SACHI Seminar: Team-buddy: investigating a long-lived robot companion

SACHI seminar

Title: Team-buddy: investigating a long-lived robot companion

Speaker: Ruth Aylett, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh

Abstract:
In the EU-funded LIREC project, finishing last year, Heriot-Watt University investigated how a long-lived multi-embodied (robot, graphical) companion might be incorporated into a work-environment as a team buddy, running a final continuous three-week study. This talk gives an overview of the technology issues and some of the surprises from various user-studies.

Bio:
Ruth Aylett is Professor of Computer Sciences in the School of Mathematical and Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University. She researches intelligent graphical characters, affective agent models, human-robot interaction, and interactive narrative. She was a founder of the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents and was a partner in the large HRI project LIREC – see lirec.eu. She has more than 200 publications – book chapters, journals, and refereed conferences and coordinates the Autonomous affective Agents group at Heriot-Watt University- see here

Event details

  • When: 10th September 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Ambitious, entrepreneurial, innovative, employable and highflying…

Words we use to describe our alumni, who work in New York, Switzerland, London and Edinburgh amongst other places.

Whether working for established companies such as Adobe and Google or in their own business start-ups such as AetherWorks LLC. and PlanForCloud (formerly ShopForCloud) our graduates continue to flourish. And rumour has it more of our talented CS graduates will be joining some of them shortly. The suspense! They are all exemplars of why St Andrews is the only Scottish university to feature in the 2013 High Fliers, a report about the graduate market in 2013.

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Clockwise from top left:

Rob, Angus and Greg from AetherWorks LLC., who took time out to capture a photo of themselves outside their offices in New York.

Ali at graduation, sporting a colour-co-ordinated Google Glass (who knew!). Listen to Ali discuss his career at the SICSA PhD conference careers panel.

We caught up with Adam, Andrew and James earlier this year when they represented Google at the Tech Talk by Google engineers.

Neil (complete with sunglasses) visited the school last week, on an unusually sunny day, with colleagues from Adobe.

Thanks to:
AetherWorks LLC.: Robert MacInnis, Angus MacDonald, Allan Boyd and Greg Bigwood.
PlanForCloud: Ali Khajeh-Hosseini and Alistair Scott.
Adobe: Neil Moore.
Google: James Smith, Adam Copp and Andrew McCarthy.
Editorial Support: Anne Campbell

The 11th International Conference on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP 2013)

The 11th International Conference on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP 2013) was held in the Gateway in St Andrews on July 15-17,2013. Presented were 17 peer-reviewed papers on natural language processing applications, language resources, and theoretical and implementational issues with relevance to finite-state methods. In addition, there were two keynote lectures, by Alexander Clark (King’s College London) and Bill Byrne (University of Cambridge), and three tutorials, by Ruth Hoffmann (University of St Andrews), Bevan Keeley Jones (University of Edinburgh) and Kousha Etessami (University of Edinburgh).

The conference was attended by 34 researchers and students from three continents. It also hosted a business meeting of SIGFSM (ACL Special Interest Group on Finite-State Methods). The social programme included a reception on July 14th, and a guided walk, a conference dinner in Lower College Hall and a concert in St Salvator’s Chapel on July 16th.

Accommodation in Agnes Blackadder Hall was arranged for non-local delegates, and lunches were served in the Gateway. Coffee breaks could be used for informal demos in the smaller seminar rooms of the Gateway.

Sponsored student places were available thanks to support from SICSA. Further support was received from VisitScotland and the University of St Andrews.

The full programme, with links to the proceedings, can be found from the website: http://fsmnlp2013.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/

Images and text courtesy of Mark-Jan Nederhof (conference chair), Anssi Yli-Jyrä and Shyam Reyal.

Summer Days in Computer Science

Students and staff took advantage of the Scottish weather on Friday and held a BBQ to mark the anniversary of these events.

  • The Great Fire of Rome
  • Birth of Computer Scientist Mark Crispin
  • The Opening of the StACS Garden

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Organised by Jan de Muijnck-Hughes and David Letham. Cooked by Jan de Muijnck-Hughes and Masih Hajiarabderkani. Salad ingredients from the StACS Garden. Enjoyed by all (including Pippa the dog).

