On the day

Our Open day is made up with over 40 individual demos. Presenting these will be our staff and students with representation from 1st year right through to PhD students. Demos will be from coursework and research projects and represent some of the highlights from the academic year.

Our exhibitors will be present and look forward to discussing their work with our visitors.

All our rooms, offices and teaching spaces will be filled with demos and we will be open to welcome visitors from 10am – 4pm – you and your team are most welcome at any point during this time.

Open Day Team

You are warmly welcomed by our Open Day Team: Ruth Hoffmann and Kirsty Ross. If you have any questions, please email us here.

“Schedule”

This is an informal event with no set times for exhibits. In case you are wanting to plan anything here is an approximate schedule:

10:00 Doors Open
10:15 Coffee/Tea with breakfast rolls and pastries
12:30 Lunch will be available
14:00 Coffee/Tea with pastries
16:00 Doors Close

Other refreshments will be available! Registration is not expected, but should you have dietary requirements please do let us know.

What’s on show on the day

During the academic year, we will expand our list of exhibits as courses and projects are completed.

By March we will have a full list of exhibits and expect this to include over 40 individual exhibits.

A range of projects will be on show covering the full range of our work in the School of Computer Science. Our show will include projects, posters and demos from all of our staff and students (post- and under-graduate).

Projects will cover a variety of themes and include the following topics:

Algorithms Artificial Intelligence Climate Action Compilers Computer Science computer systems Computer Vision Computing in Everyday Life Constraint Programming coursework Data Visualisation Decision Making Deep Learning design fiction Digital Literacy Dissertation Education Functional Programming Hardware HCI Health Informatics Human-computer interaction Internet Internship Project IoT Logic Machine Learning Mathematics Modelling Older Adults Operating Systems Optimisation Pathology Personalised Medicine PhD Research Programming languages Python Research software Robotics Similarity Search Theoretical Computer Science Types UI UX Web Application

Our Projects

  • Persuading Sustainable Consumption

    This project aimed to examine the barriers to behaviour change and delve into potential solutions for achieving a more sustainable future through the use of technology. The exhibit will involve examples of protypes and ideas considered during the project as well as encouraging everyone to get involved and share their own visions of how they…

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  • New money for old rope; repurposing open knowledge from Wikidata

    In Honours year, students are required to understand a substantial piece of research as part of their Honours project. This year, five students have undertaken projects inspired by Wikidata, the Glasgow Women’s Library, and the Scottish Brick Museum. This poster outlines the pracalities involved in collaborating with external partners on Honours projects. Keywords Open Knowledge,…

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  • World of Wikidata

    The Junior Honours module is compulsory and taken by all third year Computer Science students. This year, they were tasked with creating visualisations connected to Wiki Projects using information from Wikidata. These Wiki projects included Film & TV, Paleontology & Dinosaurs, Sports, Video Games, and Weather. This poster will discuss the practicalities of integrating external…

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  • OLSA: an Online Learning Support Application

    Although having several tabs or applications open concurrently to take notes, manage tasks, and locate resources may be necessary for many students, it is not conducive to effective learning. The present project aims to develop an Online Learning Support Application, one which offers a collection of productivity and learning tools with a simple user interface…

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  • Wiki Loves Monuments

    Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo competition held annually, which aims to increase the quality and quantity of openly licensed images of monuments and listed buildings available on the Wikimedia Project. The first UK competition was held in 2013, and it has grown since then. Our projects aim to make participating in Wiki Loves…

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  • Idris: Programming as a Conversation

    Idris is a programming language which encourages “type-driven development”. We believe that to enable the highest levels of productivity, programming should be a conversation between the programmer and the machine. A type represents a formally defined “plan” for a program, which, in type-driven development, is then refined step by step into a complete, working program.…

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  • Routezy: Route Generator

    Routezy streamlines your road trip planning process. This intuitive app reimagines the way we explore, offering a seamless blend of technology and adventure. With Routezy, planning road trips becomes effortless, guiding you to specially curated points of interest which align with your ideal holiday. Keywords Dissertation, Mobile Development, TSP, Computing in Everyday Life Staff [Ruth…

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  • A Proof Checker for Linear Logic

