School of Computing Science

Scottish Programming Languages Seminar

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 03 December, 2025
Time: 10:00 - 17:30
Location:Learning and Teaching Building, University of Strathclyde

The SPLS hybrid event will be held by the MSP Group of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at University of Strathclyde. Talks will take place in room TL325 in the Learning and Teaching Building (49 Richmond Street). There will be signs directing you from the main entrance of the building. A special PhD event will be held in the morning, starting at 1000hrs. The PhD Event will be held in LT1414a in Livingstone Tower, home to the Department of Computer & Information Sciences. It will be an introduction to SPLI in specific, and doing a PhD in general, as well as a chance to meet your fellow PhD students from other institutes. It is intended to be most useful to students early in their PhD, although everyone is free to attend (including non-PhD students). Find out more about the programme and register for the event. Registration will close on 26 November.

Title TBA

Group: Programming Languages at University of Glasgow (PLUG)
Speaker: Jacob Trevor
Date: 03 December, 2025
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: F121 Lilybank Gardens and Online

Jake will give us a talk/rant about package managers. Details TBA.

Scottish Programming Languages Seminar

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 03 December, 2025
Time: 10:00 - 17:30
Location: Learning and Teaching Building, University of Strathclyde

The SPLS hybrid event will be held by the MSP Group of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at University of Strathclyde. Talks will take place in room TL325 in the Learning and Teaching Building (49 Richmond Street). There will be signs directing you from the main entrance of the building. A special PhD event will be held in the morning, starting at 1000hrs. The PhD Event will be held in LT1414a in Livingstone Tower, home to the Department of Computer & Information Sciences. It will be an introduction to SPLI in specific, and doing a PhD in general, as well as a chance to meet your fellow PhD students from other institutes. It is intended to be most useful to students early in their PhD, although everyone is free to attend (including non-PhD students). Find out more about the programme and register for the event. Registration will close on 26 November.

Title TBA

Group: Programming Languages at University of Glasgow (PLUG)
Speaker: Jacob Trevor
Date: 03 December, 2025
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: F121 Lilybank Gardens and Online

Jake will give us a talk/rant about package managers. Details TBA.

Accessing Innovate UK Funding

Group: Glasgow Computing Science Innovation Lab
Speaker: Prof. Surajit Ray, Dr Andrew Feeney, Ms Jill Dykes, University of Glasgow
Date: 09 December, 2025
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Location: Room 422, SAWB

Innovate UK is an important source of funding for research and innovation in the UK but is often poorly understood, particularly in academia where the dynamics of research council funding are more familiar.

This session will provide an introduction to the main types and workings of Innovate UK funding.  The session is aimed primarily at early career academic researchers, and researchers new to the UK / Innovate UK funding.  Industry colleagues from the companies who participate in GLACSIL and our Industry Advisory Board are welcome to attend too.

There will be an introductory talk from Jill Dykes, Business Development Manager, School of Computing Science, about the types of funding available, plus talks from 2 colleagues in the College of Science and Engineering who will share their experiences of accessing Innovate UK funding, and discuss its role in supporting their research.

This will be a hybrid session (Teams details below) with lunch provided for in-person attendees.

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AGENDA

12pm – 12:30pm : lunch and networking

12:30pm – 12:40pm: introduction to Innovate UK funding – Jill Dykes, Business Development Manager, School of Computing Science

12:40pm – 1pm: Case Study 1 – Dr Andrew Feeney, Senior Lecturer, School of Engineering, University of Glasgow

1pm – 1:20pm: Case Study 2 – Professor Surajit Ray, School of Maths & Statistics, University of Glasgow

1:20pm – 1:30pm: Innovate UK funding insights and tips – Jill Dykes, Business Development Manager, School of Computing Science

1:30pm – 2pm: networking & refreshments

CASE STUDY SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Dr Andrew Feeney is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Medical and Industrial Ultrasonics (C-MIU), James Watt School of Engineering, at the University of Glasgow. He obtained his PhD in ultrasonics from Glasgow in 2014, where his thesis focused on the integration of nickel-titanium shape memory materials into ultrasonic transducers, with the aim of exploring novel approaches to establishing systems with tunable dynamic properties. He then undertook postdoctoral research into sub-sea ultrasonically assisted exploration technology, investigating the influence of ultrasonic vibrations on different sub-sea geological materials, and the development of novel ultrasonic devices for minimally-invasive surgeries, based on conventional flextensional transducer configurations. In 2016, he joined the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick, where he was Research Fellow in the Centre for Industrial Ultrasonics (CIU) until 2020. His research during this period focused on engineering a new generation of high frequency flexural ultrasonic transducers for operation in a range of liquid and gas measurement environments, including at elevated levels of pressure and temperature (hundreds of bar and °C respectively). Some of the innovations developed in this research are now used by industry.

Dr Feeney currently leads the Adaptive Ultrasonics and Systems (Adaptus) Research Group, established to realise adaptive ultrasonics and systems for adaptable or intelligent medical and industrial technologies. The Adaptus Research Group utilises advanced materials including those exhibiting shape memory behaviour and metamaterials, integrating them with a wide range of ultrasonic devices and electro-mechanical systems to control and optimise dynamic performance. The group operates across a few key themes, including advanced materials, biomedical devices, industrial sensing, and sustainable manufacturing. He is currently funded through EPSRC-UKRI, Innovate UK, Horizon Europe, and industry. Dr Feeney is a Chartered Engineer and member of both the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the IEEE.

Professor Surajit Ray is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on uncertainty quantification for AI algorithms in medical image analysis, as well as the theory and geometry of mixture models and functional data analysis. He is particularly interested in problems arising from “large magnitude,” both in the dimensionality of data and in the scale of datasets. His methodological work spans multivariate mixtures, structural equation models, high-dimensional clustering, and functional clustering. Collaborative projects include medical image segmentation, immunology, and climate–ecosystem dynamics, with a growing emphasis on translating medical imaging software tools into clinical practice.

How Well Woven is the Web?

Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Stephen McQuistin, University of St. Andrews
Date: 09 December, 2025
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Zoom

Internet resilience is typically framed in terms of the physical and software infrastructure. But there's another dimension worth considering: the resilience of the standardisation process itself. Protocols emerge from sustained collaborative effort undertaken in standards development organisations like the IETF and W3C. This process can be fragile. When key contributors depart, they take with them not just technical expertise but institutional memory, social capital, and an understanding of why particular design decisions were made.

In this talk, I’ll describe our work on this understudied aspect of resilience by analysing twenty years of discussion and authorship data (2004 to 2023) from both organisations. I'll examine dependency dynamics within and across these communities, and assess the criticality of influential participants.

## Speaker

Stephen McQuistin is a a lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on Internet standards, including their development, implementation, and measurement.

TBC

Group: Networked Systems Research Laboratory (NETLAB)
Speaker: Kelsey Collington
Date: 10 December, 2025
Time: 10:00 - 11:00
Location: Room 422, SAWB

Education Champions Meeting

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 10 December, 2025
Time: 16:00 - 17:00
Location: Online

Monthly meeting of SICSA Education Champions. Please contact the Education Director if you’re a CS academic based in Scotland and are interested in becoming an Education Champion for your institution.

SICSA Education Seminar - Pedagogical Prompt Engineering Protocol Applied to LLM Feedback in Introductory Programming

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 15 December, 2025
Time: 14:00 - 15:30
Location: University of Glasgow, School of Computing Science, Room 423, Sir Alwyn Williams Building, Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow, G12 8RZ

Please register to attend in person or online. Venue: Room 423, Sir Alwyn Williams Building, Lilybank Gardens, School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow Join us for the last SICSA Education Seminar of 2025 on 15 December at 2pm where University of Glasgow doctoral candidate Eyman Alyahyan will present her work: A Pedagogical Prompt Engineering Protocol Applied to LLM Feedback in Introductory Programming Abstract: Many researchers and educators are exploring how Large Language Models (LLMs) could be used to support feedback practices in computing education. Yet the prompts that guide these systems are often ad-hoc and not grounded in pedagogy. What if we could design prompts that enable LLMs to produce feedback that supports student learning? In this seminar, Eyman Alyahyan introduces the Pedagogical Prompt Engineering Protocol (PPEP)—a systematic, theory-informed methodology for developing effective educational prompts. PPEP served as the methodological foundation for this work. Applying the protocol led to the PPE-LLM framework, a set of 10 components that translate the protocol into a clear design structure for building prompts. These components give teachers a ready-to-use scaffold for creating a well-structured prompt. That prompt can then be used to generate formative feedback using LLMs that supports student learning in introductory programming. The talk shows how moving from principles to practice can make LLM-generated feedback more consistent and pedagogically meaningful. It also offers a transparent, repeatable approach for researchers and developers to create future prompt frameworks and LLM-based feedback tools grounded in pedagogy rather than intuition.

[FATA] Festive event

Group: Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA)
Speaker: N/A
Date: 16 December, 2025
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Location: Room 422, SAWB

Calendar blocker

Measuring and understanding Distributed Denial of Service attacks

Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Daniel R. Thomas, University of Strathclyde
Date: 20 January, 2026
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Zoom

Bio:

Dr Daniel R. Thomas is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde where he is Director of the NCSC certified Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR). His research interests are in measuring security and cybercrime so that we can monitor improvement, evaluate interventions and inform regulators. This reveals which techniques work and provides the missing economic incentives to improve security and reduce cybercrime. He co-organises the Strathclyde International Perspectives on Cybercrime Summer School [link](https://www.strath.ac.uk/science/computerinformationsciences/strathcyber/cybercrimesummerschool) , which next runs 24th-28th August 2026.

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Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Tom Spink, University of St. Andrews
Date: 27 January, 2026
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Zoom

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Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Yuvraj Patel, University of Edinburgh
Date: 03 February, 2026
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Zoom

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Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Tao Chen, University of Birmingham
Date: 19 February, 2026
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Zoom

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HRI 2026

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 16 March, 2026
Time: 00:00 - 00:00
Location: TBA

The ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is the premier venue for innovations on human-robot interaction. Sponsored by the ACM special interest groups on computer-human interaction (SIGCHI) and artificial intelligence (SIGAI) as well as the IEEE robotics and automation society (RAS), HRI brings together researchers spanning robotics, human-computer interaction, human factors, artificial intelligence, engineering, and social and behavioral sciences. The theme of the 21st edition of HRI is HRI Empowering Society. Our field has the potential to bring about positive change in many areas of our societies such as healthcare, transport, remote working, agriculture and industry. However, this change cannot happen if we do not engage properly with the end users who will potentially utilize robots in their jobs and daily lives. For this reason, HRI 2026 will focus on: 1) how we can ethically integrate robots in everyday processes without creating disruptions or inequalities, carefully thinking at the future of work and services; 2) how we can make them accessible to the general public (in terms of design, technical literacy and cost) with the final aim to make robots more willingly adopted as technological helpers. More information is available on the HRI 2026 website