Speaker: Tim Summers

Speaker: Various

The use of computing in research is prolific: from daily data analyses, to large simulations on supercomputers, it is all around us. To celebrate 60 years of computing at the University of Glasgow, we ask: just how much has computing affected other disciplines? How might it in the future? And how should the future generation of researchers prepare to work with increasingly complex systems?

WIth a mix of speakers, panel discussions, and demonstrations, the Future of Computational Science event brings together an interdisciplinary audience of postgraduate researchers to help answer these questions, and to celebrate how computing is changing the research landscape, enabling some unsolved questions to finally be answered.

Schedule:

Speaker: Michel Steuwer, Adam Harries, Naums Mogers, Federico Pizzuti, Toomas Remmelg, Larisa Stoltzfus

The Lift project aims at generating high-performance code for parallel processors from a portable high-level program. Starting from a single high-level program an optimisation process based on rewrite rules transforms the portable program into highly-specialised low-level code delivering high-performance.

This talk will motivate the indispensability of performance portability given the increasing pace of the development of specialised hardware such as GPUs, FPGAs, or Google's TPU. After a brief introduction of the core aspects of Lift, the Lift team will give an overview of our ongoing research of using Lift for accelerating areas such as machine learning, physics simulations, graph algorithms, and linear algebra.

Speaker: Various

This course is designed for a beginning Tableau user - so anyone working with data, regardless of technical or analytical background. You'll learn how to create different types of visualisations and how to combine them in interactive dashboards. As students, we'll also take a look at how Tableau can integrate with tools you're already familiar with such as MATLAB, Python and R.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Dr. Felipe Meneguzzi, Pontifícia Universidade is having a Master Class on “Plan and Goal Recognition” on Tuesday 17th October at the University of Aberdeen. Plan and goal recognition is the task of inferring the plan and goal of an agent through the observation of its actions and its environment and has a number of applications on computer-human interaction, assistive technologies and surveillance. Although such techniques using planning domain theories have developed a number of very accurate and effective techniques, they often rely on assumptions of full observability and noise-free observations. These assumptions are not necessarily true in the real world, regardless of the technique used to translate sensor data into symbolic logic-based observations. In this tutorial class, we explain plan recognition approaches that rely on a range of assumptions about the available domain knowledge , from complete plan-libraries up to incomplete planning domain theories. We end the tutorial explaining applications of these techniques in two specific areas: multiagent systems and video data recognition. Bio: Dr. Felipe Meneguzzi is a researcher on multiagent systems, normative reasoning and automated planning. He is currently an associate professor/senior lecturer at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS). Prior to that appointment he was a Project Scientist at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. Felipe got his PhD at King’s College London in the UK and an undergraduate and masters degree at PUCRS in Brazil. He received the 2016 Google Research Awards for Latin America, and was one of four runners up to 2013 Microsoft Research Awards. His current research interests include plan recognition, hybrid planning and norm reasoning. Registration now at Eventbrite The host of this SICSA DVF is Dr Nir Oren, University of Aberdeen

Speaker: Various

To introduce you to Tableau and the art of data visualisation, we'll start the session off with a quick demonstration. As we move through the modern world, many of our actions leave behind an electronic footprint. We use metadata from a year's worth of cell-phone activity to try and gather as much insight as possible into one individual - just how much will we find out?

Companies are looking to hire students who not only have a data analytics skills, but who are also able to present their insights clearly. Data visualization skills continue to be in high demand with employers for this reason. In this session, we'll also take a look at some best practices around data visualisation so that you can share your stories in a way that engages your audience.

Speaker: Mircea Iordache

The Docker tutorial will introduce containers, a portable way to create and deploy standalone applications. Research reproducibility is of concern and Docker can be used to redistribute experiments and validate results.

This tutorial is structured into 3 parts:

1. Introduction to Docker

2. Recreating an existing experiment

3. Packaging and distributing your own experiment

Docker containers are built on top of the Linux OS so familiarity with the command line is recommended. A laptop with a Docker installation is required for this session; Docker is supported by most major operating systems (Linux, macOS, and Windows 10 Professional).

Speaker: Manos Farsarakis, Adrian Jackson

Software Carpentry aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills.

This workshop is hosted by EPCC, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, and organised in collaboration by ARCHER, the Software Sustainability Institute, and UoE Research Data Service.

ARCHER, the UK's national supercomputing service, offers training in software development and high-performance computing to scientists and researchers across the UK. As part of our training service we are running a two-day Data Carpentry workshop. 

This hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools, including program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.

Speaker: Luz Martinez

Abstract: I will talk about a system for recognizing grasp points in RGB-D images. This system is intended to be used in domestic robots when deploying clothes lying at random positions on a table. By taking into consideration that the grasp points are usually near key parts of clothing, such as the waist of pants or the neck of a shirt. Also, I will cover my recent work on clothing simulators that I use to obtain images to train deep learning networks.

Short-bio: Luz is a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at the University of Chile; and currently, a visiting research student in the Computer Vision and Autonomous group. Luz has worked with service robots for 4 years and has expertise in computer vision, computational intelligence, voice recognition and high-level behaviours design. She is currently working on her PhD thesis and she focuses on clothing recognition using active vision.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow Professor Daniel Sorin, Duke University will be delivering a Masterclass on Shared Memory and Memory Consistency Models at the Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh on 12th & 13th October. Abstract: Most general-purpose multicore processors provide hardware support for shared memory, in which threads running on all of the cores can access the shared memory system. Modern multicore memory systems include multiple levels of caches, some of which might be shared across multiple cores, and off-chip main memory. Threads communicate with each other by performing loads (reads) and stores (writes) to shared memory locations that may or may not be present in caches. To enable programmers to reason about concurrent accesses to shared memory locations without having to consider the hardware implementation, every architecture supports an implementation-independent memory consistency model that specifies the legal behaviors of shared memory systems. Notably, the consistency model governs what orderings and interleavings of memory accesses (loads and stores) are possible. Different architectures (IA-32, Power, SPARC, etc.) can have different consistency models. In this class, we learn about shared memory architectures and memory consistency models. Bio: Daniel J. Sorin is the Addy Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. His research interests are in computer architecture, with a focus on fault tolerance, verification, and memory system design. He is the author of "Fault Tolerant Computer Architecture" and a co-author of "A Primer on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence." He is the recipient of a SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Career Award, and Duke's Imhoff Distinguished Teaching Award. He received a PhD and MS in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Wisconsin, and he received a BSE in electrical engineering from Duke University. If you would like to come along to either of the Master Classes make sure you sign in at the Reception desk at the Informatics Forum.

Speaker: SICSA Event
The SICSA Theory, Modelling and Computation Research Theme is please to be sponsoring the Scottish Programming Languages Seminar (SPLS) , an informal meeting for discussion of any aspect of programming languages. SPLS will take place on Wednesday 11 October at the University of Edinburgh Information and updates about the October edition of SPLS will be sent via the SPLS Mailing List. Confirmed speakers are: Yasir Alguwaifli (University of St Andrews) -- Measuring Energy Usage for Parallel Haskell Programs James Chapman (University of Strathclyde) -- Delayed NBE Stuart Gale (University of Strathclyde) -- Normalization or Bust Jan de Muijnck-Hughes (University of Glasgow) -- Designing Hardware using Session Types and Dependent Types: A First Look Alastair Murray (Codeplay) -- Layering Abstractions: Heterogeneous Programming and Performance Portability Shayan Najd (University of Edinburgh) -- Embedding by Normalisation Chris Schwaab (University of St Andrews) -- First class Time and Energy for Multicore Systems Thomas Weber (Augsburg University / LMU Munich / TU Munich / University of Edinburgh) -- Building useful UIs using Uselet The full programme can be accessed on the SPLS web-site. If you plan on attending, please register here so we have an idea of numbers for catering. There will be a vegetarian option available, but please let us know if you have any other dietary requirements.  

Speaker: Martin Sablotny

Today’s software products are complex entities with many functions. Those functions have to be tested thoroughly in order to prevent security issues. In the modern software development process fuzzing an important role in finding security related bugs.
Nonetheless developing generation based fuzzers for complex input formats is a time consuming work and requires a lot of knowledge about those formats. This work focuses on the use of  deep learning algorithms in order to create HTML tags, which are combined to test cases and executed inside a browser. First results have shown that it is possible to learn the format from a generation based fuzzer and outperform it in terms of code coverage.

Speaker: Simon Gay & David Manlove

Simon and David will give us short introductions on two core research topics of the FATA Research Section: Programming Languages and Algorithms.

Speaker: David Stirling

This presentation considers a number of successful cases that have significantly benefited from the inclusion of an ontology framework. Firstly, a human bespoke ontology describing cyclic temporal control states has enabled successful multi-objective control (an intelligent autopilot) of a simulated aircraft. Secondly, an empirically learnt ontology was derived to identifying several industrial process modalities, which were exploited to reveal underlying causal factors for a set of undesirable modes (states) of high heat loads in a Blast Furnace. The first case reviews a novel approach for learning and building computational models of human skills that are typically utilized in complex control situations. Such skills are often internalized as sub-cognitive and automatic responses, such as those routinely used in driving a car. Previously, a degree of success in modelling these was reported via behavioural cloning. However, skills obtained by this technique, often exhibit a lack of generality and robustness when applied to different control tasks. This is now mitigated in the alternative presented approach, by segmenting and compressing a universal set of reaction plans with symbolic induction methods. This approach is termed, Compressed Heuristic Universal Reaction Planners or CHURPs. The substantially improved robustness and control performance arises from synergistic interactions and collaborations between the different CHURPs entities including, surrogate control and goal sharing. In the latter case, an abstracted ontology containing nine major heat load modalities, was initially learnt as a 38 state Gaussian Mixture Model from several years of Blast Furnace heat load data, and subsequently utilized to diagnose the casual influences determining these states. Such methodologies are now being pursued in a number of kinematic rehabilitation motion studies, as well as oncology and radiotherapy aspects of cancer care.

Bio:
Dr Stirling obtained his BEng degree from the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education (1976), an MSc (Digital Techniques) in from Heriot-Watt University, Scotland UK (1980), and his PhD from the University of Sydney (1995). He has worked for over 20 years in wide range of industries, including as a Principal Research Scientist with BHP Steel. More recently he joined the University of Wollongong as a Senior Lecturer. David has developed a wide range of expertise in data analysis and knowledge management with skills in problem solving, statistical methods, visualization, pattern recognition, data fusion and reduction. He has applied machine learning and data mining techniques in specialized classifier designs for noisy multivariate data to medical research, exploration geo-science, and financial markets, as well as to industrial primary operations.

Speaker: SICSA Event
    SICSA DemoFest is the annual technology showcase of leading Informatics and Computer Science research from Scottish Universities and it creates an environment for industry partners and academics to come together and identify opportunities for: Collaborative Innovation Studentships, Placements and Recruitment Technology Licensing & Consultancy Feasibility & Proof of Concept Studies The event will feature: Exhibition hall with 50 research demonstrations from Scottish Universities Partner and stakeholder exhibitions Keynote talks on hot topics relevant to business today DemoFest 2017 will focus on the following key areas: Big Data Cyber-Security User-Experience Robotics and Autonomous Systems Artificial Intelligence Networking & The Cloud This year's event will take place on 3rd October 2017, 4-7pm at Our Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh.

Speaker: SICSA Event
https://youtu.be/qCoBo6ZYMRE SICSA DemoFest is the annual technology showcase of leading Informatics and Computer Science research from Scottish Universities and it creates an environment for industry partners and academics to come together and identify opportunities for: Collaborative Innovation Studentships, Placements and Recruitment Technology Licensing & Consultancy Feasibility & Proof of Concept Studies The event will feature keynotes; 50 research and tech demonstrations; and networking. The next event will take place on 3rd October 2017, 4-7pm at Our Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh. The full programme will be available in May 2017. Registration will open in May 2017

Speaker: SICSA Event
DemoFest: Bringing Research to Life Our Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh 3 October 2017, 4-7pm   SICSA DemoFest is the largest event of its kind in Scotland. Now in its tenth year, it showcases the very best of Informatics and Computing Science research from all of Scotland’s Universities. The next event will take place on 3rd October 2017, 4-7pm at Our Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh and will be sponsored by The Data Lab and Toshiba Medical Visualization Systems. The 2017 event will feature: Welcome: Shirley-Anne Somerville MSP, Minister for Further Education, Higher Education and Science Keynote Talk: Gillian Docherty, CEO The Data Lab – “The future is depending on us!” Exhibition hall with over 50 research demonstrations from Scottish Universities Sponsor and partner exhibits DemoFest provides a perfect opportunity for your organisation to experience, first-hand, the cutting-edge research taking place in Scottish universities. Our exhibitors will talk about their research, tell you why it’s important to your organisation, and demonstrate their technology working in real-time. The event also provides a space for you to discuss future collaborations, business opportunities, internships, employment opportunities and much more. DemoFest 2017 will focus on the following key areas: Big Data Cyber-Security User-Experience Networking and the Cloud Robotics and Autonomous Systems Artificial Intelligence   DemoFest is organised by SICSA in partnership with ScotlandIS and is sponsored by The Data Lab and Toshiba Medical Visualization Systems

Speaker: Harry Scells

Title: Integrating the Framing of Clinical Questions via PICO into the Retrieval of Medical Literature for Systematic Reviews

Abstract: The PICO process is a technique used in evidence based practice to frame and answer clinical questions. It involves structuring the question around four types of clinical information: Population, Intervention, Control or comparison and Outcome. The PICO framework is used extensively in the compilation of systematic reviews as the means of framing research questions. However, when a search strategy (comprising a large boolean query) is formulated to retrieve studies for inclusion in the review, PICO is often ignored. This presentation evaluates how PICO annotations can be applied and integrated into retrieval to improve the screening of studies for inclusion in systematic reviews. The task is to increase precision while maintaining the high level of recall essential to ensure systematic reviews are representative and not biased. Our results showed that restricting the search strategies to match studies on the basis of PICO annotations does improve precision compared to a non-PICO baseline (while maintaining similar, although reduced recall). The implication of this study is that the development of search technologies based on these annotations can lead to both time and cost savings when compiling systematic reviews.

