Departmental Seminar – Andy Stanford-Clark

Title: Innovation Begins at Home

Abstract:
Prof Andy Stanford-Clark, Chief Technologist for Smarter Energy at IBM UK, will discuss the journey from Smart Metering to a future Smart Grid, incorporating the challenges of microgeneration, electric vehicles, intermittent generation, and demand-side management. Focusing specifically on energy saving in the home, Andy will talk about his own home automation system, and aspects of consumer behaviour change linked with that technology. The talk will also give details of a community energy-saving project, and the Isle of Wight EcoIsland project.

Bio:
Professor Andy Stanford-Clark is the Chief Technologist for IBM’s consulting business in Energy and Utilities for the UK and Ireland. He is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, and “Master Inventor” with more than 40 patents. Andy is based at IBM’s Hursley Park laboratories in the UK, and specialises in remote telemetry, energy monitoring and management, Smart Metering and Smart Grid technologies. He has a particular interest in home energy monitoring, home automation, demand-side management, and driving consumer behaviour change. Andy has a BSc in Computing and Mathematics, and a PhD in Computer Science. He is a visiting professor at the University of Newcastle and a Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Event details

  • When: 22nd April 2013 15:00 - 22nd April 2013 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Colloquium, Seminar

System Seminar: Remote Health Monitoring Using Online Social Media Systems, on 16 April, by Chonlatee Khorakhun

Abstract:

Remote monitoring is considered an essential part of future eHealth systems to enable the delivery of healthcare outside clinical sites at reduced cost, while improving quality of patient care. We examine the use of online social networks for re- mote health monitoring. By exploiting the existing infrastructure, initial costs can be reduced and fast application development is possible. Facebook is used as an example platform: as a platform allowing user-defined applications, development is flexible and can be arranged quickly to suit different requirements of patients and health professionals. We analyse the general requirements of a remote monitoring scenario and the process of building and using a Facebook application to meet these requirements. Four different access viewpoints are implemented to suit the requirements of each user in our example scenario to form a carer network: the patient, the doctor in charge, professional carers, and family members of the patient. The suitability of the application is analysed including security and privacy issues. We conclude that online social media systems could offer a suitable platform for developing certain types of remote monitoring capability.

Bio:

Chonlatee Khorakhun is a second year PhD student, supervised by Prof. Saleem Bhatti. Before coming to St. Andrews, Chonlatee had completed an M.Sc. in Information and Communication Systems at University of Technology Hamburg-Harburg and worked in industry in Germany.

Event details

  • When: 16th April 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

System Seminar: Decentralised Orchestration of Service-oriented Workflows, on 16 April, by Ward Jaradat, University of St Andrews

Abstract:

Centralised orchestration of service-oriented workflows presents significant scalability challenges, these include: the consumption of network bandwidth, degradation of performance, and single points of failure. These challenges are particularly prominent when dealing with highly distributed data-intensive workflows, which involve large quantities of intermediate data that need to be routed through a centralised engine. In this talk we present a dataflow specification language and a distributed architecture that attempt to address these scalability challenges. Our language provides simple abstractions for orchestrating large-scale web service workflows and separates between the workflow logic and its execution. It is based on a data-driven execution model that permits parallelism to improve the workflow performance. Unlike classical approaches of distributed computing, our architecture allows the computation to be moved “closer” to services in the workflow; this is achieved by partitioning the workflow specification into smaller fragments which may be sent to remote locations for execution.

Bio:

Ward is a research student supervised by Dr. Adam Barker and Prof. Alan Dearle. He completed an M.Sc. in Software Engineering at the University of St Andrews. His research interests span the areas of software engineering, distributed computing, and service-oriented architecture, with a focus on building practical solutions for improving the scalability and performance of software systems.

Event details

  • When: 16th April 2013 13:00 - 14:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

MIT Technology Review – Jakub Dostal

MIT Technology Review has written a comprehensive article about Jakub Dostal’s Diff Displays that track visual changes on unattended displays. Jakub presented the work two weeks ago at the 18th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces in Santa Monica, California, USA. The Diff Displays project is part of Jakub’s PhD thesis on proximity-aware user interfaces. His PhD is supervised by Prof. Aaron Quigley and Dr Per Ola Kristensson.

Talk by Susmit Sarkar

Title: “Shared-Memory Concurrency in the Real World: Working with Relaxed Memory Consistency”

Abstract:

Shared-memory concurrency is now mainstream, from phones to servers. However, real-world implementations do not validate the basic assumption of Sequential Consistency traditionally made in work on concurrent programming and verification. Instead, we get subtle relaxed consistency models. Furthermore, the consistency models of different hardware architectures vary widely and have often been poorly defined, while programming language models (aiming to abstract from hardware details) are different again.

