Earlier this month Prof. Mothy Roscoe from ETH Zürich delivered the first set of distinguished lectures for 2015 in the Byre Theatre. The three highly accessible, well attended and engaging lectures centred around the question “What’s happening to computer hardware, and what does it mean for systems software?”
Images courtesy of Saleem Bhatti
Primary School pupils from across Fife take part in fun, hands-on activities themed around Computer Science and Space. They will have the opportunity to use online resources to explore the solar system, program their own Lunar Lander game in Scratch, and guide a Lego Mindstorm robot around a track. This session is part of Space School @ St Andrews.
Professor David Kaufman of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver will be visiting the School between May 7th and May 21st.
Prof. Kaufman is a world leading expert on Computer Supported Education, Educational Technologies and Digital StoryTelling.
See: http://www.sfu.ca/education/faculty-profiles/dkaufman.html
He will be hosted by Ishbel and working with the Virtual Worlds research group. Prof. Kaufman will be giving several talks and workshops across Scotland.
The schedule is:
1.In Stirling on Tuesday 12th at 11am in 4B108 Cottrell Building, Prof. Kaufman will be talking about Digital Games and Simulations in HE
2. On Thursday 14th at 11am at GCU, in the George Moore Building, M625, 11am he will also be talking about Digital Games and Simulations in HE
3. On Monday 18th in Abertay, at 11am in rm 2521, he will discuss Ageing Well : Can Digital games help older adults.
4. He will be in Edinburgh on May 15th if anyone wishes to meet up with him that day.
Short term Virtual Worlds internships are available for students wishing to work with Alan Miller on virtual museums or with Ishbel Duncan, Janie Brooks (ELT) and Paula Miles (Psychology) on the Virtual St Andrews project.
Each project has 60 hours notational funding attached (£50 per 6 hours).
Please contact Alan or Ishbel in the first instance.
A required project for the SICSA Athena SWAN initiative is to create a repository (website, resource centre, database of statistics) for the SICSA universities ASWAN submissions. The Athena SWAN awards are to do with encouraging more women into the CS area from schools up to senior staff. This work will help CS Schools gather statistics on student numbers and staff numbers as well as good practice events, talks or resources. A notional £500 is associated with the work, 60 hours work.
Please contact Ishbel if you are interested.
Potential PhD students with a strong background in Computer Science are encouraged to apply for this three-year studentship funded by the Research Council of the European Commission (ERC). The student will work within an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Computer Science and Geography in the WORKANDHOME project (ERC Starting Grant 2014), which investigates how home-based businesses are shaping society and space.
The student will examine the Computer Science challenges within this research project. The exact scope of the PhD project is open to discussion but we anticipate that the successful candidate will be working broadly on Data Science topics, potentially covering one or more of the following areas: cloud computing, social network analysis and agent-based modelling. This is a unique opportunity to work at the cutting edge of systems research. Come join us in St Andrews.
Funding Notes: The studentship will cover UK/EU tuition fees and an annual tax-free stipend of approximately £13,000. Funding will be for three years of full-time study, starting date ideally in September/October 2015.
Applications: It is expected that applicants should have or expect to obtain a UK first-class honours degree (or its equivalent from non-UK institutions) in Computer Science but the minimal standard that we will consider is a UK upper-second class Honours degree or its equivalent.
For further information on how to apply, see our postgraduate web pages. The closing date for applications is June 30th 2015. All interested candidates should contact Dr Adam Barker in the first instance to discuss your eligibility for the scholarship and a proposal for research.
The School of Computer Science welcomes Dr Gavin Doherty, Trinity College Dublin to give his talk on ‘Technologies for mental health: designing for engagement’.
Abstract:
Mental illness is one of the greatest social and economic challenges facing our society.
The talk will consider at some of the different ways in which technology (and HCI research) can help, with a particular focus on the problem of engagement. Taking examples from a series of projects to develop novel technologies for use in the mental health space, we will see some of the unique issues and challenges which come from working in this domain, and the steps which can be taken to address them. The SilverCloud platform, designed to deliver range of engaging and effective clinician-supported mental health interventions, will be used as a specific example to discuss the topics of evaluation and dissemination. Development of a suite of programmes and a number of partnerships based on the platform have enabled the delivery of supported online interventions to tens of thousands of patients in a range of public and private healthcare services worldwide.
Bio:
Dr. Gavin Doherty is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, and co-founder of SilverCloud Health. He completed his doctorate at the University of York, before undertaking postdoctoral work at CNR in Pisa and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK before moving to TCD. He is interested in design for specific application areas, and has led a number of interdisciplinary projects in a number of different domains. A major focus of his work over the last decade has been on the design of technologies for mental health. The aim has been to develop systems which can increase access to, increase engagement with, and assist in improving the outcomes of mental health interventions.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.