Bio: Harry is visiting from Queensland University of Technology in Australia doing his PhD on information retrieval for systematic reviews.

Speaker: Antoine Loriette

Speaker: Prof Simon Moore

Memory safety bugs result in many vulnerabilities in our computer systems allowing exploits including recent security breaches: WannaCry, HeartBleed, CloudBleed and StackClash.  To fundamentally improve computer system resilience to these attacks, we propose a new processor (CHERI) together with compiler and operating system support that mitigate these bugs with few changes to applications.  CHERI provides fine grained memory protection using a new hardware supported type: the capability.  Capabilities provide hardware enforced provenance, integrity and bounds checking for code and data references.  We demonstrate how (code, data) capability pairs can be used for highly scalable and performant compartmentalisation.  Efficient compartmentalisation allows the principle of least privilege to be widely applied, mitigating both known and unknown attacks.  Though these changes to computer systems are radical, there is a clear adoption path and we are currently working with major commercial partners to transition the technology.

Speaker: Michel Steuwer

In this work, we advocate a composable approach to programming systems with Graphics Processing Units (GPU): programs are developed as compositions of generic, reusable patterns. Current GPU programming approaches either rely on low-level, monolithic code without patterns (CUDA and OpenCL), which achieves high performance at the cost of cumbersome and error-prone programming, or they improve the programmability by using pattern-based abstractions (e.g., Thrust) but pay a performance penalty due to inefficient implementations of pattern composition.

We develop an API for GPUs based programming on C++ with STL-style patterns and its compiler-based implementation. Our API gives the application developers the native C++ means (views and actions) to specify precisely which pattern compositions should be automatically fused during code generation into a single efficient GPU kernel, thereby ensuring a high target performance. We implement our approach by extending the range-v3 library which is currently being developed for the forthcoming C++ standards. The composable programming in our approach is done exclusively in the standard C++14, with STL algorithms used as patterns which we re-implemented in parallel for GPU. Our compiler implementation is based on the LLVM and Clang frameworks, and we use advanced multi-stage programming techniques for aggressive runtime optimizations.

We experimentally evaluate our approach using a set of benchmark applications and a real-world case study from the area of image processing. Our codes achieve performance competitive with CUDA monolithic implementations, and we outperform pattern-based codes written using Nvidia’s Thrust.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA is pleased to welcome DVF Professor Daniel J Sorin from Duke University who will be giving a talk on "Designing Formally Verifiable Cache Coherence Protocols" on Tuesday 26 September at the University of St Andrews (Room 1.33A Jack Cole Building). Abstract: The cache coherence protocol is an important but notoriously complicated part of a multicore processor. Typical protocols are far too complicated to verify completely and thus industry relies on extensive testing in hopes of uncovering bugs. In this work, we propose a verification-aware approach to protocol design, in which we design scalable protocols such that they can be completely formally verified. Rather than innovate in verification techniques, we use existing verification techniques and innovate in the design of the protocols. We present two design methodologies that, if followed, facilitate verification of arbitrarily scaled protocols. We discuss the impact of the constraints that must be followed, and we highlight possible future directions in verification-aware microarchitecture. Bio: Daniel J. Sorin is the Addy Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. His research interests are in computer architecture, with a focus on fault tolerance, verification, and memory system design. He is the author of "Fault Tolerant Computer Architecture" and a co-author of "A Primer on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence." He is the recipient of a SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Career Award, and Duke's Imhoff Distinguished Teaching Award. He received a PhD and MS in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Wisconsin, and he received a BSE in electrical engineering from Duke University. The host of this Distinguished Visitor is Vijay Nagarajan and the contact for this talk is Professor Susmit Sarkar

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA is pleased to welcome DVF Professor Daniel J Sorin from Duke University who will be giving a talk on "Designing Processors to Accelerate Robot Motion Planning" on Wednesday 20 September at the University of Glasgow. Abstract: We have developed a hardware accelerator for motion planning, a critical operation in robotics. I will present the microarchitecture of our accelerator and describe a prototype implementation on an FPGA. Experimental results show that, compared to the state of the art, the accelerator improves performance by three orders of magnitude and improves power consumption by more than one order of magnitude. These gains are achieved through careful hardware/software co-design. We have modified conventional motion planning algorithms to aggressively precompute collision data, and we have implemented a microarchitecture that leverages the parallelism present in the problem. Bio: Daniel J. Sorin is the Addy Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. His research interests are in computer architecture, with a focus on fault tolerance, verification, and memory system design. He is the author of "Fault Tolerant Computer Architecture" and a co-author of "A Primer on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence." He is the recipient of a SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Career Award, and Duke's Imhoff Distinguished Teaching Award. He received a PhD and MS in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Wisconsin, and he received a BSE in electrical engineering from Duke University. The host of this SICSA Distinguished Visitor is Vijay Nagarajan and the contact for this talk is Jeremy Singer

Speaker: Prof. Daniel J. Sorin

We have developed a hardware accelerator for motion planning, a critical operation in robotics. I will  present the microarchitecture of our accelerator and describe a prototype implementation on an FPGA. Experimental results show that, compared to the state of the art, the accelerator improves performance by three orders of magnitude and improves power consumption by more than one order of magnitude. These gains are achieved through careful hardware/software co-design. We have modified conventional motion planning algorithms to aggressively precompute collision data, and we have implemented a microarchitecture that leverages the parallelism present in the problem.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Dr. Felipe Meneguzzi, Pontifícia Universidade will be giving a talk on "Plan and Goal Recognition in the Real World " on Tuesday 19th September 2017 at the University of St Andrews Abstract: Plan and goal recognition is the task of inferring the plan and goal of an agent through the observation of its actions and its environment and has a number of applications on computer-human interaction, assistive technologies and surveillance. Although such techniques using planning domain theories have developed a number of very accurate and effective techniques, they often rely on assumptions of full observability and noise-free observations. These assumptions are not necessarily true in the real world, regardless of the technique used to translate sensor data into symbolic logic-based observations. In this work, we develop plan recognition techniques, based on classical planning domain theories, that can cope with observations that are both incomplete and noisy and show how they can be applied to sensor data processed through deep learning techniques. We evaluate such techniques on a kitchen video dataset, bridging the gap between symbolic goal recognition and real-world data. Bio: Dr. Felipe Meneguzzi is a researcher on multiagent systems, normative reasoning and automated planning. He is currently an associate professor/senior lecturer at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS). Prior to that appointment he was a Project Scientist at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. Felipe got his PhD at King's College London in the UK and an undergraduate and masters degree at PUCRS in Brazil. He received the 2016 Google Research Awards for Latin America, and was one of four runners up to 2013 Microsoft Research Awards. His current research interests include plan recognition, hybrid planning and norm reasoning. The host of this Distinguished Visiting Fellow is Dr Nir Oren

Speaker: SICSA Event
The SICSA Cyber Physical Systems Research Theme is pleased to be sponsoring the workshop on Foundations of Situated and Multomodal Communication which is part of the 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS), being held on 19 September 2017 in Montpellier, France First call for papers now for the Situated or multimodal communication, in which speakers exploit various aspects of the non-linguistic context to communicate a message, is a fact of life for face-to-face conversations. Its analysis is of fundamental importance for modelling the interpretation of everyday conversations and human-robot interactions. This workshop will bring together both linguists and computer scientists to discuss foundational, conceptual, and practical issues involving situated and multimodal communication. Relevant questions include: What is the nature of the non-linguistic context? What is the range of ways that gesture and speech exploit the non-linguistic context and how do they exploit it differently? What are the practical and/or computational advantages in using non-linguistic context to convey meaning? How can we measure the effects of non-linguistic context on meaning? How do we exploit corpora to address the task of analysing multimodal communication? How should we model agents for human-robot interactions? Should we ensure that interlocutors' vision of the external world is coherent? If so, how do we do this? How do we model cases in which different interlocutors adopt different perspectives on the same non-linguistic context? How do we handle the need to disambiguate a message?  

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Dr. Felipe Meneguzzi, Pontifícia Universidade will be giving a talk on "Plan and Goal Recognition in the Real World" on Monday 18th September 2017 at the University of Edinburgh. Abstract: Plan and goal recognition is the task of inferring the plan and goal of an agent through the observation of its actions and its environment and has a number of applications on computer-human interaction, assistive technologies and surveillance. Although such techniques using planning domain theories have developed a number of very accurate and effective techniques, they often rely on assumptions of full observability and noise-free observations. These assumptions are not necessarily true in the real world, regardless of the technique used to translate sensor data into symbolic logic-based observations. In this work, we develop plan recognition techniques, based on classical planning domain theories, that can cope with observations that are both incomplete and noisy and show how they can be applied to sensor data processed through deep learning techniques. We evaluate such techniques on a kitchen video dataset, bridging the gap between symbolic goal recognition and real-world data. Bio: Dr. Felipe Meneguzzi is a researcher on multiagent systems, normative reasoning and automated planning. He is currently an associate professor/senior lecturer at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS). Prior to that appointment he was a Project Scientist at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. Felipe got his PhD at King's College London in the UK and an undergraduate and masters degree at PUCRS in Brazil. He received the 2016 Google Research Awards for Latin America, and was one of four runners up to 2013 Microsoft Research Awards. His current research interests include plan recognition, hybrid planning and norm reasoning. The host of this Distinguished Visiting Fellow is Dr Nir Oren

Speaker: Andrew Howes

Speaker: Albrecht Schmidt

Historically the use and development of tools is strongly linked to human evolution and intelligence. The last 10.000 years show a stunning progress in physical tools that have transformed what people can do and how people live. Currently, we are at the beginning of an even more fundamental transformation: the use of digital tools to amplify the mind. Digital technologies provide us with entirely new opportunities to enhance the perceptual and cognitive abilities of humans. Many ideas, ranging from mobile access to search engines, to wearable devices for lifelogging and augmented realty application give as first indications of this transition. In our research we create novel digital technologies that systematically explore how to enhance human cognition and perception. Our experimental approach is to: first, understand the users in their context as well as the potential for enhancement. Second, we create innovative interventions that provide functionality that amplifies human capabilities. And third, we empirically evaluate and quantify the enhancement that is gained by these developments. It is exciting to see how ultimately these new ubiquitous computing technologies have the potential for overcoming fundamental limitations in human perception and cognition.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA is pleased to support the Education Workshop on Entrepreneurship which is taking place on 5 September 2017 at the University of Dundee This workshop proposes to open discussion on how to adopt and further improve upon entrepreneurial education within Computing-related subjects, and on a wider basis. This is motivated by SEED, a multi-disciplinary project exploring this topic, and sponsored by SICSA Education. Register at Eventbrite Across our sessions we would like to hear from colleagues across Scotland who have embedded entrepreneurship into their curriculum: what motivated this decision, how did you implement it, and what feedback (if any) did you get from students? A separate CfP is available and open until the 25th August: should you wish to present your work, please fill in the Google Form at https://goo.gl/forms/24onOx08uYjAbkGd2 10:00-10:15 Registration 10:15-10:45 Introduction (Zarb & Brady, introducing SEED) 10:45-11:00 Tea Break 11:00-12:00 Session 1 12:00-13:00 Keynote by Prof P. Downes, Principal of the University of Dundee 13:00-14:00 Lunch 14:00-16:00 Session 2 16:00-16:30 Dissemination A drinks reception and tour of the new Centre for Entrepreneurship to follow.

