On behalf of the School, we would like to congratulate Thomas Hansen supervised by Dr Edwin Brady who has successfully defended his thesis.
Thanks to Dr Adam Barwell who was internal examiner and Dr Jeremy Yallop from University of Cambridge as external examiner.
Many congratulations to Thomas! 🎉
On behalf of the School of Computer Science, we would like to congratulate all of graduating students.
We wish you all the very best of luck! 🎓
The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday 6th December at 2PM in JC 1.33a
Below is a title and Abstract for Mustafa and Maria’s talks – Please do come along if you are able.
Mustafa Abdelwahed:
Title: Behaviour Planning: A toolbox for diverse planning
Abstract:
Diverse planning approaches are utilised in real-world applications like risk management, automated streamed data analysis, and malware detection. These approaches aim to create diverse plans through a two-phase process. The first phase generates plans, while the second selects a subset of plans based on a diversity model. A diversity model is a function that quantifies the diversity of a given set of plans based on a provided distance function.
Unfortunately, existing diverse planning approaches do not account for those models when generating plans and struggle to explain why any two plans are different.
Existing diverse planning approaches do not account for those models when generating plans, hence struggle to explain why any two plans are different, and are limited to classical planning.
To address such limitations, we introduce Behaviour Planning, a novel toolbox that creates diverse plans based on customisable diversity models and can explain why two plans are different concerning such models.
Maria Andrei:
Title: Leveraging Immersive Technology to Enhance Climate Communication, Education & Action
Abstract: Climate change represents one of the most pressing challenges of our time, not only in its environmental impacts, but also as a pivotal science communication problem. Despite widespread scientific consensus on the causes and mitigation strategies for climate change, public understanding remains deeply fragmented and polarized. This disconnect hinders the collective action required from individuals, organizations, and policymakers to combat global warming effectively. My research explores the potential of immersive technologies to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and public understanding by leveraging experiential learning experiences to inspire the attitudinal and behavioural shifts necessary to address climate change.
The next PGR seminar is taking place this Friday at 2PM in JC 1.33a
Below is a title and Abstract for Zhongliang’s talk– Please do come along if you are able.
Title: Adversarial Attack as a Defense: Preventing Unauthorized AI Generation in Computer Vision
Abstract: Adversarial attack is a technique that generate adversarial examples by adding imperceptible perturbations to clean images. These adversarial perturbations, though invisible to human eyes, can cause neural networks to produce incorrect outputs, making adversarial examples a significant security concern in deep learning. While previous research has primarily focused on designing powerful attacks to expose neural network vulnerabilities or using them as baselines for robustness evaluation, our work takes a novel perspective by leveraging adversarial examples to counter malicious uses of machine learning. In this seminar, I will present two of our recent works in this direction. First, I will introduce the Locally Adaptive Adversarial Color Attack (LAACA), which enables artists to protect their artwork from unauthorized neural style transfer by embedding imperceptible perturbations that significantly degrade the quality of style transfer results. Second, I will discuss our Posterior Collapse Attack (PCA), a grey-box attack method that disrupts unauthorized image editing based on Stable Diffusion by exploiting the common VAE structure in latent diffusion models. Our research demonstrates how adversarial examples, traditionally viewed as a security threat, can be repurposed as a proactive defense mechanism against the misuse of generative AI, contributing to the responsible development and deployment of these powerful technologies.
On 11th April, the School of Computer Science at St Andrews will host our Doors Open event. We will be thrilled to welcome any and all visitors from outwith the School, whether you are locally based, from elsewhere in the UK, or from overseas.
As a rapidly growing school, we are looking to build relationships with new partners and are keen to find out how we can help you, your companies, and/or organisations to solve problems and improve processes.
Our Doors Open Day will have over 60 individual exhibits and activities. Our presenters will be our staff and students, with representation from 1st year undergrad through to PhD students, academic and technical members of staff.
Please register here if you would like to attend to enable us to order sufficient food!
Thank you to Professor Gordon Blair for delivering this year’s distinguished lecture on Computer Science and the environment.
The series of talks explained the role of computer science in addressing the massive challenges associated with a changing climate.
Feedback was positive and the series was enjoyed by all!
From Left to Right: Jonathan Lewis, Blesson Varghese, Simon Dobson, Gordon Blair, Ian Miguel & Al Dearle (Back)
The School of Computer Science will host a graduation reception on Tuesday 3rd December in the Jack Cole building, between 12.00 and 14.00. Graduating students and their guests are invited to the School to celebrate with a glass of bubbly and a cream cake. Computer Science degrees will be conferred in a morning ceremony in the Younger Hall. Family and friends who can’t make it on the day can watch a live broadcast of graduation. Graduation receptions have been held in the school from 2010.
On October 10th, we were delighted to welcome back Professor Ursula Martin from the University of Oxford, to deliver the semester one distinguished lecture series in the Byre Theatre. Earlier in her career Prof Martin was professor of Computer Science here, and in fact only the second female professor in the history of the University of St Andrews.
The lectures covered numerous aspects of the history of computing. A particular highlight was to hear about Ada Lovelace’s early work, on Ada Lovelace day. As a trained mathematician and computer scientist who has studied her papers in detail, Ursula has discovered new insights about Ada’s education and work with Charles Babbage. She also focussed on aspects of computing history that are often ignored, such as history of computing in countries other than the USA or UK. Another aspect was how, even today, the contribution of women in history is often ignored, which Ursula herself has been able to correct in some cases.
The well received lectures centred around what every computer scientist should know about computer history. Professor Martin is pictured at various stages throughout the lectures and with Head of School, Prof Simon Dobson, DLS Coordinator, Prof Ian Gent and Principal and Vice-Chancellor, Prof Sally Mapstone. Read more about Professor Martin and the individual lectures in what every computer scientist should know about computer history. Recordings of each lecture can be viewed at the end of this post.
Images courtesy of Ryo Yanagida.
Lecture 1- The Early History of Computing: Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage and the early history of programming.
Lecture 2 – Case Study, Alan Turing, Grace Hopper, and the history of programming.
Lecture 3- What do historians of computing do, and why is it important for computer scientists today.
Technology fundamentally shapes our communication, relationships, and access to information. It also evolves through our interaction with it. Dialoguing across disciplines can facilitate an understanding of these complex and reciprocal relationships and fuel reflection and innovation.
This hands-on, participant-driven and experimental workshop will start a discussion of what can come from considering technology through a philosophical lens. Through discussions and hands-on design activities, it will provide an introduction to and reflection on questions at the intersection of computer science and philosophy, such as:
Engaging these questions can provide participants an entry-point into exploring these themes in the context of their own research.
This workshop is aimed at researchers from computer science who are curious about philosophy and how to leverage it to inform technically oriented research questions and designing for innovation. It is also aimed at researchers in the arts & humanities, social sciences, and philosophy who are curious about current research questions and approaches in computer science and how questions of technology can stimulate philosophical thought and research.
Attending the workshop is free but please register by emailing Nick Daly: nd40[at]st-andrews.ac.uk
Organisers: Nick Daly (School of Modern Languages) and Uta Hinrichs (School of Computer Science)
Some stunning pictures of the North Haugh and recent Guy Fawkes Night fireworks at the East Sands. Images courtesy of MSc student Xu Zhu.