The School of Computer Science welcomes Mel Woods from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee.
Abstract:
Blue heritage plaques pepper the UK landscape expounding officially validated narratives celebrating past events, people, and buildings. This seminar will discuss a novel method that draws on this specific cultural context to generate reflective, nano-stories, documenting them through populating a place, physical space, and an online data repository. The guerrilla blue plaque method was designed to support people to reflect on possible futures, in this instance the theme of future cities. The seminar will demonstrate how using critical design artefacts can help support understanding of future hopes, needs, and goals for individuals and communities. It will also discuss the method as a feedback mechanism for participatory design, citizen engagement and emergent outcomes from the latest deployment.
This work was initially developed as part of a UK arts and digital media festival and exhibited recently at Microsoft Research Lab, Cambridge at RTD 2015.
Bio:
Mel is Reader at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee. In her research she has developed and explored interaction between people to support discovery, foster creativity and affect. Throughout her academic career she has sustained a critical enquiry in art and design, creating digital artefacts, interfaces, prototypes and exhibits using novel methods and evaluation techniques.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.
The Palimpsest project involving the University of St Andrews’ SACHI group collaborating with the University of Edinburgh’s English literature and text-mining group launched LitLong Edinburgh on 30th march 2015.
Lit Long: Edinburgh features a range of maps and accessible visualisations, which enable users to interact with Edinburgh’s literature in a variety of ways, exploring the spatial relations of the literary city at particular times in its history, in the works of particular authors, or across different eras, genres and writers. Lit Long: Edinburgh makes a major contribution to our knowledge of the Edinburgh literary cityscape, with potential to shape the experience and understanding of critics and editors, residents and visitors, readers and writers.
Give the web visualisation a try here.
SACHI’s Dr Uta Hinrichs created the web visualisation, Dr David Harris-Birtill created the mobile app and Professor Aaron Quigley was the St Andrews lead and co-investigator on the Palimpsest project funded by the AHRC.
This work is featured on the Guardians website and mentioned in Edinburgh University’s news.
The School of Computer Science welcomes Dr Michael Milford from Queensland University of Technology, Australia who is meantime visiting Scotland. 
Abstract: The brain circuitry involved in encoding space in rodents has been extensively tested over the past forty years, with an ever increasing body of knowledge about the components and wiring involved in navigation tasks. The learning and recall of spatial features is known to take place in and around the hippocampus of the rodent, where there is clear evidence of cells that encode the rodent’s position and heading. RatSLAM is a primarily vision-based robotic navigation system based on current models of the rodent hippocampus, which has achieved several significant outcomes in vision-based Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM), including mapping of an entire suburb using only a low cost webcam, and navigation continuously over a period of two weeks in a delivery robot experiment. This research led to recent experiments demonstrating that impressive feats of vision-based navigation can be achieved at any time of day or night, during any weather, and in any season using visual images as small as 2 pixels in size. In our current research we are investigating the problem of place recognition and visual navigation from two angles. The first is from a neuroscience-inspired perspective, modelling the multi-scale neuronal map of space found in the mammalian brain and the variably tolerant and selective visual recognition process in the primate and human brain. The second is from an algorithmic perspective, utilizing state of the art deep learning techniques. I will discuss the insights from this research, as well as current and future areas of study with the aim of stimulating discussion and collaboration.
Bio: I hold a PhD in Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor of Mechanical and Space Engineering from the University of Queensland (UQ), awarded in 2006 and 2002 respectively. After a brief postdoc in robotics at UQ, I worked for three years at the Queensland Brain Institute as a Research Fellow on the Thinking Systems Project. In 2010 I moved to the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to finish off my Thinking Systems postdoc, and then was appointed as a Lecturer in 2011. In 2012 I was awarded an inaugural Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, which provides me with a research-intensive fellowship salary and extra funding support for 3 years. In 2013 I became a Microsoft Faculty Fellow and lived in Boston on sabbatical working with Harvard and Boston University. I am currently a Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at QUT with a research focus, although I continue to teach Introduction to Robotics every year. From 2014 to 2020 I am a Chief Investigator on a $19,000,000 Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision.
My research interests include vision-based mapping and navigation, computational modelling of the rodent hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, especially with respect to mapping and navigation, computational modelling of human visual recognition, biologically inspired robot navigation and computer vision and Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping (SLAM).
Homepage:https://wiki.qut.edu.au/display/cyphy/Michael+Milford
Google Scholar:http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TDSmCKgAAAAJ