Speaker: SICSA Event
What to EXPECT The conference brings together a diverse group of educators interested in Computing education from Nursery teachers through to College and University lecturers and people supporting extra curricular activites. If you’ve not joined us before, the conference is a great way to get a hands on with new resources, equipment and environments, meet other educators you can colloborate with in future and gain inspiration for the year ahead. The broad themes for this years conference are improving diversity through creative computing activities, implementing cyber security, practical support for the new CS BGE Experience’s and Outcomes and Benchmarks, formative assessment for Computing and a chance to influence the agenda for future professional learning and school based research in Scottish schools. This year we have over twenty different sessions (around half of which are hands on workshops) to choose from with a selection of highlights that include An opening keynote by the founder of Computing At School in the UK, Microsoft Researcher and giant in the field of Computer Science, Simon Peyton Jones especially for Nursery and Primary specialists at BGE early, 1st and 2nd levels Hands on with Barefoot unplugged activities with one of the creators of the resources and expert Barefoot instructor- Jane Waite Working with the CS E’s and O’s and benchmarks- Judy Robertson and Kate Farrell especially for Primary and Secondary teachers at BGE 3rd and 4th levels Diving deep into primary programming- design for quality and independence- Jane Waite Hands on workshop of new unplugged activities for teaching the basics of parallel processing- Jeremy Singer and Louise Black Developing Computational Thinking with 3D Animations & Games in Alice- Quintin Cutts and Fionnuala Johnson especially for Secondary teachers for the Senior Phase and FE Teaching the level 6 Cyber Security NPA and learners experience of it- George Mullin Planning and advice for introducing the level 4/5 Cyber Security NPA’s in your school- Peter Liddle and Gareth Rae Everyone Sessions linked to a powerful and free platform for formative assessment of Computing Project Quantum- tests worth teaching to?- Miles Berry Creating good formative assessment questions for Computing- Project Quantum leader- Miles Berry Sessions linked to current schools based research Hot off the press: latest research in computer science education in schools (2015-17)- Sue Sentance “Educators would like to know? Generating questions for future schools based research”- Judy Robertson and a chance to discuss and help shape 3 early stage projects for new forms of professional learning in Computing for teachers and learners. We realise that the SQA will be holding development days in the coming month so we’ve made sure that most of the sessions at this years conference complement, rather than just repeat them. This year we’ve also listened to your feedback and increased the length of sessions, created breaks in between, put on a much nicer lunch, created optional industry keynotes and have seating in the Wolfson Medical Building attrium you can use to catch up with colleagues both old and new. If you’ve never been to a previous conference before then there’s never been a better time to go! Format of THE DAY This year the conference is organised into a short welcome and a prize draw and vote of thanks at the end two keynotes with a general Computing Education talk and a talk from Industry demonstrating the wider impact and influence of Computing in Scotland. A mix of different seminar, workshop and discussion based sessions including hands on practical workshops available throughout the day featuring Microbits, Barefoot Computing activities, New unplugged activities for teaching key parrallel computing concepts and many more! Broad General Education sessions on teaching Computing to Primary and lower Secondary pupils. Senior phase sessions useful for anyone teaching National 4 to Advanced Higher Computing Science and equivalent NPA’s. Vocational, HE and Industry sessions focused around the connection between Computing education in HE and FE and work within the ICT industry. There will also be an exhibition space and drop in area where you can chat to others and find out about various Computing resources and equipment. Conference TIMES Registration and breakfast will be from 8.30am till 9.30am and the event will close at 4.30pm. 8.30am – 9.25am Registration and breakfast 9.30am – 9.50am Welcome and opening 10.00am-10.45am Session 1 10.50am-11.35am Session 2 11.40am-12.25pm Session 3 12.30pm- 1.15pm Lunch 1.20pm – 2.05pm Session 4 2.10pm – 2.55pm Session 5 3.00pm – 3.45pm Session 6 3.50pm – 4.30pm Close, Thanks and Prize Draw Based on previous years feedback, attendees will be able to choose their own extended refreshment break in the exhibition and seating area during session 1 or 2 in the morning or during session 5 or 6 in the afternoon. All computer and hardware based practical workshops will take place over 2 sessions and are 1 hour and 30 minutes in length and all other sessions will last 45 minutes. What DOES IT COST? Tickets for students including those on probation cost £15, computing educators at all levels and people in industry with an interest in education cost £35 and exhibitors £200 which includes a light breakfast, refreshments with tray bakes during the day, a lovely buffet lunch and a wealth of hands-on-workshops, discussions and seminars.

Speaker: Inah Omoronyia, Phil Trinder, and many others

The era of many-core computing is transforming much of computing and areas like AI, sensor nets, IoT, and big data are just some examples. Many-core software systems have three main components: computation, i.e. the algorithms to be performed, data encoded in data structures and data stores, and communication between compute units:

  Software Systems = Computation + Data + Communication

 Such systems must resolve three inter-linked challenges in each of the components to be:

• Scalable: emergent computing platforms operate at unprecedented scale, with commodity servers already commonly comprising hundreds of hosts, tens of thousands of cores, and thousands of storage devices.
• Reliable: systems must tolerate and recover from hardware, software and network failures.
• Secure: Systems are increasingly connected, and hence vulnerable to misuse and attack.

RS4 is a 1 day workshop that brings together academic and industrial researchers to outline both challenges and promising approaches.

The workshop is sponsored by SICSAand the MaRIONet Manycore Network, and is part of the 60th Anniversary of the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow.

Speaker: SICSA Event
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/research/gpg/RS4/ The era of many-core computing is transforming much of computing and areas like AI, sensor nets, IoT, and big data are just some examples. Many-core software systems have three main components: computation, i.e. the algorithms to be performed, data encoded in data structures and data stores, and communication between compute units: Software Systems = Computation + Data + Communication Such systems must resolve three inter-linked challenges in each of the components to be: Scalable: emergent computing platforms operate at unprecedented scale, with commodity servers already commonly comprising hundreds of hosts, tens of thousands of cores, and thousands of storage devices. Reliable: systems must tolerate and recover from hardware, software and network failures. Secure: Systems are increasingly connected, and hence vulnerable to misuse and attack. RS4 is a 1 day workshop that brings together academic and industrial researchers to outline both challenges and promising approaches. The workshop is sponsored by SICSA http://www.sicsa.ac.uk/ and the EPSRC MaRIONet Manycore Network, and is part of the 60th anniversary of the School of Computing Science, at the University of Glasgow Invited Speakers include: Alastair Reid, ARM: Security in The trusted computing base Michele Weiland, EPCC: Exascale Computing Alastair Murray, Codeplay Software: Safety-critical software David Irvine, Maidsafe: Security and Privacy of next-generation internet systems Presentations Sought If you would like to present at the workshop, please send a title and abstract to Inah Omoronyia Inah.Omoronyia@glasgow.ac.uk for approval by Friday 19th May 2017. Registration To facilitate catering, please register your intention to attend at https://doodle.com/poll/kgu8a2vrm3qfisxd by Friday 19th May 2017

Speaker: SICSA Event
The next meeting of the SICSA AI Theme will take place on Wednesday, August 30, 2017 at the Cottrell Building Room B3, University of Stirling. How do the many facets of learning in AI relate to each other? Many AI systems learn: the alternative (that the system arrives fully functional, just needing plugged into place) implies the development of systems of staggering complexity if they are to be deployed in the real world. But the adaptation or learning of systems takes many different forms. In the neural network arena, learning is associated with changing the strength of links between neurons (and sometimes with introduction and removal of neurons as well); it is about robots learning about their sensory systems, and learning about their environments; in Bayesian systems, learning is statistical, calculating the probability of hypotheses with support vector machines, learning is about learning a decision surface; in decision trees, it is about inducing an appropriate tree from examples; and there are many other types of learning in AI in other branches of the discipline. There is growing interest in this area, as evidenced by the DARPA call “Toward Machines that Improve with Experience”, see http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-03-16, The aim of this meeting is to seek connections between these different types of learning. At first sight many of them seem quite independent of each other, but are they? Invited Speakers: Ian Murray, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. David King, Computing and Mathematics, Abertay University (Other invited speakers to be advised We intend to have several other speakers as well as a poster session: we seek abstracts both for speakers and for poster presentations from both established researchers and PhD students. Abstracts: Posters: Posters can be from researchers at any level, from Undergraduate to Masters to PhD, to research fellows, to Academic staff. These should relate in some sense to the title of the meeting (How do the many facets of learning in AI relate to each other?). Poster contributors should email Professor Leslie Smith (mailto:l.s.smith@cs.stir.ac.uk), a brief abstract (< 250 words) either as a .pdf file or as plain text, before 24 August, and should also register for the meeting at Eventbrite Meeting Format: The meeting will start at 10.15 with coffee on arrival: there will be talks from the invited speakers, contributed talks, and a poster session. Please see the event programme for more information. We intend to organize some discussion groups in the afternoon to investigate possible areas of collaboration. The aim is to form some conclusions about novel relationships between learning in different aspects of AI as a result. The meeting will end about 16.00, probably adjourning to less formal premises to continue discussions. Please contact the SICSA AI Theme Leaders Professor Leslie Smith or Professor Emma Hart if you have any questions or alternatively register at the Eventbrite page now.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA HCI Research Theme Workshop: Register now at Eventbrite Digital Humanities is at the intersection of computing/digital technologies and the disciplines of the arts and humanities.Their goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from the extensive research base of both computing and the humanities across Scotland. These numerous world leading research groups often do not communicate about shared problems and solutions, and we aim to realise more of the potential for digital humanities research within Scotland to make it even more collaborative and successful. This workshop on digital humanities is sponsored by the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research theme. We have invited two Keynotes: Professor Lorna Hughes (University of Glasgow) and Professor Daniela Petrelli (Sheffield Hallam University), we will have a panel with industry and academic perspectives, and there will be plenty opportunities to network (with and without a Pint in hand). The meeting is organised by Frank Hopfgartner (University of Glasgow) and Martin Halvey (University of Strathclyde).

Speaker: Marc Deisenroth

Fully autonomous systems and robots have been a vision for many decades, but we are still far from practical realization. One of the fundamental challenges in fully autonomous systems and robots is learning from data directly without relying on any kind of intricate human knowledge. This requires data-driven statistical methods for modeling, predicting, and decision making, while taking uncertainty into account, e.g., due to measurement noise, sparse data or stochasticity in the environment. In my talk I will focus on machine learning methods for controlling autonomous robots, which pose an additional practical challenge: Data-efficiency, i.e., we need to be able to learn controllers in a few experiments since performing millions of experiments with robots is time consuming and wears out the hardware. To address this problem, current learning approaches typically require task-specific knowledge in form of expert demonstrations, pre-shaped policies, or the underlying dynamics. In the first part of the talk, I follow a different approach and speed up learning by efficiently extracting information from sparse data. In particular, I propose to learn a probabilistic, non-parametric Gaussian process dynamics model.By explicitly incorporating model uncertainty in long-term planning and controller learning my approach reduces the effects of model errors, a key problem in model-based learning. Compared to state-of-the art reinforcement learning our model-based policy search method achieves an unprecedented speed of learning, which makes is most promising for application to real systems. I demonstrate its applicability to autonomous learning from scratch on real robot and control tasks. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss an alternative method for learning controllers for bipedal locomotion based on Bayesian Optimization, where it is hard to learn models of the underlying dynamics due to ground contacts. Using Bayesian optimization, we sidestep this modeling issue and directly optimize the controller parameters without the need of modeling the robot's dynamics.

NOTE MEETING ROOM CHANGE - NOW IN SAWB 303 DUE TO DELAYS IN BUILDING WORK COMPLETION

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA Education is pleased to be sponsoring the forthcoming workshop, Peer Assessment in Group Work which is taking place on Monday 14 August 2017 at the University of Dundee With improved teaching efficiencies in institutions across Scotland, and reflecting industrial practice, an increasing number of student assignments are being completed within groups. While this allows students to build on their team working skills and gain valuable experience of working in a team environment, it provides challenges for educators in assessing group members on an individual level. This gives rise to issues of transparency, fairness and confidentiality for both students and educators. The purpose of this workshop is to understand current practices across Scotland for assessing group work. In particular, we are interested in the methods used to ensure that marks are allocated fairly within a group in order to reflect the contributions and abilities of the team members. This meeting will allow delegates to share and contribute to a discussion leading to a body of shared best practice. The schedule for the day is as follows: 10:00-10:30 Registration 10:30-10:45 Presentation from Organisers 10:45-11:00 Tea Break 11:00-12:00 Discussion - Sharing current practice 12:00-13:00 Lunch 13:00-14:00 Discussion - Generate best practice 14:00-14:45 Tea Break 14:45-15:45 Group Presentations 15:45-16:00 Wrap up If you wish to attend this workshop or require further information please visit the Eventbrite Page

Speaker: Yong Zheng

Context-awareness has been explored and applied in multiple areas, including ubiquitous computing, information retrieval and recommender systems. We may need to collect contexts in advance, so that the system can make changes by adapting to these dynamic situations. Obviously, it is much easier to collect these information from sensors in ubiquitous computing, but the process of context acquisition becomes one of the challenges in the Web applications. In this talk, we introduce the context-aware applications on the Web, especially based on the information retrieval and recommender systems. In addition, we highlight and discuss the context-driven applications that may influence the process of context collections, user interface and interactions, as well as relevant algorithms to support these novel applications.

