Intellectual Property – What, why, and how?

Dr Alan Boyd and Dr Nicholas Malden, D Young & Co LLP (Patent Attorneys)
Intellectual Property – What, why, and how?
In many technological fields, especially computer science, output isn’t a physical object that can be sold, but is an idea or an expression of an idea that comes from your mind. But how can industry take advantage of such ideas or expressions, and what’s to stop a competitor from simply copying your hard work and benefiting from it at your expense? In this talk, we’ll take you through the basics of Intellectual Property (IP) and look at how it can be used by a computer scientist, its importance to new start-ups and large multinationals alike, and also introduce you to the patent attorney profession. We’ll give you a chance to try your hand at writing a patent claim, and we’ll give a prize to the best one!

Event details

  • When: 5th November 2013 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Purdie Theatre C
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

The Interaction of Representation and Reasoning by Professor Alan Bundy, University of Edinburgh

These lectures will take place in Lower College Hall, North Street. The lectures will discuss the close relationship between how knowledge and problems may be represented and how people and computers use these representations to guide their reasoning about the problems.

Prof Steve Linton, Prof Alan Bundy and Prof Ian Sommerville

Prof Steve Linton, Prof Alan Bundy and Prof Ian Sommerville
Distinguished lectures, 27th November 2013

10.00 1. Title: The Interaction of Representation and Reasoning

Abstract: Successful reasoning is dependent on appropriate representation of both knowledge and of successful methods of reasoning. A change of representation can change an intractable problem into an easy one. Failures of reasoning can suggest changes of representation. Reasoning failures can, for instance, take the form of proofs of false conjectures, failures to prove true conjectures or inefficient inference. I will illustrate these interactions by drawing on work in my research group.

11.30 2. Title: Theory Evolution in Physics

Abstract: We investigate the problem of automatically repairing a faulty Physics theory when it conflicts with experimental evidence. We introduce novel strategies for fault diagnosis and for representation repair. Diagnosis and repair are composed into general-purpose repair plans. We will illustrate this with two such plans, where theory and experiment conflict over (a) the value and (b) the dependence of a function, respectively. We represent both physical concepts and the repair plans using higher-order logic. This is because many physical concepts are most naturally represented as higher-order functions and because polymorphic higher-order functions are required to enable the repair plans to be applied to diverse situations.

14.00 3. Title: Reformation: A Domain-Independent Algorithm for Theory Repair

Abstract: We describe and invite discussion on work in progress on reformation, a new algorithm for the automated repair of faulty logical theories. A fault is revealed by a reasoning failure: either the proof of a false theorem or the failure to prove a true conjecture. Repair suggestions are systematically extracted via analysis of the attempted unification of two formulae. These suggestions will either block an unwanted but successful unification or unblock a wanted but failed unification attempt. In contrast to traditional belief revision and abduction mechanisms, the repairs are to the language of the theory as well as to the deletion or addition of axioms.

Professor Alan Bundy

Professor Alan Bundy is Professor of Automated Reasoning in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Bundy is a world-leader in the area of artificial intelligence called Mathematical Reasoning and has held more than 50 research grants in this area since the 1970s , has published more than 200 research papers and has been awarded the 2007 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence and Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automated Deduction. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineers and, in 2012, was awarded a CBE for services to computing science. As well as his research work, Professor Bundy has played an active role in the British Computer Society and has been instrumental in supporting changes to the computer science curriculum in schools.

Slides:

Event details

  • When: 27th November 2013 10:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Lower College Hall
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series

ITS & UIST 2013: “Influential and Ground Breaking”

These are words used by the Co-Chair of UIST 2013, Dr Shahram Izadi of Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK), to describe one of the prestigious conferences taking place in St Andrews this week.

“UIST is the leading conference on new user interface trends and technologies. Some of the most influential and ground breaking work on graphical user interfaces, multi-touch, augmented reality, 3D user interaction and sensing was published at this conference.

It is now in its 26th year, and the first time it has been hosted in the UK. We are very excited to be hosting a packed program at the University of St Andrews. The program includes great papers, demos, posters, a wet and wonderful student innovation competition, and a great keynote on flying robots.”

Ivan Poupyrev, principal research scientist at Disney Research in Pittsburgh, described hosting UIST in St Andrews as “an acknowledgment of some great research in human-computer interaction that is carried out by research groups in Scotland, including the University of St Andrews.”

Two major events taking place this week are the 8th ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS), and the 26th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), hosted by the Human Computer Interaction Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.

Read more about the events in the University News and local media.

Big Data Research Featured in MIT Technology Review

A survey article written by Jonathan Ward and Adam Barker has been featured in the MIT Technology Review.

Undefined By Data: A Survey of Big Data Definitions surveys the various definitions of big data offered by the world’s biggest and most influential high-tech organisations. The article then attempts to distill from all this noise a definition that everyone can agree on. The article was picked up by the MIT Technology Review and has fostered a lively discussion around a coherent definition; according to Topsy (social media analysis) the article has been retweeted over 400 times.

Creating High Value Cloud Services at ScotSoft Forum

On August 29th Gordon Baxter, Derek Wang and Ian Sommerville (St Andrews), along with Ian Allison (RGU) manned the stand for the SFC funded project “Creating High Value Cloud Services” at Scotland IS’s annual ScotSoft Forum. There were over 500 people at the event which was held in Edinburgh’s Sheraton Grand Hotel. The programme of talks that took place throughout the afternoon included presentations by Larry Cable (Salesforce) and a keynote by Vint Cerf (Google).

Find out more about the project on Services to the Cloud and The Cloudscape blog

Some Limits of Language: A Perspective from Formal Grammars and Languages by Prof Arvind Joshi, School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Limits of language can be studied from various perspectives such as morphology, syntax, and semantics, among others. At the syntactic level, one direction that has been pursued very actively is via the theory of formal languages, beginning with the so-called Chomsky hierarchy. In this hierarchy, the finite state languages (regular languages) and the context free languages (CFL) have been studied very extensively, leading to many important results relevant to syntax as well as parsing. At the same time, inadequacy of these two classes of grammars (languages) for capturing natural languages has been well documented by now.
A careful look at the pumping lemma for context free languages led to the discovery of the so-called tree adjoining grammars (TAG) and to the notion of mildly context sensitive languages (MCSL), which has served as a framework for showing equivalences among other systems (such as Combinatory Categorial Grammars, CCG and Head Grammars (HG), for example). This has led to a deeper understanding of the limits of language, more specifically, by trying to provide an answer to the question: how far do we need to be beyond CFL to achieve syntactic adequacy.
I will try to describe some of this recent work by a number of researchers in the past few years.

Aravind Joshi did his undergraduate work in India and his graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania in Electrical Engineering, while simultaneously attending some courses in Linguistics at the same University. Since 1961 he has been a faculty member in the Department of Computer and Information Science and the Department of Linguistics. At present, he is a Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science and a Member of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science.
Besides working on some problems in the mathematics of language, at present, he is involved in a project on discourse annotation, jointly with Bonnie Webber (Edinburgh U.) and Rashmi Prasad (U. Wisconsin), for creating the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB).

Event details

  • When: 15th October 2013 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Purdie Theatre C
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar