It’s Children In Need this Friday.
Well done to Sophie Gent, who raised £133 for children in need in October. The delicious cakes were the result of 3 days hard baking in the Gent household. They proved to be very popular and were certainly a welcome addition during coffee time in the school.
Al Dearle, Monty Widenius, Steve Linton, Ian Gent (left to right), St Andrews, 15 October 2012
We were privileged today to hear three lectures from Monty Widenius, main author of the MySQL database system. His main focus was on entrepreneurship and being an entrepreneur while giving away source code on an open source basis.
Three staff members from St Andrews are pictured with Monty before the first lecture, in St Salvator’s quad at the University of St Andrews.
The School of Computer Science is delighted to announce two Adobe prize bursaries available this year.
The bursaries are open to students currently in their first year at St Andrews with a degree intention of Computer Science or any joint honours combination involving Computer Science who are eligible for the full means-tested loan or grant from SAAS or the English, Welsh or Northern Irish equivalents. The value of the bursaries is £1000 per year for up to four years, subject to the students remaining eligible and maintaining an annual grade point average of at least 13.0.
If you wish to apply for one of these bursaries, please submit 500 words on the subject of “What excites me about Computer Science?” and email it to admin-cs@st-andrews.ac.uk. The deadline for submission is 1st November 2012.
These bursaries are the first in a number of new initiatives between Adobe systems and the School of Computer Science, including both teaching and research. We will be announcing several more over the next few months.
Professor Mari Ostendorf of the University of Washington is visiting
Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews as part of a SICSA Distinguishing
Fellowship.
Title: Rich Speech Transcription for Spoken Document Processing
Abstract:
As storage costs drop and bandwidth increases, there has been rapid growth of spoken information available via the web or in online archives — including radio and TV broadcasts, oral histories, legislative proceedings, call center recordings, etc. — raising problems of document retrieval, information extraction, summarization and translation for spoken language. While there is a long tradition of research in these technologies for text, new challenges arise when moving from written to spoken language. In this talk, we look at differences between speech and text, and how we can leverage the information in the speech signal beyond the words to provide a rich, automatically generated transcript that better serves language processing applications. In particular, we look at how prosodic cues can be used to recognize segmentation, emphasis and intent in spoken language, and how this information can impact tasks such as topic detection, information extraction, translation, and social group analysis.
Kevin is the founder and CEO of RunRev, overseeing a global team and development of the Rev programming language.
This seminar has been postponed due to Kevin’s work commitments. A new date will be announced in due course.
Monty Widenius delivered the Semester 1 Distinguished Lecture Series on Monday 15th October 2012, from 10am to 3.30pm, in Upper College Hall.
Monty is CEO & CTO at Monty Program Ab, and is perhaps best known as founder of MySQL, the world’s most used open source.
Monty delivered three lectures on MySQL and Open Source Business. He has kindly made the slides available – linked to from the titles.
The lectures were introduced by the Dean of Science, Prof Al Dearle, and refreshments were provided at 11am.
These lectures were open to all.
The detailed programme is available as a pdf: Monty Widenius DLS Programme
Professor Aaron Quigley will be giving his Inaugural Lecture in School III on Wednesday 31st October at 5:15 p.m.
Billions of people are using interconnected computers and have come to rely on the computational power they afford us, to support their lives, or advance our global economy and society. However, how we interact with this computation is often limited to little “windows of interaction” with mobile and desktop devices which aren’t fully suited to their contexts of use. Consider the surgeon operating, the child learning to write or the pedestrian navigating a city and ask are the current devices and forms of human computer interaction as fluent as they might be? I contend there is a division between the physical world in which we live our lives and the digital space where the power of computation currently resides. Many day to day tasks or even forms of work are poorly supported by access to appropriate digital information. In this talk I will provide an overview of research I’ve been pursuing to bridge this digital-physical divide and my future research plans. This talk will be framed around three interrelated topics. Ubiquitous Computing, Novel Interfaces and Visualisation. Ubiquitous Computing is a model of computing in which computation is everywhere and computer functions are integrated into everything. Everyday objects are sites for sensing, input, processing along with user output. Novel Interfaces, which draw the user interface closer to the physical world, both in terms of input to the system and output from the system. Finally, the use of computer-supported interactive visual representations of data to amplify cognition with visualisation. In this talk I will demonstrate that advances in human computer interaction require insights and research from across the sciences and humanities if we are to bridge this digital-physical divide.
Reverend Bayes, meet Countess Lovelace: Probabilistic Programming for Machine Learning
Andrew D. Gordon, Microsoft Research and University of Edinburgh
Abstract: We propose a marriage of probabilistic functional programming with Bayesian reasoning. Infer.NET Fun turns the simple succinct syntax of F# into an executable modeling language – you can code up the conditional probability distributions of Bayes’ rule using F# array comprehensions with constraints. Write your model in F#. Run it directly to synthesize test datasets and to debug models. Or compile it with Infer.NET for efficient statistical inference. Hence, efficient algorithms for a range of regression, classification, and specialist learning tasks derive by probabilistic functional programming.
Bio: Andy Gordon is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Andy wrote his PhD on input/output in lazy functional programming, and is the proud inventor of Haskell’s “>>=” notation for monads. He’s worked on a range of topics in concurrency, verification, and security, never straying too far from his roots in functional programming. His current passion is deriving machine learning algorithms from F# programs.
Exciting update on two pieces of software from the Open Virtual Worlds research group.
The first is NuiLib
(available at NuiLib.org), a utility library for facilitating
development with NUI (Natural User Input) devices (such as the Microsoft
Kinect).
It puts an abstraction layer over the top of the NUI device to
hide the gory details of the original API and allows the developer to
focus on what they are trying to use the device for. It aims to ease
cross platform support, support for different devices, development and
experimentation with new NUI input parsing algorithms, integration of
new algirithms and code clarity.
The second is Armadillo.
This is a Virtual World client modified to support Kinect input. Users
can perform gestures to move their avatar through the world without having to interact with the computer itself. Helpful in museum or school installation
projects.
A video of Armadillo in action is available on the Open Virtual Worlds’ facebook timeline.
Kinect integration in Armadillo was achieved solely using NuiLib.
NuiLib has been featured on Microsoft’s Channel9 Coding for Fun blog
and by the DevelopKinect
community.
Talks are underway to include Armadillo in an
educational pilot program across 38 schools in Ireland and as part of a
Virtual World performance art project.
Both projects were developed by John McCaffery. You can find him in Room 0.09 (Jack Cole Building).
If you are starting on a Kinect project and want
to look at NuiLib or would like to superman your way through the Open
Virtual Worlds group’s reconstruction
of St Andrews Cathedral send him an email or pop in for a chat.
A new Gateway to Computer Science programme has been launched to provide new entry opportunities for applicants who cannot meet our standard asking rates due to social or educational disadvantage. If you are interested in this programme, then please contact our Admissions Officers.