Bio:

Dr. Yong Zheng obtained his PhD degree in Computer and Information Sciences from DePaul University, USA. Currently, he is a full-time senior lecturer at Illinois Institute of Technology, USA. His research lie in user modeling, behavior analysis, human factors (user emotions and personalities), context-awareness, multi-criteria decision making, educational learning, and recommender systems. Particularly, he is one of the experts in the context-aware recommender systems. And he served as a data science consultant at NPAW (Nice People At Work), Barcelona, Spain to help them build context-aware recommendation engines. He published more than two dozens of academic papers related to his research topics. He served as publicity chair at ACM RecSys 2018 and ACM IUI 2018. He organized multiple workshops related to recommender systems. And he was invited as PC members for a number of academic conferences, such as WWW, ACM RecSys, ACM UMAP, ACM IUI, etc

Speaker: SICSA Event
The SICSA PhD Conference 2017 will take place on 27 and 28 June at the University of Dundee. For the full programme, please visit www.sicsaconf.org. The PhD Conference has become one of the highlights of the SICSA Events calendar, bringing together Computing Science and Informatics PhD students, leading academics and industry practitioners for two days of workshops, keynote presentations and social evening event. The Conference is an event aimed specifically at Informatics and Computer Science PhD students from across Scotland and is organised each year by a committee of PhD students and members of the SICSA Executive. Keynote speakers this year will include one of Scotland’s leading entrepreneurs, Chris van der Kuyl; and Mandy Chessell, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Distinguished Engineer at IBM.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA Human Computing Interaction Research Theme Doctoral Consortium will take place on Monday 26th June (the day before the SICSA PhD Conference) at the University of Dundee. The SICSA HCI Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for doctoral students in Scotland to explore and develop their research interests in a friendly workshop guided by experienced SICSA researchers. The Doctoral Consortium will allow you to present your ideas and get feedback from a panel of experienced PhD supervisors and researchers, and the other students attending. This is a great way to get feedback on your work in a friendly and helpful environment before you complete your important thesis. Eligibility: All doctoral students in Scottish universities who work in an area covered by SICSA HCI are eligible to apply. We encourage applications from PhD students in all years of study but particularly those in their second or third year. Please note that you must have the support of your supervisor in applying to participate in the doctoral consortium. How to apply: Please send a single email with a subject heading of SICSA HCI DC to Nick Taylor (n.x.taylor@dundee.ac.uk) on or before 5pm on June 9th 2017. The email should contain the following in .doc or .pdf format: • A short CV (max 2 pages) • A description of your research (max of two pages of A4, with a minimum font size of 10 pt). This should include the main hypotheses/ research questions under investigation, and a description either of results obtained so far or of results expected in the near future. • A short letter of recommendation from your supervisor, explaining how you may benefit from the Doctoral Consortium. Important dates: Extended Deadline for application: June 16, 2017. Notification of acceptance: June 12, 2017. Date of SICSA HCI doctoral consortium: June 26, 2017. Chairs: Nick Taylor, University of Dundee Panel: Will be confirmed shortly

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA is pleased to welcome Professor Vijay Kumar from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA to Heriot Watt University, Colin Maclaurin Building, Room CMS.01 on Friday 23 June to talk about “A Security Shield for Medical Domain"” Abstract: Unlike non-medical data, the medical domain is relatively more vulnerable to security threats. Currently personal information such as social security number go for $35-$40 whereas a few bytes of patient medical record (PMR) go for $80-$100. Recently a number of hospitals in the USA and the UK were successfully hacked, some of which paid enormous amount of money to hackers to get their system back. This is one of the reasons cybersecurity has become a highly crowded research discipline. Note unlike non-medical data (resume, job history, salary, etc.), medical data is relatively omnipresent; in shopping mall, convenient stores, mobile hospitals, etc. In the USA, many convenient stores have urgent care or home treatment facilities, have dispensaries, etc. They deal with PMR (patient medical record) regularly and are easy target for hackers. They can mount software and hardware attack. The issues “can we ever manage to provide complete security to PMR?” In this seminar, we take up this challenge and discuss innovative software and hardware approaches to answer this question. We do not focus on a particular current research scheme, rather we talk about our approaches: hardware and software. The seminar will engage students, faculty and if possible medical professionals for a productive discussion. Bio: Professor Vijay Kumar is a Curators’ Distinguished Research Professor. Computer Science, University of Missouri-Kansas City, U.S.A. His research areas are (a) Data Dissemination through Wireless Channels, (b) Mobile Database Systems (MDS), (c) Sensor Technology, (d) Information security, (e) Cloud computing and (f) Medical Informatics. A number of these projects have been funded by grants from National Science Foundation, HP labs, Sprint, St Lukes Hospital research Foundations, etc. He has 100+ refereed publications in ACM TODS, IEEE TKDE, IEEE TMC, ACM Communications, and national and international conferences. He is the Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Next Generation Computing (IJNGC). He has written five books which have been published by John Wiley, Prentice Hall, and Kluwer. Prof. Kumar is a senior member of ACM and IEEE and ACM distinguished speaker. He has served as program chair, general chair, etc., on a number of ACM and IEEE international and national conferences. He has given a number of invited and keynote talks at various academic events (conferences, seminars, etc.) The host of this SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow is Professor Albert Burger, Heriot Watt University.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Professor Nasser Kehtarnavaz will be speaking about "Real-Time Human Action Recognition via Simultaneous Utilization of Depth Images and Inertial Signals" on Friday 23 June at 10am at the University of the West of Scotland, Paisley Campus (P118 Lecture Theatre). Abstract: It is established that there are recognition rate limitations when using a single modality sensor to perform human action or gesture recognition for human-computer interaction applications. The work presented in this talk addresses the simultaneous utilization of two cost-effective sensors that provide 3D data (a Microsoft Kinect depth camera and a wearable inertial sensor) for the purpose of achieving more robust human action or gesture recognition under realistic operating conditions. The use of computationally efficient features as well as computationally efficient classification and fusion approaches are discussed. Experimental results obtained indicate that the developed fusion framework generates higher recognition rates compared to the situations when each sensor is used individually. Moreover, an actual working action and gesture recognition system has been developed which runs in real-time on any modern laptop without using any dedicated hardware. The developed fusion system is also applied to a medical application called Senior Fitness Test. Bio: Nasser Kehtarnavaz is Erik Jonsson Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research areas include signal and image processing, real-time implementation on embedded processors, biomedical image analysis, and machine learning. He has authored or co-authored 10 books and more than 340 journal papers/conference papers/patents/industry manuals/editorials in these areas. He is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of SPIE, a Professional Engineer, and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Real-Time Image Processing. More information on Dr. Kehtarnavaz’s research and teaching activities are provided at http://www.utdallas.edu/~kehtar The host of this Distinguished Visiting Fellow is Dr Qi Wang, University of the West of Scotland

Speaker: Mireille Makary

In this talk, I will talk about my ongoing research and will present two different approaches I used to build relevance judgments (qrels) for TREC test collections without any human intervention. I will talk about an approach that involves using keyphrases extraction and another based on supervised machine learning techniques using Naïve Bayes and Support vector machines classifiers.

Bio: I am a PhD student at the University of Wolverhampton, Research Group in Computational Linguistics. My research area is in information retrieval. I am also a lecturer at Computer Science Department in the International University - Lebanon.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA is pleased to welcome Professor Vijay Kumar from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA to Edinburgh Napier University (Room G2) on Monday 19 June to talk about "Interactive Visualisation in the Medical Domain" Abstract: What we see is more informative than what we read or what we hear. We, therefore, like to visualize our perception of data, feeling, activity, anatomy, relationship, etc. We like to communicate or share information through visualization because it is efficient, relatively accurate and less verbose. Although visualization is highly useful for every field, it is essential for medical domain which sustains human life and its activities. Significant amount of work has been done on visualization, still we need to learn lot more to exploit its strength to manage activities of medical domain. One of the problems of visualization data (graphs) that we will discuss is their storage and access. If we use one node of a graph for a patient then there is likely to be around 10 billion nodes for all patients in USA. If every patient’s ailment is an edge then there will be lots and lots of edges. In this seminar we will investigate various aspects of medical domain such as PMR (patient medical record), data on human biology and physicians’ needs and explore how they can be managed (stored and access) for visualizing patients’ medical data with least latency with high accuracy. I will present a few ideas and together with the audience, we will try to learn what features of visualization would reveal additional information so that physicians could improve their diagnostic accuracy. This seminar will neither critically analyze recent visualization techniques nor develop new techniques. Rather, it will focus on defining new directions in visualization necessary to meet the challenges of today’s medical needs: diagnostics, patient treatment, imaging, etc. The seminar will engage students, faculty and if possible medical professionals for a productive discussion Bio: Professor Vijay Kumar is a Curators’ Distinguished Research Professor. Computer Science, University of Missouri-Kansas City, U.S.A. His research areas are (a) Data Dissemination through Wireless Channels, (b) Mobile Database Systems (MDS), (c) Sensor Technology, (d) Information security, (e) Cloud computing and (f) Medical Informatics. A number of these projects have been funded by grants from National Science Foundation, HP labs, Sprint, St Lukes Hospital research Foundations, etc. He has 100+ refereed publications in ACM TODS, IEEE TKDE, IEEE TMC, ACM Communications, and national and international conferences. He is the Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Next Generation Computing (IJNGC). He has written five books which have been published by John Wiley, Prentice Hall, and Kluwer. Prof. Kumar is a senior member of ACM and IEEE and ACM distinguished speaker. He has served as program chair, general chair, etc., on a number of ACM and IEEE international and national conferences. He has given a number of invited and keynote talks at various academic events (conferences, seminars, etc.) The host of this SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow is Professor Albert Burger, Heriot Watt University.  

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Professor Nasser Kehtarnavaz will be speaking about "Real-Time Human Action Recognition via Simultaneous Utilization of Depth Images and Inertial Signals" on Monday 19 June at 10am at Edinburgh Napier University (The Glass Room). Abstract: It is established that there are recognition rate limitations when using a single modality sensor to perform human action or gesture recognition for human-computer interaction applications. The work presented in this talk addresses the simultaneous utilization of two cost-effective sensors that provide 3D data (a Microsoft Kinect depth camera and a wearable inertial sensor) for the purpose of achieving more robust human action or gesture recognition under realistic operating conditions. The use of computationally efficient features as well as computationally efficient classification and fusion approaches are discussed. Experimental results obtained indicate that the developed fusion framework generates higher recognition rates compared to the situations when each sensor is used individually. Moreover, an actual working action and gesture recognition system has been developed which runs in real-time on any modern laptop without using any dedicated hardware. The developed fusion system is also applied to a medical application called Senior Fitness Test. Bio: Nasser Kehtarnavaz is Erik Jonsson Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research areas include signal and image processing, real-time implementation on embedded proc19 June 207essors, biomedical image analysis, and machine learning. He has authored or co-authored 10 books and more than 340 journal papers/conference papers/patents/industry manuals/editorials in these areas. He is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of SPIE, a Professional Engineer, and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Real-Time Image Processing. More information on Dr. Kehtarnavaz’s research and teaching activities are provided at http://www.utdallas.edu/~kehtar If you would like to attend this talk please register at the Eventbrite page The host of this Distinguished Visiting Fellow is Dr Qi Wang, University of the West of Scotland

Speaker: Alumni Day

60th Anniversary of Computing at Glasgow

In 1957, the University of Glasgow became the first University in Scotland to have an electronic computer. To mark the 60th Anniversary of this momentous occasion the School of Computing Science is inviting our alumni, students, staff, and industry partners to campus to celebrate. 

Please join us on 17th June, for an afternoon of talks and discussion, followed by a celebratory gala dinner in the evening. Keynote speakers include Prof Steve Furber, University of Manchester (“From ARMs to Brains”), and Prof Ursula Martin, University of Oxford (“Ada Lovelace: the programmer, the maths, and the fake news”), with talks about the history of computing in Glasgow from our own Dr Jeremy Singer, plus alumni and current staff. 

More information at http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/computing/60thanniversary/ or you can register for the Alumni Day via Eventbrite (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/60th-anniversary-of-computing-at-glasgow-tickets-33577511240). We hope to see you on 17th June!

Speaker: Cara Wilson (Queensland University of Technology)

Involving children with autism in the design of technologies can produce truly effective tools. However, much of the content used in such technologies is predefined by neuro-typical adult designers, and little research in HCI focuses on leveraging the child’s own strengths, interests and capabilities in order to support important competencies such as social interaction and self-expression. Further, much current research focuses on co-design with children with autism who are verbal, while their non-verbal peers are often excluded from the design process. We begin to investigate how practices from disciplines such as Speech and Language Therapy, and Education may be applicable to the co-design process with non-verbal children with autism. I will discuss our aims to make our co-design sessions truly child-led, moving towards design beyond words. I will present MyPortfolio, a suite of simple apps which aim to provide holistic, interest-based support for child, teacher and parent in autism-specific school settings. Following this brief talk, I’d like to open the topic to discussion, encouraging your opinions on design with children.

Cara Wilson is a PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology

Speaker: Professor Douglas W. Oard

In Europe today, people have a “right to be forgotten.”  Exercising that right requires identifying each Web page that a person wishes to have removed from a search engine’s index.  In Maryland today, people have no right to record what they hear in the course of a day without the consent of every person whom they hear.  The law provides that the penalty for doing so could be as much as a year in jail for the first offence.  In many jurisdictions today, citizens have a right to request information held by their government.  Government officials who seek to sift through that information to determine which parts are releasable sometimes take so long to do so that the public purpose for which the request was originally made simply cannot be served.  In this talk I will argue that each of these problems arises from the same cause: an almost complete lack of attention to building language technologies that can proactively protect sensitive content.  I will further claim that the language technology for performing these tasks is well within the present state of the art, but that we will need to co-evolve the design of our information systems with the legislative, regulatory and normative public policy frameworks within those new capabilities would be employed.  Finally, I will illustrate the considerations that arise by describing a new project in which we are seeking to integrate protection for sensitive content into a search engine that is designed to provide public access to collections in which sensitive and non-sensitive content are intermixed and unlabelled.  

About the Speaker:

Douglas Oard is a Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park (USA), with joint appointments there in the College of Information Studies (Maryland’s iSchool) and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).  Dr. Oard earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland.  His research interests center around the use of emerging technologies to support information seeking by end users.  Additional information is available at http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~oard/.