    Linear logic is a refinement of traditional (or classical) logic which is conscious of resource usage, and tracks resources carefully. This logic has many applications in Computer Science (such as in the design of programming languages and resource verification tools), as well as in Quantum Information Theory and in Linguistics. This tool checks proofs in…

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  • Climate Action Large Language Model

    CaLLM is a chatbot that has been given specialist information about the impact of climate change and the Berwickshire Marine Reserve to harness both the natural language processing power of large language models (like ChatGPT) and niche expert information to create an accurate, precise and personalised Climate Action guide. Keywords Dissertation, Large Language Models, Retrieval…

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  • Steganographic Messaging

    From the Greek “steganographia”, steganography means “covered writing”. It’s about hiding messages within other things, like images or audio, to communicate secretly. Steganographic algorithms hide data but don’t fully ensure covert communication. This study focuses on complete systems for secret communication. Previous attempts had mixed success, with some easily exposed. This research explores alternate means…

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  • Making it easier to write correct programs

    Dependently-typed programming languages, such as Idris and Agda, permit the use of logical properties to constrain the values an expression could take. This allows us to incorporate the proof that a program satisfies certain specifications directly in the program itself, making correctness guarantees an intrinsic part of an implementation. Despite this advantage, developing dependently-typed programs…

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  • Energy improvements for mobile device operating systems

    Our phones are growing in compute power every year. But what about the times when we are more concerned with battery life than speed? We ask how mobile phone operating systems like IOS and android can improve your battery life by reducing your device’s performance when you don’t need it. Keywords Mobile Computing, Energy Efficiency,…

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  • Our Friends Electric

    Emerging technologies-such as the voice enabled internet-present many opportunities and challenges for research and society as a whole. Advocating for better, healthier implementations of these technologies will require us to communicate abstract values, such as trust, to an audience that ranges from the general public to technologists to policymakers. In this research, we use a…

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  • Challenging the ‘Male Default’ Paradigm: Utilising Advanced Data Visualisation to Raise Awareness Gender Bias in Healthcare

    This dissertation project, titled ‘Challenging the ‘Male Default’ Paradigm: Utilising Advanced Data Visualisation to Raise Awareness of Gender Bias in Healthcare,’ aims to use innovative data visualisation techniques to shine a spotlight on gender bias in healthcare, enabling a more inclusive and equitable approach to medical decision-making, research, and patient care. The “Male Default” paradigm…

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  • What’s Wrong with this Sudoku? Using Constraint Programming to Explain Unsatisfiability

    Computers have long been used to quickly solve problems which can be modelled using constraints, like Sudoku, but what if the problem has no solution? An extension to the common functionality of existing constraint solvers can provide an explanation of why a model has no solution, requiring little additional time. While your favourite Sudoku app…

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  • Sudoku Techniques

    Exploring the different techniques that can be used to solve sudoku puzzles. Keywords Dissertation,Puzzle Techniques,Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence Staff [Ruth Hoffmann]{rh347}

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  • One More Time With Feeling: Music Harmony using Deep Learning

    Baroque music frequently uses something called Figured Bass Notation, which lets an accompanist improvise music harmony. Software exists that allow you to use this notation to realise a harmony in a rules-based way, but is it possible to do the same with machine learning, and how does a machine learning version compare? Using a previously-unexplored…

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  • Encouraging Pro-Social Behaviour on Social Media Platforms

    This dissertation aims to offer practical and collaborative strategies for nurturing pro-social and inclusive behaviour online. By changing the nature of interactions online, social media platforms can be transformed into a safer and more meaningful space for its users. Keywords Dissertation, Social Media, User Experience, Human Computer Interaction Staff [Angela Miguel]{arm14}

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  • Minesweeper Hint System

    Imagine playing Minesweeper and getting stuck. This system uses smart techniques to assist your gameplay. It combined two solving methods: constraint programming, which helps narrow down where mines might be based on the rules of the game, and probability, which calculates the likelihood of a tile containing a mine. So, when you’re don’t know which…

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  • Co-designing alternative narratives for decentralised ​digital futures with rural communities in Karnataka, India​ ​ ​ ​

