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

St Andrews Students – Experience with Industrial Internships

Internships are fantastic opportunities to gain some practical experience as well as find out what is happening the real world of computer science! Come and hear some our UG students share their experiences of their 2013 summer internships.
Melissa Mozifian: Adobe
Waqas Arshad: AIG
Mariya Hristova: Google STEP
Sam Koch: Facebook

Event details

  • When: 1st October 2013 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Purdie Theatre C
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Scaling Skyscanner’s Flight Search & Making Mobile Applications at Skyscanner

Welcome to the first presentation in the School of Computer Science’s Seminar Series.

Please join us on for a seminar on Skyscanner’s technology this Tuesday (September 24) at 14:00 in Purdie Lecture Theatre C.

The two talks combined will take about 50 minutes with time for questions, and combine two topics presented by Skyscanner experts:

Grzegorz Janas- Project Manager Mobile Applications
Simon Thorogood- Senior Architect Development Engineering
Scott Krueger- Technical Manager Databases
Skyscanner: http://www.skyscanner.net/

Abstract:
Come and hear from Skyscanner Engineers on the Challenges behind engineering the world’s fastest growing Metasearch product and our journey towards being the “most trusted online travel company in the world” Skyscanner has 24 million unique monthly visitors and 25 million installed apps generating one-third of its traffic through mobile.

Everybody welcome.

Event details

  • When: 24th September 2013 14:00 - 15:30
  • Where: Purdie Theatre C
  • Series: School Seminar Series
  • Format: Seminar

Constraint Modelling Winners

Medal given to prize winning team
At the annual conference on Constraint Programming, CP 2013, Ian Gent and Ian Miguel were members of the winning team in the “First International Lightning Model and Solve” competition. Many thanks to the organisers of the event and especially to Allen van Gelder of UCSC for having the idea of entering a manual team and for inviting us to join in.

This was a quick event – just two hours – and the team’s strategy was to solve problems by hand, using pen and paper.  This was reflected in their team name, “Mano”.

Ian Gent has written a much longer blog post about the experience, why the team won, and why it is not bad news for constraint programming.

 

Creator of the World Wide Web Honoured

Professor Alan Dearle from the School of Computer Science, and Dean of Science at the University, has the honour of acting as Laureator for Sir Tim Berners-Lee today, one of the international scholars and thinkers awarded an Honorary Degree as part of the University’s 600th Anniversary celebrations.

Join Professor Dearle and Sir Tim Berners-Lee and watch the Honorary Graduation Live on the University website.