Speaker: Ornela Dardha

Multiparty Session Types (MPST) is a typing discipline for message-passing distributed processes that can ensure properties such as absence of communication errors and deadlocks, and protocol conformance. Can MPST provide a theoretical foundation for concurrent and distributed programming in “mainstream” languages? We address this problem by (1) developing the first encoding of a full-fledged multiparty session pi-calculus into linear pi-calculus, and (2) using the encoding as the foundation of a practical toolchain for safe multiparty programming in Scala.
Our encoding is type-preserving and operationally sound and complete. Crucially, it keeps the distributed choreographic nature of MPST, illuminating that the safety properties of multiparty sessions can be precisely represented with a decomposition into binary linear channels. Previous works have only studied the relation between (limited) multiparty and binary sessions via centralised orchestration means. We exploit these results to implement an automated generation of Scala APIs for multiparty sessions, abstracting existing libraries for binary communication channels. This allows multiparty systems to be safely implemented over binary message transports, as commonly found in practice. Our implementation is the first to support distributed multiparty delegation: our encoding yields it for free, via existing mechanisms for binary delegation.

Speaker: Dr Maja Matarić

To honour the pioneering work of Karen Spärck Jones, the BCS holds a distinguished lecture in her name each year, celebrating a prominent female computing researcher. This event is aimed at a wide general audience: we welcome all ages and levels of computing experience. This year’s lecture will be delivered by Dr Maja Matarić and will be streamed live from the School of Computing Science (hosted by the Athena Swan Committee), preceded by a public social robotics demo session.

Dr Maja Matarić is the Professor and Chan Soon-Shiong Chair of Computer Science, Neuroscience & Pediatrics; Founding Director at the USC's Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center; and Director of the USC's Robotics Research Lab.

She will speak about socially-assistive robotics, which is a new field of intelligent robotics that focuses on developing machines capable of assisting users through social rather than physical interaction.

 The live stream will take place in Sir Alexander Stone Room 208. There will be an introduction and networking drinks from 17:30, and then the lecture itself will begin at 18:00. Please register (for free!) at http://tinyurl.com/robots-that-care-glasgow to attend the lecture.

Speaker: Glasgow Social Robotics Group

In conjunction with the live stream of the BCSWomen Karen Spärck Jones Lecture 2017, the School of Computing Science Athena Swan Committee is hosting an open social robotics demo session. Come to the Atrium of the Wolfson Medical Building between 15:00 and 17:00 and meet the University's team of social robots!

This event is open to all, no registration required. Refreshments will be served.

To register for the live stream of the evening lecture, please go to tinyurl.com/robots-that-care-glasgow

Speaker: SICSA Event

Everyone with an interest in theorem proving and related forms of formal verification is warmly invited to the Scottish Theorem Proving seminar at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. This year we celebrate 20 years of Scottish Theorem Proving seminars (over 40 events). Therefore it is a great opportunity for the School of Computing Science to host the first seminar of 2017 to join the on-going celebration of the 60th anniversary of Computing in Glasgow.

Theorem proving research is notably strong in Scottish universities, with active groups and researchers in at least six departments. The Scottish Theorem Proving Seminar series provide a common venue for communication and sharing of ideas by all these researchers. At least once a year, one of the departments hosts an informal seminar for the whole Scottish theorem proving community. As well as theorem proving, other related fields are also represented, e.g. model checking and other forms of formal verification. This is a friendly venue for PhD students and RAs to discuss their work in progress and get feedback.

Registration: Attendance is free, but participants are asked to register by 18th of May on Eventbrite. Lunch, tea, coffee and celebratory cake will be provided.

Programme:

• 13:15 - 14:00 Lunch
• 14:00 - 14:40 Tom Melham (University of Oxford), Effective Validation of Low-Level Firmware — (invited talk)
• 14:40 - 15:20 Yue Li (Heriot-Watt University), Productive Corecursion in Logic Programming
• 15:20 - 15:40 Coffee break
• 15:40 - 16:20 Chris Warburton (University of Dundee), Quantitative Benchmarks for Theory Exploration
• 16:20 - 17:00 Oana Andrei (University of Glasgow), Machine Learning and Probabilistic Model Checking for Interactive Systems

Chairs: Oana Andrei and Alice Miller

More details can be found at: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~oandrei/STP17/

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA is sponsoring the Scottish Theorem Proving 2017 which is taking place on Friday 19th May 2017 at School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Everyone with an interest in theorem proving and related forms of formal verification is warmly invited to the Scottish Theorem Proving seminar at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. This year we celebrate 20 years of Scottish Theorem Proving seminars (over 40 events). Therefore it is a great opportunity for the School of Computing Science to host the first seminar of 2017 to join the on-going celebration of the 60th anniversary of Computing in Glasgow. Summary: Theorem proving research is notably strong in Scottish universities, with active groups and researchers in at least six departments. The Scottish Theorem Proving Seminar series provide a common venue for communication and sharing of ideas by all these researchers. At least once a year, one of the departments hosts an informal seminar for the whole Scottish theorem proving community. As well as theorem proving, other related fields are also represented, e.g. model checking and other forms of formal verification. This is a friendly venue for PhD students and RAs to discuss their work in progress and get feedback. The usual format is to have three or four talks in an afternoon session, starting around 14:00 and finishing by 17:00. Lunch will be provided from 13:15 and later in the afternoon there will be cake during the coffee break. Call for contributions: We invite contributions on all aspects of theorem proving and related forms of formal verification. If you would like to give a talk, please get in touch with Oana Andrei oana.andrei@glasgow.ac.uk by 5th May 2017. Provisional schedule: 13:15 - 14:00 Lunch 14:00 - 14:40 Tom Melham (University of Oxford), title TBC 14:40 - 15:20 Yue Li (Heriot-Watt University), Co-inductive Structural Resolution 15:20 - 15:40 Coffee break 15:40 - 16:20 TBA 16:20 - 17:00 TBA Co-chairs: Oana Andrei (oana.andrei@glasgow.ac.uk) and Alice Miller (alice.miller@glasgow.ac.uk) — please direct any enquired to Oana. Website: More details can be found at the Scottish Theorem Proving web-page. Registration: Attendance is free, but participants are asked to register by 10th of May at the Eventbrite page in order to help with catering arrangements. Lunch, tea and coffee will be provided.

Speaker: Bjørn Sand Jensen

We will have a look at Edward (http://edwardlib.org/), a probabilistic modelling, programming and inference library which interfaces directly with Tensorflow. We will attempt to implement, train and evaluate a discriminative model (supervised Bayesian neural network) and an unsupervised generative model (variational auto-encoder and/or adversarial model). 

Background:

Deep Probabilistic Programming, Tran et al, https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.03757

Supervised Bayesian network: http://edwardlib.org/tutorials/bayesian-neural-network (including reference).

Variationally auto-encoder: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05908 (tutorial)

(Tentative: f-GAN - Training Generative Neural Samplers using Variational Divergence Minimization , https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00709 )

Code:

A self-contained Jupyter notebook be provided before the meeting based on extended examples from http://edwardlib.org/tutorials/.

Speaker: Gorry Fairhurst

Abstract:

Active Queue Management (AQM) with Explicit Congestion Notification  (ECN) has been deployed in cloud data centres to minimise the latency  and improve the near real-time deadlines for workflows such as  Partition/Aggregate tasks. The talk explores how ECN can also reduce  latency of transactional applications using the Internet. This leads to  a simple sender-side change to TCP, “Alternative Backoff with ECN”, and  how this can offer a compelling reason to deploy and enable ECN across  the Internet. It finally outlines the path to standarisation and how  future research can enable new applications.

Bio: 

Gorry Fairhurst is a Professor in the School of Engineering at the University of Aberdeen. His current research include performance evaluation and protocol design, Internet transport architecture, rural broadband access and satellite networking. He has 20 years experience working as an Internet Engineer, and is committed to open Internet standards and chairs the IETF’s Transport and Services Working Group (TSVWG).

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA Cyber Security Research Them is pleased to be sponsoring the Poster Competition for Women in Cyber Security (PCWiCS)-2017: “The Truth About Cyber Security in 7 Words”, on 10 May at the Cyber Academy and is being held in conjunction with the International Conference of Big data in Cyber Security. The competition aims to inspire women into cybersecurity roles by bringing together the cyber women from across the UK in the form of a poster competition. The event will be held in collaboration with Edinburgh Napier University, The Cyber Academy and SICSA on the 10th of May 2017 and in parallel with The International Conference of Big Data in Cyber Security. Having PCWiCS-2017 held in parallel with this conference, will assist women in cyber security to understand the demands for cyber security/digital forensics in different organisations. This event not only connects women in cyber security to leading industrial experts but also provides for greater collaboration amongst universities and leading industries. We hope that the delegates will engage with industrial contacts for future partnerships and research-based industrial collaborations. The free cost of the event makes it an affordable home-based conference in Scotland. All interested “female” from academia and industry are invited to submit their work on cyber security and digital forensics to PCWiCS-2017. Full details and important dates can be found at the PCWiCS web-site If you would like more information on this event please contact Naghmeh Moradpoor

Speaker: Alexander Hallgren

Controlling robotic agents requires complex control methods. This study aims to take advantage of emergent behaviours to reduce the amount of complexity. Cellular automata (CA) are employed as a means to generate emergent behaviour at low computational cost. A novel architecture is developed based on subsumption architecture, which uses an agent-local CA to influences the selection of a behaviour. The architecture is tested by measuring the time it takes the robot to navigate through a maze. 2 different models are used to evaluate the system. The results indicate that the current configuration is ineffective, but a number of task are proposed as future work.

Speaker: Arijus Pleska

In this paper, we target a data modelling approach used in computational metabolomics; to be specic, we assess whether spatial smoothing improves the topic term and noise identification. By assessing mass spectrometry imaging data, we design an enhancement for latent Dirichlet allocation-based topic models. For both data pre-processing and topic model design, we survey relevant research. Further, we present the proposed methodology in detail providing the prelimi- naries and guiding through the performed topic model en hancements. To assess the performance, we evaluate the spatial smoothing application on a number

Speaker: Piotr Ozimek

Speaker: Iulia Popescu

In this talk, I will present my Level 5 (MSci) project which explored how users react and what they feel when they are exposed to different types of stimuli (visual, auditory). This study aimed to understand how short-term stressors impact individuals’ behaviour when they need to complete a task in a multi-modal interaction context (e.g. searching for a flight using graphical and spoken dialogue interfaces). Additionally, I will give an overview about the data set which has been delivered as part of this project and how it can be used for further research.

Speaker: Rhys Simpson

Visually removing objects from a video feed is difficult to perform in real-time, as existing solutions rely on expensive patch lookups and specific environment conditions to produce meaningful results. Results are also guessed from the image surrounding the object, usually making them physically inaccurate and visually displeasing. Recent advances in hardware and software are pushing businesses to make large investments into Augmented Reality, including furniture catalogue applications, which could greatly benefit if existing objects could be visually removed from the video feed in real-time. This paper demonstrates a novel approach where instead of painting frames in an entirely 2D context, a 3D room mesh is captured, tracked and selectively rendered to paint geometry that was behind the object over it. The object's mask, and filled textures covering the planes the object was in contact with are also sourced and tracked from this mesh. Our approach works for a broad range of objects in typical indoors scenes, where target objects are separate and against large wall and floor planes. We show that our algorithm produces much better results per frame than object removal using traditional 2D inpainting, at an interactive framerate, and demonstrate that temporal incoherence between subsequent video frames is also eliminated.

Speaker: Dr Sebastian Nowozin

An important problem in achieving general artificial intelligence is the data-efficient learning of representations suitable for causal reasoning, planning, and decision making.  Learning such representations from unsupervised data is challenging and requires flexible models to discover the underlying manifold of high-dimensional data.  Recently three new classes of unsupervised learning approaches based on deep learning have enabled major progress towards large-scale unsupervised learning: generative adversarial networks (GAN), variational autoencoders (VAE), and approaches based on integral probability metrics (IPM).

I will provide an overview of these methods, research contributions by my group, and the main open research questions around this new class of learning methods.

Speaker: Michel Steuwer & Juan Fumero

Computer systems are increasingly featuring powerful parallel devices with the advent of many-core CPUs and GPUs. This offers the opportunity to solve computationally-intensive problems at a fraction of the time traditional CPUs need. However, exploiting heterogeneous hardware requires the use of low-level programming language approaches such as OpenCL, which is incredibly challenging, even for advanced programmers.

On the application side, interpreted dynamic languages are increasingly becoming popular in many domains due to their simplicity, expressiveness and flexibility. However, this creates a wide gap between the high-level abstractions offered to programmers and the low-level hardware-specific interface. Currently, programmers must rely on high performance libraries or they are forced to write parts of their application in a low-level language like OpenCL. Ideally, nonexpert programmers should be able to exploit heterogeneous hardware directly from their interpreted dynamic languages.

In this talk, we present a technique to transparently and automatically offload computations from interpreted dynamic languages to heterogeneous devices. Using just-in-time compilation, we automatically generate OpenCL code at runtime which is specialized to the actual observed data types using profiling information. We demonstrate our technique using R, which is a popular interpreted dynamic language predominately used in big data analytic. Our experimental results show the execution on a GPU yields speedups of over 150x compared to the sequential R implementation and the obtained performance is competitive with manually written GPU code. We also show that when taking into account start-up time, large speedups are achievable, even when the applications run for as little as a few seconds.