This talk is about what relaxed consistency models we actually get on current mainstream systems: the x86 multiprocessor architecture, the IBM Power and ARM lines of multiprocessors, and in the new concurrency model in ISO C/C++11. Part of the challenge here is that neither hardware microarchitects nor low-level programmers (for operating systems or compilers) know exactly what you get, or what you should get. I will discuss the models that are getting some agreement/acceptance, and how we can use those models.

Event details

  • When: 4th April 2013 12:00 - 13:00
  • Where: Cole 1.04
  • Format: Talk

Internships at Adobe

Adobe are offering two internships this summer. Interns will work with the Partner and Solutions Enablement Team in Edinburgh for 3 months over the summer (June-August though exact dates are flexible). The team in Edinburgh contributes fundamental shared technologies for the Adobe Creative Suite. This includes Adobe-internal technologies shared between products like CEP and cloud technologies, as well as technologies for external customers and developers like the Illustrator and InDesign SDKs, Adobe Exchange and Creative Cloud Connection.

Interns will work on an independent project with supervision from Adobe engineers. In the last few years interns have worked on projects like:

– Eclipse based tooling for generating user interfaces for InDesign extensions
– Working on toolkits for cloud computing
– Creating a debugging editor for HTML5+Javascript extensions building on Adobe Brackets
– Creating an SDK for make it really easy for Adobe developers to create new graphical Lua applications
– Develop a server based on the Jabber IM protocol and an AIR client, to allow team members to post status updates and broadcast messages
– Create a WADL editor – a Ruby On Rails app which generated SDK documentation based on WADL API specifications.

Several interns have shipped code to Adobe customers. Many have stayed on to work with Adobe permanently.

See:

http://www.adobe.com/uk/careers/locations.html#edinburgh
http://blogs.adobe.com/cssdk/
https://www.adobeexchange.com/
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/creative-cloud-connection/
http://brackets.io

Apply by sending a cv and covering letter to admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk

Closing date for applications 26th April 2013

School Seminar: Neil Moore

Neil Moore obtained his PhD in Computer Science at St Andrews a couple of years ago, and is now working for Abobe.

He’ll be giving a technical talk, and describing internship opportunities at Adobe.

Title: Mutualism in software development

Abstract:
Computers are designed to be extensible at different levels: hardware can run different operating systems and operating systems are designed to expose functionality to allow third parties to write applications. It is easy to overlook extensibility at the level of application software: functionality can be added to or extracted from existing applications by third parties with no access to the source. For example: plugins, scripting environments, APIs, web services, etc.

I will talk about ways that this can benefit both the application publisher as well as third parties. I will also give practical information and examples of how this can be achieved based on my experience in working in this area for Adobe, who are heavily invested in extensibility in their products.

Event details

  • When: 1st April 2013 15:00 - 16:00
  • Where: Phys Theatre C
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Seminar

PhD Studentships – Sponsored by Time Warner Cable and Adobe

The School of Computer Science has secured support from two major companies, Time Warner Cable and Adobe, and is able to offer two fully funded PhD studentships in exciting areas of research with important applications. Both studentships are fully funded for EU applicants (covering fees, and a stipend of at least £13.5K p/a) for up to 42 months, the expected duration of the PhD. Non EU applicants may apply but may be liable for an additional approximately £11K p/a in fees.

Applicants should normally have (or expect to obtain this academic year) a 2:1 or (preferably) first class Honours Bachelors degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related topic, or a MSc (distinction preferred) in one of these subjects.

The two research topics available are:

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PPSP in Computer Science

PPSP in Computer Science – What’s been happening in the School of Computer Science? Posters, Prizes, Scholarships and Plants of course.

Posters & Prizes
PhD students Anne-Marie, Ditchaphong and Ildiko are pictured shortly after receiving 1st, 2nd and 3rd place respectively in the annual poster session. They received Amazon vouchers as a reward.

Poster Titles and Supervisors

Anne-Marie Mann – Turning a pen into a HAT (handwriting assisting technology) Investigating the effectiveness of a digital pen to improve handwriting skills. Supervisor Aaron Quigley.

Ditchaphong Phoomikiattisak – An alternative Approach to IP Mobility. Supervisor Saleem Bhatti.

Ildiko Pete – An Incremental Software Development Framework for Maintaining Artefact Consistency. Supervised by Dharini Balasubramaniam.

Scholarships
Representatives from Adobe were in the school to award two new scholarships for Computer Science students at St Andrews. Applicants were asked to write an essay on the subject “What excites you about Computer Science?” Nathan Blades and Carson Leonard, both first year CS students, were this years recipients.

Plants
David and Ruth break new ground, planting an apple tree, in the Comp Sci garden. Security is currently two gnomes who should be approached with caution.