    Decentralising Digital was a 2 year project involving design researchers from universities across the UK, Quicksand – a design research studio from India, and a range of community partners working with rural farmers and communities in Karnataka, India. The project, focused on co-create future alternative narratives that explore how powerful developments in emerging technologies such…

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  • Meaningful Interactions using Non-Conventional Hardware Options

    A project for the “Interactive Software and Hardware” module which required students to creatively work with hardware and software to create an interactive exhibit. This exhibit demonstrates a prototype system in which users can engage in short pattern-recognition and memorisation-based activities through non-conventional hardware interfaces. These interfaces include: a motion capture camera (Kinect), a microcontroller…

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  • Klondike Solitaire with Quantum Safety

    The Klondike Solitaire card game, popularised by the Windows Solitaire program, is notable for being surprisingly difficult to win. This research explores how unwinnable deals can be detected and avoided using Artificial Intelligence search techniques. This has lead to the development of a world’s best method of detecting unwinnable deals, and the implementation of a…

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  • Finding Categorically Similar Images

    Computers can categorise images incredibly accurately. For example, my house is categorised as a small wooden cottage. Can we use this information to find other similar houses? Google returns 11.2 billion images of houses; it is impossible to compare them all. If each comparison takes a millisecond, comparing them all will take 129 days. To…

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  • Generative Machine Learning for Synthetic Histopathology Slides

    Anonymising medical data for use in machine learning is important to preserve patient privacy and, in many circumstances, is a requirement before data can be made available. One approach to anonymising image data is to train a generative model to produce data that is statistically similar to the input data and use the synthetic data…

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  • Transforming Computational Pathology with Transformers

    In the realm of healthcare, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming a pivotal force in revolutionising patient care, particularly through advancements in computational pathology. Harnessing the power of AI technologies, such as deep learning, transformers, and neural networks, significantly enhances the accuracy and efficiency of disease diagnosis. This showcase demonstrates how sophisticated AI models can analyse…

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  • Delivery Routing Constrained by Customer Availability

    Every day, delivery drivers face the challenge of finding the best route to take for their deliveries, to minimize costs and maximize efficiency. To complicate things, customers are now often able to specify time windows during which they are available to receive deliveries, and companies must now plan around these time windows to ensure customer…

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  • Human-Centric Machine Learning

    One primary goal of Machine Learning (ML) development is to create computational systems capable of learning from real-world data and making informed predictions. While ML applications demonstrate benefits, unexpected algorithmic behaviours, traceable to various aspects of ML system design, have led to a decrease in public trust in such systems due to their perceived unreliability.…

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  • Immersive exploration of Climate Futures

    Climate change poses an existential threat to much of what we treasure and indeed to life on our planet. there is no planet B. In this exhibit we use game technology to explore potential climate futures. Based on scientific data and forecasts the exhibit will represent what climate change will mean at the Ant-Arctic, Western…

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  • Privacy on the Web: Analysing the Public Suffix List

    Web browsers, and other applications, need to be able to determine when two domain names are related to each other, and when they are not. This helps them to make decisions about how data, like cookies, should be shared. The way that applications figure this out is by using the Public Suffix List, a community-maintained…

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  • Web Technologies

    As part of a broad restructuring of our postgraduate teaching, we are refactoring and refocussing our teaching of web technologies. Our aim is to give a solid understanding of core concepts and technologies, to give experience in widely used libraries and frameworks, and to look toward emerging trends in web development. This poster will present…

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  • Fast Towel-Shaper: Pick-and-Place Towel Manipulation using Transporter Skill Policies under Goal-condition Phase Prediction

    Towel manipulation is a crucial stepstone towards more general cloth manipulation, but it remains a challenge to fold a towel from any crumple state and recover from a failed folding step. In this work, we develop a two-layer hierarchical agent that uses a goal-condition phase-prediction network to decide which manipulation phase the towel is under…

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  • Language App for Intermediate Chinese

    The majority of apps out there for language learning are aimed at beginners. It follows the same textbook structure, boring grammar and none of the content seems applicable to you. It’s time for a new era of language learning, where it’s fun and where we can choose our own course! This language app lets you…

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  • Students’ Perspectives on Learning Analytics