Speaker: Tim Storer

Socio-technical systems model the structure and interactions of
heterogeneous collections of actors, including human operators,
technical artefacts and organisations.  Such systems are characterised
by the interactions of actors at different scales of activity and behave
according to a complex interplay of factors, including formally defined
business processes, legal or regulatory standards, technological
evolution, organisational culture or norms and interpersonal
relationships and responsibilities.  The modelling and engineering of
such systems is still very much a a craft, requiring repeated trial,
error and subsequent revision.  Application of conventional systems
modelling methods is difficult, because socio-technical systems are not
readily disposed to functional decomposition, as the complex
interactions between components makes a separation of concerns
difficult.   As a consequence, existing techniques result in models that
either lack sufficient detail to capture the  effect of subtle
contingencies; are too narrow to make useful assessments about the
larger system; are unable to
 capture evolution in behaviours; or are so complex that analysis and
interpretation becomes intractable.

In this work, I will present a novel method for modelling
socio-technical systems that substantially reduces the difficulty of
simulating complex contingent behaviours.  In our approach, informal,
contingent behaviours are modelled as aspects that can be applied
obliviously to alter actor behaviour described in idealised workflows.
The aspects apply code fuzzers to the workflow descriptions, adjusting
the flow of execution of a workflow and representing the variability
that can occur in real life systems.  I will present a proof of concept
tool, Fuzzi Moss, and evaluate the approach using a case study of
software development workflows.

Speaker: SICSA Event
This year's SICSA pre-CHI day will be hosted by the University of Dundee on 27th April The SICSA pre-CHI day is a great opportunity to hear about the latest internationally-leading Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research being carried out at Scottish universities. All papers presented at the event have been accepted for CHI 2017 in Denver, USA. There will also be opportunities to network with colleagues working in HCI from across Scotland over lunch and coffee. SICSA will provide lunch and afternoon coffee, so bring your morning coffee with you. The timings for the day are as follows: 10:00 - 10:15: Arrival and Registration 10:15 - 10:30: Opening address 10:30 - 10:50: Social Printers: A Physical Social Network for Political Debate 10:50 - 11:10: A Framework for Speechreading Acquisition Tools 11:10 - 11:30: Investigating Tilt-based Gesture Keyboard Entry for Single Handed Text Entry on Large Devises 11:30 - 11:40: Break 11:40 - 12:00: Bottom-up vs. Top-down: Trade-offs in Efficiency, Understanding. Freedom and Creativity with InfoVis Tools 12:00- 12:20: Multi-moji: Combining Thermal, Vibrotactile & Visual Stimuli to Expand the Affective Range of Feedback 12:20 - 12:40: Transistions in digital personhood: Online activity in early retirement 12:40 - 13:50: Audible Beacons and Wearables in Schools: Helping Young Visually Impaired Children Play and Move Independently 13:50 - 14:00: An Evaluation of Input Controls for In-Car Interactions 14:00 - 14:20: ForgetMeNot: Active Reminder Entry Support for Adults with Acquired Brain Injury 14:20 - 14:30: Tangible Educational Toys for Children with Type-1 Diabetes 14:30 - 14:50: Understanding Public Evaluation: Quantifying Experimenter Intervention. 14:50 - 15:20 - Coffee Break 15:20 - 15:40: Understanding Concept Maps: A Closer Look at How People Organise Ideas 15:40 - 15:50: Was my message read? Privacy and Signaling on Facebook Messenger 15:50 - 16:00: Workshop paper. Beyond Accessibility: Lifting Perceptual Limitations for Everyone 16:00 - 16:20: Designing Game-Based Myoelectric Prosthesis Training 16:40 - 17:00: Wrap Up The full schedule can be accessed here: SICSA Pre-CHI 2017 Schedule Register to attend the SICSA pre-CHI day at https://goo.gl/forms/U8ps1bpJxevdhxFv2 Please contact Wendy Moncur or David Flatla if you have any questions.  

Speaker: Nick Brown

The Epiphany is a many-core, low power, low on-chip memory co-processor typical of a number of innovative micro-core architectures. The very low power nature of these architectures means that there is potential for their use in future HPC machines, and their low cost makes them ideal for HPC education & prototyping. However there is a high barrier to entry in programming due to the associated complexities and immaturity of supporting tools.

I will talk about ePython, a subset of Python for the Epiphany. Due to the idiosyncrasies of the hardware we have developed a new Python interpreter and this, combined with additional support for parallelism, has meant that novices can take advantage of Python to very quickly write parallel codes on the Epiphany and easily prototype their codes. In addition to running codes directly we have developed support for decorating kernels in existing Python codes and for these to be seamlessly offloaded, via ePython, to the Epiphany. I will discuss a prototype machine learning code for detecting lung cancer in 3D CT scans, where our decorators are used to offload the neural network onto the Epiphany in order to evaluate whether this technology is appropriate for these sorts of codes and what sort of performance once can expect.

Speaker: SICSA Event
The Networking & Systems SICSA Research Theme is pleased to be sponsoring the SCOttish Networking Event (SCONE) which is taking place on Wednesday 26th April 2017 at the University of St Andrews. SCONE is the SCOttish Networking Event - an informal gathering of networking and systems researchers in and around Scotland. The goal of these meetings is to foster interaction between researchers from our various institutions. Each meeting will take place over the course of an afternoon, and feature: talks from PhD students talks from faculty, postdocs and industrial researchers discussions of possible funding opportunities food and drink We meet 2-3 times a year. For more information please see the SCONE Web-site http://scone.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/wiki/Meeting26042017

Speaker: Walaa Alayed

The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) rely on the use of external Objective Functions for selecting the best path, where the majority of OFs are based on a single routing metric. In this talk I’ll be presenting an Analytic Hierarchy Process Objective Function (AHP-OF) inspired by multi-criteria decision making techniques.  The idea of AHP-OF is to combine several routing metrics by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique to provide a better neighbour selection compared to existing OFs. The motivation of designing AHP-OF is to satisfy the different application requirements for Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLN) such as reliable, real time and highly available applications.

Speaker: Carlos Castillo

Social media is an invaluable source of time-critical information during a crisis. However, emergency response and humanitarian relief organizations that would like to use this information struggle with an avalanche of social media messages, exceeding their capacity to process them. In this talk, we will look at how interdisciplinary research has enabled the creation of new tools for emergency managers, decision makers, and affected communities. These tools typically incorporate a combination of automatic processing and crowdsourcing. The talk will also look at ethical issues of this line of research.

http://bigcrisisdata.org/

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA Research Theme Theory Modelling & Computation is sponsoring the Scottish Combinatorics Meeting which is being held at the University of St Andrews on 24 & 25 April Everyone with an interest in combinatorics and its applications is warmly invited to the Third Scottish Combinatorics Meeting, at the University of St Andrews. This year's meeting is run in conjunction with the British Colloquium for Theoretical Computer Science (to be held in St Andrews immediately following SCM). The invited speakers are: Rosemary Bailey (St Andrews) David Bevan (Strathclyde) Simon Blackburn (Royal Holloway, University of London) Robert Brignall (The Open University) Anders Claesson (University of Iceland, Reykjavik) Max Gadouleau (Durham) Kitty Meeks (Glasgow) Maura Paterson (Birkbeck, University of London) Attendance at the meeting is FREE, but participants are asked to register by 31st March 2017 (by emailing one of the organisers) in order to help with catering arrangements. Tea, coffee and light lunch will be provided on both days. Dinner will be arranged at a local restaurant for the evening of Monday 24th. If you would like to participate please let us know (preferably at time of registration). The meeting will be held in Lecture Theatre B of the Mathematical Institute of the University of St Andrews. Information on how to get to the venue can be found here. In addition to the invited talks, there will be an opportunity for research students and junior researchers to give short presentations on their work: more details here. A provisional schedule will be available in due course. More information can be found on the web-site: http://turnbull.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/~nik/scm/ We look forward to welcoming you in St Andrews.

Speaker: Daniel Buschek

We present ProbUI, a mobile touch GUI framework that merges ease of use of declarative gesture definition with the benefits of probabilistic reasoning. It helps developers to handle uncertain input and implement feedback and GUI adaptations. ProbUI replaces today's static target models (bounding boxes) with probabilistic gestures ("bounding behaviours"). It is the first touch GUI framework to unite concepts from three areas of related work: 1) Developers declaratively define touch behaviours for GUI targets. As a key insight, the declarations imply simple probabilistic models (HMMs with 2D Gaussian emissions). 2) ProbUI derives these models automatically to evaluate users' touch sequences. 3) It then infers intended behaviour and target. Developers bind callbacks to gesture progress, completion, and other conditions. We show ProbUI's value by implementing existing and novel widgets, and report developer feedback from a survey and a lab study.

Speaker: Dr. Sara J. Fernstad

Abstract:

Missing data are records that are absent from a data set. They are data that were intended to be recorded, but for some reason were not. Missing data occur in almost any domain and is a common data analysis challenge that causes problems such as biased results and reduced statistical rigour. Although data visualization has great potential to provide invaluable support for the investigation of missing data, missing data challenges are rarely addressed by the visualization society. This talk will cover various concepts and aspects in missing data analysis, suggesting patterns of relevance for gaining further understanding of ‘missingness’ in datasets and present the result of an evaluation of different visual representations of missing data. It will also suggest some directions for designing visualization to support the understanding of ‘missingness’ in data.

Biography: Dr Sara Johansson Fernstad

Sara received a PhD in Visualization and Interaction from Linköping University (Sweden) in 2011. She will take up a lectureship at the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University in May 2017, and has since 2014 held a lectureship at the Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences at University of Northumbria. Between 2011 and 2014 she carried out post-doctoral research at Unilever R&D Port Sunlight, and at Cambridge University. Her main research focuses on Information Visualization, with particular interest in visualization of high dimensional data, heterogeneous data and incomplete data, and the application of visualization approaches in analysis of ‘Omics type data.

Speaker: SICSA Event
Please join CENSIS and SICSA for an’ IoT meets cyber security’ workshop which is taking place on Thursday 20 April at the University of Edinburgh About the Event With the rapid growth in IoT devices, services and interconnectivity and more sophisticated cyber attacks on networks and infrastructure we are facing a range a challenges. The recent botnet attacks on Dyn, the Domain Name System (DNS) provider, brought down sites such as Reddit, Netflix and Twitter; an attack that highlights how vulnerable the Internet of Things can be when it meets cyber. This event will explore the best practice for protecting IoT devices and services across a range of industries and the potential for innovation opportunities in IoT cyber security. Provisional agenda The event includes a presentations by expert speakers from academia, industry and government combined with lively debate and networking. 09:30-10:00 - Registration and networking 10:00-10:15 - Introduction and welcome; Dr Mike Just, Associate Professor, Heriot-Watt University 10:15-10:40 - IoT markets and applications; Dr Stephen Milne, Business Development Manager, CENSIS 10:40-11:05 - From smart contracts to distributed autonomous Things; Prof Chris Speed, Chair of Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh 11:05-11:30 - Cyber resilience; Prof Chris Johnson, Head of Computing Science, University of Glasgow 11:30-12:00 - Can we make IoT secure enough for humans?; Prof Angela Sasse, Professor of Human Centres Technology, University College London 12:00-13:00 Lunch and networking 13.00-13:30 - Securing and managing IoT devices and systems; Dr John Goodenough, ARM 13:30-14:15 - IoT vulnerabilities – side channels, backdoors and bad design: the latest research and a practical demonstration; Prof Bill Buchanan, Edinburgh Napier University 14:15-14:30 - Summary outputs and project support mechanism 14:30 Coffee and continued networking 16:00 Event closes Who should attend? This event is suitable to government agencies, universities and companies of all sizes with an interest in the security side of IoT products, devices or services. The event is not aimed at an undergraduate audience but is open to postgraduate students provided they are conducting work in IoT or cyber security. Further information Please visit the Eventbrite page to register for the event.

Speaker: SICSA Event
The Biological Visualisation Community's 3rd BiVi Annual Meeting takes place in Edinburgh on 20th-21st April 2017. This two day meeting comprises one day with 3 keynote talks, 7 talks on biological data visualisation as well as opportunities for lightning talks, posters and demos, with a second day of hands on training workshops. The talks and training include visualisation across the whole spectrum of biological data types from Œomic sequence based data through cells and tissues to whole organism physiology. This is a meeting of interest to anybody working in biomedical science as well as developers of visualisation techniques. The keynote speakers are: - Jean-luc Doumont: The Three Laws of Communication - Marc Streit: From Visual Exploration of Biomedical Data to Storytelling and Back Again - Bang Wong: Art and Science: A partnership catalyzing discovery in biomedicine SICSA members can register at: http://store.napier.ac.uk/product-catalogue/school-of-computing/bivi/3rd-bivi-annual-meeting-sicsa-member More details can be found at http://bivi.co/event/3rd-bivi-annual-meeting. If you have any questions please contact:info@bivi.co

Speaker: Prof. Des Higham

Many applications require us to summarize key properties of a large, complex network. I will focus on the task of quantifying the relative importance, or "centrality" of the network nodes. This task is routinely performed, for example, on networks arising in biology, security, social science and telecommunication. To derive suitable algorithms, the concept of a walk around the network has proved useful; through either the dynamics of random walks or the combinatorics of deterministic walks.

