The Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) have confirmed that the Scottish Funding Council have approved funding for six new initiatives that will provide new placements, exchanges and internships with Scottish and overseas businesses. Read more in the University News and in Latest news from SICSA
research
SICSA DEMOfest 2012
The Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance in association with ScotlandIS hosted their 5th annual DEMOfest, a technology showcase of Scottish Universities Informatics and Computer Science on the 6th November.
The school had three posters at the DEMOfest. Derek and Gordon were promoting their work on the SFC funded Horizon Project “Services to the Cloud”, Masih’s poster was “On The Propagation of Network State Knowledge In Structured Peer-to-Peer Networks”, which forms part of his PhD, and Chris was talking about the work he’s been doing with Alex Voss on “Analysing Social Media”.
In addition, for the first time, workshops were included as part of the DemoFest. Gordon organised the first of these on the topic of Cloud Computing. The lunchtime workshop was aimed at software developers who are considering moving their product to the cloud, and comprised three invited speakers and an open panel Q&A/discussion session.
It was attended by 37 people from industry and academia, and is the first in a series of dissemination workshops being organised as part of the Services to the Cloud project.
Virtual Worlds Research: NuiLib & Armadilo
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.
Business success for former PhD Student Ali Khajeh-Hosseini
Congratulations to Hassan and Ali Khajeh-Hosseini on their ShopForCloud business, which has just been sold to RightScale.
Ali worked as a software engineering intern at RightScale while studying for his PhD in computer science. Read more in Scotsman business article and on the ShopForCloud Blog.
Virtual Worlds at Sensation
Weekend at Sensation
It’s been a busy weekend for the virtual worlds group. The reconstructed St Andrews Cathedral and other ongoing projects, were on display at Sensation in Dundee as part of the “Create and Inspire” initiative.
Friday involved organised school visits and Saturday and Sunday proved busy with members of the public entering the reconstruction to speak to Robert the Bruce and take a guided tour.
The visitors book recorded some great comments, extracts from this will be posted shortly, on the Virtual Worlds Blog.
hci2012 People & Computers XXVI
HCI 2012 will be held between the 12th and the 14th of September 2012 in Birmingham.
The Programme Committee includes Aaron and Per Ola as short paper chairs and Miguel in Interactive Demos.
Information available online at hci2012 submissions.
Decision Support Tools for Cloud Migration in the Enterprise
This month’s IEEE Computing Now features the paper “Decision Support Tools for Cloud Migration in the Enterprise” written by Ali Khajeh-Hosseini, Ian Sommerville, Jurgen Bogaerts, and Pradeep Teregowda.
PhD Poster Session 2012
The PhD poster session took place today in the Jack Cole coffee area.
Ron Morrison awarded Amazon vouchers to the three best posters. Congratulations to Lakshitha, Yi and Ali.
3rd place to System Deployment Costs in Public Clouds – Ali Khajeh-Hosseini
2nd place to Building Energy Awareness into ICT Systems (complete with magnifying glass) – Yi Yu
1st place to Monitoring Architectural Conformance through Runtime Event Interpretation – Lakshitha De Silva
Many of the posters featured at this session, including all the prizewinners, are now available for everyone to look at.
Competition entrants included:
- Jan de Muijnck-Hughes Leveraging Predicate Based Encryption
Systems - James W. Smith Energy Efficiency in Cloud Computing
- CJ Davies Virtual Time Windows − Cross Reality for Cultural Heritage
- John McCaffery Open Virtual Worlds as a Platform for 3D
Application - Ruth Hoffmann Token Passing Networks and Permutation Pattern
Classes - Indika Perera 3D Multi User Learning Environments:
Management Policy Considerations - Ward Jaradat A Scalable Architecture for Decentralised Execution of Data-Intensive Workflows
- Jin Huang Architectural Concerns for Distributed, Self‐adaptive
Systems - Ozgur Akgün Refining Portfolios of Constraint Models with CONJURE
- Masih Hajiarabderkani Adaptive Dissemination of Maintenance
Information in Peer-to-Peer Systems - Jakub Dostal Viewing Distance and Attention Detection in
Multi-Display Environments (MDEs) - Arunas Prokopas Constraint Solver Synthesizer
- Chonlatee Khorakhun Enabling “Internet of Things”
- Luke Hutton Temporal decay of social networking privacy
policies - Bruce Simpson A new approach to multihoming in the IPv6
Internet
Twitter Innocent in English riots
Alex Voss was part of the team investigating the role of social media during the English Riots. The study was highlighted in the University news today, and the Guardian this morning.
Update
The results of the study will also be presented at the Reading the Riots conference,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/dec/14/reading-the-riots-conference-live-blog
which also features a range of other speakers including Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition, Theresa May,
the home secretary and Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary.
The study was led by Professor Rob Procter, of the University of Manchester, and funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee).
Challenges in Social Network Visualisation
Aaron Quigley the Chair of Human Computer Interaction in the School and Director of SACHI, the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction research group gave a seminar this morning in Edinburgh at the School of Informatics.