    Collecting students’ perspectives on learning analytics to inform guidelines and create mock-up designs for the university to implement. Q: What are learning analytics? A: Data on the learner that is analysed and presented back to the learner to aid or motivate their learning. You may have seen these as graphs on sites such as Coursera…

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  • Online On-the-Go: Mobile Internet Connectivity with ILNP in FreeBSD

    The Internet wasn’t designed for mobile devices — moving around breaks things! Fortunately, we can hide this behind layers and layers of patched together solutions. Unfortunately, these solutions face performance costs. We show there is another way: by evolving the internals of the operating system, we can provide mobile connectivity for everyone without changing existing…

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  • Not So “Smart” Phones

    Modern smartphones offer endless features, applications and upgrades, often leading to heightened distractions. “Minimalist phones” deliberately restrict features to just essential utilities like calls and maps. This research analyses user perceptions of such phones focused solely on fundamentals. By limiting apps and notifications through intentional design compromises, the goal is to encourage presence, focus, and…

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  • What Does the University of the Future Look Like?

    Welcome to the St Andrews class of 2044! Based on your recent search history, we think you’d benefit from a talk given by one of our ambassadors. Like you, participants will also be from communities who opted out of technology for their children. We see you’ve been exploring what our golf courses were like before…

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  • Digraphs for GAP and VIP

    “Digraphs” is a package for the computational algebra system GAP that has been in development and use here in St Andrews since 2014. It provides usable tools and algorithms for directed graphs, a concept that arises in many fields of Mathematics and Computer Science. A cross-disciplinary group between CS and Maths maintains the package and…

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  • Sketching in Human Computer Interaction

    Sketching is a universal, accessible and quick medium for representation, brainstorming, communicating ideas, and can aid understanding. However, sketching can also be a tool for making sense of complex topics, translating research, and even scoping the future of technology. Whilst seen as a ‘soft skill’ in many disciplines, sketching is in its renaissance, even challenging…

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  • Reducing the Digital Exclusion of Older Adults with a Focus on the Transport Domain

    In this age of rapid digitalisation, heightened by the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a digital divide between older adults and wider society. Increasingly, accessing essential services requires use of digital technology. Often this excludes older adults, many of whom do not have the experience and confidence to fully engage in the digital world. Transport is…

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  • Efficient Representation of Functional Programs

    Functional programming is a programming paradigm which comprises equations between functions operating on “abstract data”. It is a very neat and concise style that focuses on the core logic rather than catering to the details of how a computer works. However, these programs are often very inefficient to execute because of the disregard for such…

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  • Java Jotters: Literate Programming in Java

    This project is focused on creating a literate programming tool for the Java programming language. Literate programming can be described as the combination of documentation alongside executable code. Which enables developers to gain a greater understanding of the code they are writing, to improve developer experience, and to facilitate maintainability and readability. The code entered…

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  • MSc in Software Engineering

    Following a review of all our in-person MSc programmes, the MSc Software Engineering programme is being revised to bring it up to date, provide coverage of some of the important topics in this vast area, and to prepare students for careers in both industry and academia. New modules will be introduced and current modules will…

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  • Who Weaves the Web?

    The success of the Web is underpinned by a series of documents that define how computers should talk to each other. The process of writing those documents is an inherently social and political process, requiring consensus amongst individuals and organisations that often have competing goals and interests. Our work has begun to untangle the social…

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  • What can Constraint Programming do for you?

    Constraint Programming (CP) is a general purpose decision making and optimisation method. At St Andrews we have developed and maintain a CP toolkit. In this exhibit we will use 4 demonstrator applications to showcase the kind of problems CP can be applied to. These are permutation patterns, nurse rostering, workload assignment and university timetabling. The…

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  • Graph Search Problems

    Searching graphs for paths, or patterns within them is a problem with many applications, from planning a good route to finding a certain connection between people. A graph is a set of points that are connected with edges. The points and edges can represent almost anything, such as friendships, roads or connected computers. We research…

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  • Mini Machines, Mega Brains

    Artificial neural networks are computer science-based representations of the biological brain. These networks can usually only be run on huge supercomputers with millions of processors that consume a lot of electricity. We are developing new ways to fit brain representations on very small processors so that smart applications are available everywhere – in our homes,…

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