In this talk I will argue that some types of walk are less relevant than others. In particular, eliminating backtracking walks leads to new network centrality measures with attractive properties and, perhaps surprisingly, reduced computational cost. Defining, analysing and implementing these new methods combines ideas from graph theory, matrix polynomial theory and sparse matrix computations.

Speaker: Alexandra Stan, Iva Babukova, Kyle Simpson

The second hour will take place in room F121

Speaker: Dr. Andrés Lucero

Abstract: Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets were originally conceived and have traditionally been utilized for individual use. Research on mobile collocated interactions has explored situations in which collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their mobile devices, thus going from personal/individual toward shared/multiuser experiences and interactions. The Social and Spatial Interactions(SSI) platform extends the current individual use of these devices to support shared collocated interactions with mobile phones. The platform supports shared collocated interactions, using the mobile phone as a physical interface and a sensor network built in the phone to track the position of the phones on a flat surface. The question the platform addresses is if people are willing to share their devices and engage in collaborative interactions. In this talk I will discuss the different methods used to create playful and engaging interactions in the context of the SSI project.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA Research Challenge Next Generation Mixed Reality Systems is organising a workshop on Tuesday 1 April at the University of Glasgow Workshop scope: Mixed-Reality systems allow the merger of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments in which physical and digital objects coexist and interact in real time. Events take place in a mix of reality and virtual reality, and physical location may affect virtual capability and vice versa. Head-up-displays (e.g., BMW augmented-reality windshield, Eurofighter Typhoon cockpit) and head-mounted-displays (e.g., Microsoft Hololens, Oculus Rift, Google Glass) are rapidly being integrated with and even replacing traditional computer and mobile phone displays. Moreover, these new devices are portable or, in some cases, wearable and are equipped with positioning systems such as GPS or Bluetooth. Application areas of mixed-reality systems play an increasing societal and economic role: these range from remote surgery, to wildlife conservation, from entertainment to education. Several issues and difficulties have emerged with the development and usage of early systems: wrong assumptions about spatial context, incompleteness in the design and security/privacy issues, probabilistic aspects (e.g., GPS drift, human behaviour). This workshop aims to bring together leading academics and industry stakeholders to identify and discuss in a friendly and informal setting the most pressing questions posed by the widespread deployment of Mixed-Reality systems. Call for speakers We invite contributions on all aspects of Mixed-Reality systems, including but not limited to: ● New mathematical frameworks to formally reason about Mixed-Reality systems with particular focus on contextual behaviours, human interactions, sensing and mobile devices. ● Discussions on the most pressing questions posed by the widespread deployment of Mixed-Reality systems. ● Modelling and analysis techniques for Mixed-Reality systems, limitations and exploration of future research directions with emphasis on IoT infrastructure, security and adaptive behaviours. ● Analysis of probabilistic and quantitative aspects. ● Case studies “in the wild”. Please get directly in touch with the Research Challenge Leader Dr Michele Sevegnani (Michele.Sevegnani@glasgow.ac.uk) by April 5 at 17:00. Travel grants for students Travel grants for students at Scottish institutions are available.  

Speaker: SICSA Event
The SICSA Theory, Modelling & Computation Research Theme is pleased to be sponsoring the Algebra and Coalgebra meet Proof Theory (ALCOP) VIII on 10 - 12 April at the University of Strathclyde About ALCOP The workshop Algebra and Coalgebra meet Proof Theory (ALCOP) brings together experts in algebraic logic, coalgebraic logic and proof theory to share new results and to strengthen the relationships between these fields. The MSP Group at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow) will host the eighth edition of this workshop. Previous editions of ALCOP where held in Vienna (2016), Delft (2015), London (2014), Utrecht (2013), Prague (2012), Bern (2011), and London (2010).   Confirmed Speakers: Neil Ghani (Strathclyde) Sam van Gool (New York) Helle Hvid Hansen (Delft) Ekaterina Komendantskaya (Heriot-Watt University) Mark V Lawson (Heriot-Watt University) Thomas Lukasiewicz (Oxford) Filip Murlak (Warsaw) Daniela Petrisan (Paris) Jan Rutten (CWI Amsterdam/Nijmegen) Registration Registration is now open! Register here: http://onlineshop.strath.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/science-faculty/computer-and-information-science/alcop-2017 For more information on ALCOP VIII please see he web-page: https://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/clemens.kupke/ALCOP2017/

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA is pleased to be sponsoring the 39th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017) which is taking place at Robert Gordon University and the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre (AECC) from 8 - 13 April 2017 The 39th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) will be held in Aberdeen, Scotland from April 8-13, 2017. ECIR is the premier European research conference for the presentation of new results in the field of information retrieval (IR). ECIR 2017 has aimed to be inclusive of researchers stretching from the Northwest of Europe such as Scotland and Scandinavia, to Southeast on Eurasian boundary with Turkey. The programme now includes a new Doctoral Consortium for enabling wider student participation. To enable further opportunities for networking and social activities, we have provided the options of short trips to castles and distilleries nearby upon request. Outline programme Keynote Speakers confirmed: Laura Dietz (University of New Hampshire) - Retrieving knowledge from the Web Alexander Hauptmann (Carnegie Mellon University) - title TBC Jaime Teevan (Microsoft Research) - Search, Re-Search The schedule is as follows: Saturday 8th April 2017: Doctoral Consortium, Student and DC Panel, Welcome Sunday 9th April 2017: Workshops & Tutorials Monday 10th April 2017: Conference, Posters, Demo Session & Welcome Reception Tuesday 11th April 2017: Conference, Conference banquet Wednesday 12th April 2017: Conference, Reception/Welcome Industry Day Thursday 13th April 2017: Industry Day Registration is open and free SICSA student places are still available. For more information please see the ECIR 2017 Web-site

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Dr. Hagen Lehmann, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, iCub Facility will be giving a talk at the University of Glasgow on 6 April 2017 on: "Social interaction characteristics for social acceptable robots" The last decade has seen fast advances in Social Robotic Technology. Social Robots start to be successfully used as robot companions and as therapeutic aids. In both of these cases the robots need to be able to interact intuitively and comfortably with their human users in close physical proximity. In order to achieve a seamless interaction and communication these robots need to coordinate different aspects of their behaviors with their human interlocutors. This behavior coordination of non-verbal and verbal interaction cues requires that the robots can interpret the social behavior of the other and react accordingly. In this talk different ways to (socially) coordinate human and robot behavior will be discussed and illustrated with examples from recent Human-Robot Interaction research. Bio: Dr. Lehmann is a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher in the iCub Facility at the Italian Institute of Technology, where he develops the SICSAR project, dedg icated to generate and test social interaction behaviors for the iCub robot. Dr. Lehmann received his Diploma in Psychology from the Technical University Dresden, his MA degree in Psychology at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bath. In these years he has worked, from different interdisciplinary perspectives, on Evolution and Social Cognition, examining in particular possible reasons for the evolution of social structures in primates, the role of social dominance in this process, and social gaze behavior and its role in human social evolution. His current work is devoted to the application of this knowledge to the fields of Human-Robot Interaction and Social Robotics, through experimental research and with a particular focus on Robot Assisted Therapy and robotic home companions. Before his work at the IIT, he was part of the Adaptive Systems Research Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire, where he was involved in different European project, e.g. iTALK, and ACCOMPANY If you would like to attend this masterclass please contact Dr Frank Broz who is hosting Dr Lehmann

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA Data Science Research Theme is pleased to be sponsored the Information Retrieval Festival on 6 - 8 April at the University of Glasgow A festival of information retrieval held in Glasgow before ECIR 2017, and a bus "Tour de Scotland" en route to Aberdeen. Agenda is as follows: Thursday 6th April: Evening Meal Friday 7th April: Invited talks and Posters Saturday 8th April: Bus "Tour de Scotland" to Aberdeen, via a whisky distillery. Keynotes: Jaana Kekalainen, University of Tampere: Realistic Interactive IR Experiments & Simulation Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam: IR + AI Industry Speaker Noreen Adams, BBC: Digital Archives at the BBC Stuart Miller, Verint: Information Retrieval for Knowledge Management in a changing world Ludovico Boratto, Eurecat: Balancing Individual and Group Satisfaction in the Evaluation of Group Recommender Systems Short Talks Frank Hopfgartner, University of Glasgow: Catching up with Industry - Online Evaluation of Information Access Diane Pennington, University of Glasgow: Making Emotional Information Retrieval a Reality Ingo Frommholz, University of Bedfordshire: Mind the Gap! Bibliometric-Enhanced Information Retrieval for Scholars’ Complex Information Needs Haiming Liu, University of Bedfordshire: Quick Idea Generation Using Positive Emotion Activity in Interactive Information Retrieval Leif Azzopardi, University of Strathclyde: Technologically Assisted Reviews in Empirical Medicine ... and others to be confirmed! If you would like to attend this event, please register at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/information-retrieval-festival-irfest-2017-tickets-32060134726

Speaker: Luminita Manuela Bujorianu

Abstract: Cyber-physical systems represent an evolving paradigm promoting a holistic view on engineered systems. The holistic view makes the formal verification look like a restrictive or specialised approach. In this way, a research challenge appears: How to leverage formal verification to cope with the holistic character of cyber-physical systems?

The holistic aspects include: emergent behaviours, complex faults (like hybrid discrete continuous), severe uncertainty, rich interactions, interdependence of critical components, potential disasters due to climate change.

In this talk, we will discuss about hyper-verification of cyber-physical systems and sketch the fundamentals of a suitable formal framework to investigate it. 

Bio: Manuela L Bujorianu (PhD in computer science, BSc in Mathematics) is a Research Fellow with Maritime Safety Research Centre, Department of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Marine Engineering, University of Strathclyde. Before she was affiliated with several universities: Leicester, Warwick, Manchester, Twente, Cambridge and Stirling.

Manuela’s research is at the border between computer science, applied mathematics, and systems engineering bridged by probability theory and statistics. The major focus is on modelling and analysis of complex systems. The considered application areas are: cyber-physical systems (maritime safety, air traffic management, intelligent transportation systems), complex systems (financial /social systems, swarms, complex networks), probabilistic risk assessment, resilience of critical infrastructures. A unique feature of Manuela publication record is that she published at the top conferences and journals in control engineering, computer science, and mathematics. She has single authored a monograph at Springer Verlag.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Dr. Hagen Lehmann, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, iCub Facility will be giving a talk at the University of St Andrews on 3 April on: "Social interaction characteristics for social acceptable robots" The last decade has seen fast advances in Social Robotic Technology. Social Robots start to be successfully used as robot companions and as therapeutic aids. In both of these cases the robots need to be able to interact intuitively and comfortably with their human users in close physical proximity. In order to achieve a seamless interaction and communication these robots need to coordinate different aspects of their behaviors with their human interlocutors. This behavior coordination of non-verbal and verbal interaction cues requires that the robots can interpret the social behavior of the other and react accordingly. In this talk different ways to (socially) coordinate human and robot behavior will be discussed and illustrated with examples from recent Human-Robot Interaction research. Bio: Dr. Lehmann is a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher in the iCub Facility at the Italian Institute of Technology, where he develops the SICSAR project, dedg icated to generate and test social interaction behaviors for the iCub robot. Dr. Lehmann received his Diploma in Psychology from the Technical University Dresden, his MA degree in Psychology at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bath. In these years he has worked, from different interdisciplinary perspectives, on Evolution and Social Cognition, examining in particular possible reasons for the evolution of social structures in primates, the role of social dominance in this process, and social gaze behavior and its role in human social evolution. His current work is devoted to the application of this knowledge to the fields of Human-Robot Interaction and Social Robotics, through experimental research and with a particular focus on Robot Assisted Therapy and robotic home companions. Before his work at the IIT, he was part of the Adaptive Systems Research Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire, where he was involved in different European project, e.g. iTALK, and ACCOMPANY If you would like to attend this masterclass please contact Dr Frank Broz who is hosting Dr Lehmann

Speaker: Kevin Ong

Kevin is a PhD student from ISAR Research Group at RMIT University, Australia. Kevin had previously worked on logs from National Archives UK, Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute, Westfield Group and Listcorp.

In this talk, he will talk about his work on information foraging in physical and virtual environments. The first part of his talk will be on "Understanding information foraging in physical environment - a log analysis" and the second part of his talk will be on "information foraging in virtual environments - an observational study".

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA is organising a workshop on Centres for Doctoral Training which will take place on Friday 31 March 2017 at the Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh As an academic environment, we feel that Scotland is a great place to do CompSci research: friendly, collaborative, flexible and sometimes quirky. We want to ensure we are ready for a future EPSRC CDT funding call (expected in the next 12 months) by running a workshop event where we can share information and experience. We aim to establish strategic partnerships between smaller institutions that will give Scotland a good chance to achieve positive outcomes in future CDT applications. We are therefore holding a SICSA Centres for Doctoral Training Strategy workshop at the Informatics Forum in Edinburgh on 31 March 2017. EPSRC representatives will attend and provide advice and guidance. The event will also feature presentations from the seven SICSA Research Themes by our Theme Leaders. Workshop Schedule 09:30-10:00 - coffee, welcome 10:00-10:10 - Introduction (Kevin Hammond & Jeremy Singer, SICSA) 10:10-11:00 - EPSRC CDT presentation (Zoe Brown, EPSRC) 11:00-11:30 - A working CDT in action (Murray Cole, University of Edinburgh) 11:30-12:00 - A dual-site CDT in action (John Marsh, University of Glasgow) 12:00-12:30 - Interactive Workshop (Part I) 12:30-13:30 - Lunch and Refreshments 13:30-14:30 - SICSA Research Theme Presentations 14:30-15:00 - Interactive Workshop (part II) 15:00-16:00 - Discussion panel (Panel members TBA) 16:00 - finis

Speaker: Blesson Varghese

It is forecast that over 50 billion devices will be added to the Internet by 2020. Consequently, 50 trillion gigabytes of data will be generated. Currently, applications generating data on user devices, such as smartphones, tablets and wearables use the cloud as a centralised server. This will soon become an untenable computing model. The way forward is to decentralise computations away from the cloud towards the edge of the network closer to the user. In my talk, I will present challenges, my current research and vision to harness computing capabilities at the edge of the network. More information is available at www.blessonv.com.