Services to the Cloud

On June 27th Gordon Baxter and Derek Wang gave a presentation about their work on the SFC funded project “Creating High Value Cloud Services” at the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce’s Business Growth Club.

Gordon talked about the lessons that have been learned so far from working closely with several Scottish SMEs who are adopting the cloud. Derek then gave a short demonstration of the web-based toolkit he has developed to analyse the potential costs and revenues associated with delivering a product or service through the cloud.

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

MSc in Human Computer Interaction starting in September 2013

We have added more details on our new MSc in Human Computer Interaction which is starting in September 2013. This is an intensive one-year programme designed to provide a solid theoretical and practical foundation in HCI. It is designed to enable students from a variety of backgrounds to become HCI practitioners, in roles including UX designer, visual analysts, interaction designers and interaction architects. This MSc will also help prepare you for a PhD programme in HCI. In semester 1 students take Human Computer Interaction Principles and Human Computer Interaction Practice, followed by User-Centred Interaction Design and Evaluation Methods in Human Computer Interaction in semester 2. Other modules can be selected from the general MSc portfolio.

You can find more details here on the MSc in Human Computer Interaction.

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Jacob Eisenstein: Interactive Topic Visualization for Exploratory Text Analysis

Abstract:
Large text document collections are increasingly important in a variety of domains; examples of such collections include news articles, streaming social media, scientific research papers, and digitized literary documents. Existing methods for searching and exploring these collections focus on surface-level matches to user queries, ignoring higher-level thematic structure. Probabilistic topic models are a machine learning technique for finding themes that recur across a corpus, but there has been little work on how they can support end users in exploratory analysis. In this talk I will survey the topic modeling literature and describe our ongoing work on using topic models to support digital humanities research. In the second half of the talk, I will describe TopicViz, an interactive environment that combines traditional search and citation-graph exploration with a dust-and-magnet layout that links documents to the latent themes discovered by the topic model.
This work is in collaboration with:
Polo Chau, Jaegul Choo, Niki Kittur, Chang-Hyun Lee, Lauren Klein, Jarek Rossignac, Haesun Park, Eric P. Xing, and Tina Zhou

Bio:
Jacob Eisenstein is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He works on statistical natural language processing, focusing on social media analysis, discourse, and latent variable models. Jacob was a Postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2008, winning the George M. Sprowls dissertation award.

Event details

  • When: 23rd July 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33
  • Format: Seminar

Senior Honours Project Success

A Multi-display exhibit that enables visitors to explore The Old Course and photographs of Lawrence Levy, and to quiz their golf knowledge was developed by Julian Petford. The display was developed during his Senior Honours Project which was supervised by Miguel Nacenta. Great job Julian. We look forward to hearing more about the event in due course.

The exhibition officially opens on Saturday, although visitors to The University Library can view the exhibit from today. Read more about the showcase on Echoes From The Vault, a blog from Special Collections, the University 600th news or view some of the images on display via the BBC website.

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Students placed third in Hackin’ The City Hackathon

UCL Financial Industry Series
Hackin’ The City Hackathon
April 6 – 7 2013

Organised by the UCL Financial Industry Series (UCL FIndS) in partnership with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Financial Services Knowledge Transfer Network, SWIFT and Level39 Technology Accelerator at Canary Wharf, the Hackin’ The City Hackathon brought together 55 students from a dozen of top universities in the UK to pit their skills in a round-the-clock hackathon to design and develop an application over 24 hours.

Six students from the university’s Computer Science department (Waqas Arshid, Gordon Coupar, Robert Dixon, Valentin Tunev, Alex Waller and Ben Lovell) were invited to attend the event in London. Five entered as ‘Team StACS’ and Ben as an individual participant with the intent of forming a team.

The aim of their project was to enable the creation and validation of safe buildings that have optimal escape routes in the event of disasters. Through the use of pathfinding algorithms, building floor plans can be analysed and statistics presented. Subsequently through these adjustments, improvements can be made in order to aid safety in the event of an emergency.

On Sunday morning, 12 teams presented their value proposition, technology solution and ran a live demo of their projects. Judges after long deliberation came up with six finalists. By 1530 on Sunday after 25 minutes of intense debate, senior judges The St Andrews team was awarded 3rd place and team members each received Amazon vouchers.

Group photo