Speaker: Edgar Meij

Abstract:

Large-scale knowledge graphs (KGs) store relationships between entities that are increasingly being used to improve the user experience in search applications. At Bloomberg we are currently in the process of rolling out our own knowledge graph and in this talk I will describe some of the semantic search applications that we aim to support. In particular, I will be discussing some of our recent papers on context-specific entity recommendations and automatically generating textual descriptions for arbitrary KG relationships.

Bio:

Dr. Edgar Meij is a senior scientist at Bloomberg. Before this, he was a research scientist at Yahoo Labs and a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam, where he also obtained his PhD. His research focuses on advancing the state of the art in semantic search at Web scale, by designing entity-oriented search systems that employ knowledge graphs, entity linking, NLP, and machine learning techniques to improve the user experience, search, and recommendations. He has co-authored 50+ peer-reviewed papers and regularly teaches at the post-graduate level, including university courses, summer schools, and conference tutorials.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA is pleased to welcome Dr. Hagen Lehmann to Heriot Watt University on Monday 27th March where he will be doing a masterclass course on: "Approaches in Social Human-Robot Interaction Research and Social Robotics" The course will give an overview of different methods and approaches used in Human-Robot Interaction Research and Social Robotics. Current efforts to integrate robots into mixed human-robot ecologies will be contextualized in the theoretical history of the field and its origins, beginning with Cybernetics research in the late 1940s. On this basis, different conceptual perspectives, important for the field and implemented in current experimental HRI studies, will be explored and illustrated, with particular attention to the psychological mechanisms supporting the interaction between humans and robots. In the second part of the lecture examples of recent research will be given in order to illustrate the limits and possibilities of the current Social Robotic approaches The estimated length of the lecture is 2 x 45 minutes, with a 15 minutes break and 15 minutes time for a follow up discussion Bio: Dr. Lehmann is a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher in the iCub Facility at the Italian Institute of Technology, where he develops the SICSAR project, dedg icated to generate and test social interaction behaviors for the iCub robot. Dr. Lehmann received his Diploma in Psychology from the Technical University Dresden, his MA degree in Psychology at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bath. In these years he has worked, from different interdisciplinary perspectives, on Evolution and Social Cognition, examining in particular possible reasons for the evolution of social structures in primates, the role of social dominance in this process, and social gaze behavior and its role in human social evolution. His current work is devoted to the application of this knowledge to the fields of Human-Robot Interaction and Social Robotics, through experimental research and with a particular focus on Robot Assisted Therapy and robotic home companions. Before his work at the IIT, he was part of the Adaptive Systems Research Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire, where he was involved in different European project, e.g. iTALK, and ACCOMPANY If you would like to attend this masterclass please contact Dr Frank Broz who is hosting Dr Lehmann

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Professor Guevara Noubir from Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA will be giving a talk on “Cross-Layer Attacks in Emerging Networks" on Friday 24 March at the University of Stirling. Abstract: The last decade has seen the rise of several new networking technologies, from mobile and wireless to overlay anonymous communication networks such as Tor. In this talk, I will argue that such networks are vulnerable to a variety of cross-layer attacks on their intrinsic features. For instance, an adversary can infer users location using malicious apps without requiring permissions, or by exploiting the physical layer characteristics. I will also provide evidence that the Tor anonymity network is also subject to active attacks, and present a framework that identifies malicious relays. I will then discuss the result of the use of the framework, revealing over 100 malicious relays. Bio: Guevara Noubir is a Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. He received a PhD is Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL 1996) and an engineering diploma (MS) from École Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique et de Mathématiques Appliquées at Grenoble (ENSIMAG 1991). Prior to joining the faculty at Northeastern University, he was a senior research scientist at CSEM SA (Switzerland) where he led several research projects in the area of wireless and mobile networking. In particular, he contributed to the definition of the third generation Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) standardized as 3GPP WCDMA and was the lead of the Data Networking Stack for the first 3G demonstrator in the world (as part of the FRAMES EU Research Project). In 2013, Noubir led Northeastern University’s team in the DARPA Spectrum Challenge competition winning the 2013 Cooperative Challenge. Dr Noubir held visiting research positions at Eurecom, MIT, and UNL. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a member of the ACM, and a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award. He serves on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, ACM Transaction on Privacy and Security, and co-chaired several ACM and IEEE conferences in the fields of mobile, wireless, and security (ACM WiSec, IEEE CNS, IEEE SECON, IEEE WoWMoM). His research covers both theoretical and practical aspects of secure and robust wireless and mobile systems. His current interests include leveraging mechanisms such as social networking authentication and low power ZigBee, to secure residential broadband networks, and boosting the robustness of wireless systems against smart attacks. The host of this Distinguished Visiting Fellow is Dr Paul Patras

Speaker: Rod

On Thursday 23^rd at the Journal club we will have a look at some of Yarin Gal’s work. He has a blog on his thesis work on Uncertainty in Deep Learning: http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/yarin/blog_2248.html

I suggest we run through the blog with  some interactive demos in Javascript:

http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/yarin/blog_3d801aa532c1ce.html

Speaker: SICSA Event
The SICSA Cyber Physical Systems Research Theme is participating in the European Robotics Forum in Edinburgh from 22 - 24 March. We are inviting teams to demonstrate their work at the ERF 2017 under the umbrella of the SICSA-Cyber-Physical Systems theme. A unique setting of technical demonstration is provided for both research labs from academia and industry to share experience and ideas. Through this exhibition stand teams will be enabled to share their visions and solutions to hardware and algorithmic implementation in Cyber-Physical Systems. Each demonstration will be facilitated with a table, 2 chairs and a power outlet. Demonstrators are expected to bring their own related hardware. Each selected team will be able to exhibit for one full-day at the event with up to 3 members (ERF 2017:http://www.erf2017.eu). Submission Guidelines: Demonstration participants should submit a 1-page abstract and a link to a maximum 3-min demo video clip for evaluation or some pictures of the apparatus. The abstract should include a short description of the demo, setup requirements, and safety concerns if any. All submissions will undergo a common review process among the organisers. Decisions about acceptance will be based on relevance to the theme, potential significance, and the accommodation capabilities. Please submit to mailto:Cyber-Physical-Systems@macs.hw.ac.uk with the subject “Demo Submission for “SICSA-Cyber-Physical Systems: your name”. Important dates: Submission deadline: FEB 28, 2017 Acceptance notification: MAR 3, 2017 Event: ERF 2017 MAR 22-24, 2017 For any questions regarding the demo session, please contact the organisers: Dr Subramanian Ramamoorthy SICSA, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB Email: s.ramamoorthy@ed.ac.uk Phone: +44 (0) 131 650 5119 Dr Katrin Solveig Lohan SICSA, Mathematical and Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS Email: k.lohan@hw.ac.uk Phone: +44 (0) 131 451 8338

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Professor Guevara Noubir from Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA will be giving a talk on “Robustness and Privacy in Wireless Systems" on Tuesday 21 March at the University of Edinburgh. Abstract: Wireless communication is not only a key technology underlying the mobile revolution, it is also used to connect, monitor, alert, and interact with physical infrastructures such as smart-grids, transportation networks, and even implantable devices. Building secure and robust wireless networks raises several theoretical and practical problems. Solving such problems requires novel approaches to circumvent the resource limitations of such systems. In this talk, I will review some of the major vulnerabilities inherent to the design of current wireless networks. I will then present specific problems and results that address some of the issues in wireless and mobile networks including smart-interference mitigation, and location tracking. Bio: Guevara Noubir is a Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. He received a PhD is Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL 1996) and an engineering diploma (MS) from École Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique et de Mathématiques Appliquées at Grenoble (ENSIMAG 1991). Prior to joining the faculty at Northeastern University, he was a senior research scientist at CSEM SA (Switzerland) where he led several research projects in the area of wireless and mobile networking. In particular, he contributed to the definition of the third generation Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) standardized as 3GPP WCDMA and was the lead of the Data Networking Stack for the first 3G demonstrator in the world (as part of the FRAMES EU Research Project). In 2013, Noubir led Northeastern University’s team in the DARPA Spectrum Challenge competition winning the 2013 Cooperative Challenge. Dr Noubir held visiting research positions at Eurecom, MIT, and UNL. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a member of the ACM, and a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award. He serves on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, ACM Transaction on Privacy and Security, and co-chaired several ACM and IEEE conferences in the fields of mobile, wireless, and security (ACM WiSec, IEEE CNS, IEEE SECON, IEEE WoWMoM). His research covers both theoretical and practical aspects of secure and robust wireless and mobile systems. His current interests include leveraging mechanisms such as social networking authentication and low power ZigBee, to secure residential broadband networks, and boosting the robustness of wireless systems against smart attacks. The host of this Distinguished Visiting Fellow is Dr Paul Patras

Speaker: Niall Barr

Language Workbenches are tools used to support the creation and use of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), frequently for the purpose of supporting Language Oriented Programming (LOP) or Generative Programming. LOP is an approach to application development where a language that is close to the problem domain is created, and the application is developed in this language. Generative programming is the related approach where a language at a high level of abstraction is used, and source code in a more general purpose language is generated from that code. In this talk I will describe the approach to web application development using generative programming that I have been using and evolving over several years, and my simple language workbench, WizardsWorkbench. As these web applications tend to follow a fairly similar pattern, DSLs are reused and evolved as required, my approach can be considered to be a form of Product Family Engineering that utilises generative programming. I will also describe the example driven approach which is used with WizardsWorkbench to develop both the parsers and the code generation output templates as well as the two DSLs used internally by WizardsWorkbench for parsers and templates.

Speaker: Florian Weber

The protocol description language Scribble, based on session types, is used as the input format for several tools that generate code to support the correct implementation of protocol roles. Scribble describes messages abstractly independently of their underlying transport mechanism. This means that working with legacy protocols and their existing textual message formats requires parsing and formatting code to bridge the gap between abstract Scribble messages and concrete protocol messages. We introduce a small language for defining the mapping between abstract and concrete messages. We also describe a tool that automatically generates the corresponding parsers and formatters from this language. This tool has been integrated with an existing Scribble to Java transpiler. We show that the combination of Scribble and a message mapping specification is an effective way of formally specifying internet protocols, by describing implementations of clients for POP3, SMTP and IMAP.

Speaker: Mengdie Zhuang

Abstract:

In this study, we investigated both using user actions from log files, and the results of the User Engagement Scale, both of which came from a study of people interacting with a retrieval interface containing an image collection, but with a non-purposeful task. Our results suggest that selected behaviour measures are associated with selected user perceptions of engagement  (i.e., focused attention, felt involvement, and novelty), while typical search and browse measures have no association with aesthetics and perceived usability. This is finding can lead towards a more systematic user-centered evaluation model.

Bio:

Mengdie Zhuang is a PhD student from the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research focuses on evaluation metrics of Information Retrieval Systems.

Speaker: Dr. Lisa Tweedie

Experiments in Positive Technology: The positives and negatives of meddling online 

This talk is going to report on a few informal action research experiments I have conducted over a period of seven years using social media. Some have been more successful than others. The focus behind each is "How do we use technology/social media to make positive change?"

I will briefly discuss four interventions and what I have learnt from them.

A) Chile earthquake emergency response via Twitter and WordPress 

B) Make Malmesbury Even Better - Community Facebook page

C) Langtang lost and found - Facebook support group for families involved in the Langtang earthquake, Nepal

D) I am Amira - educational resources for British schools about the refugee crisis downloaded by 4000+ schools from Times Educational Supplement Resources online (TES)

www.iamamira.wordpress.co.uk

Three of these are still ongoing projects. I will make the case that these projects have all initiated positive change. But that they also each have their darker side. I will discuss how each has affected me personally.

I will conclude with how I plan to carry forward my findings into the education arena. My current research thoughts are around education, play and outdoor learning.

Lisa started her academic life as a psychologist (via engineering product design at South Bank Poly) gaining a BSc (Hons) in Human Psychology from Aston University. She was then Phil Barnard's RA at the applied psychology unit in Cambridge (MRC APU). Researching low level cognitive models for icon search. She soon realised she wanted to look at the world in a more pragmatic way. 

Professor Bob Spence invited her to do a PhD in the visualisation of data at Imperial College, London (Dept of EEE). This was the start of a successful collaboration that continues to this day. She presented her work internationally at CHI, Parc (Palo Alto) and Apple (Cupertino) amongst other places. Lisa's visualisation work is still taught in computer science courses worldwide. She did a couple of years post doc at Imperial into developing visual tools to support problem holders create advanced statistical models (generalised linear models - Nelder - EPSRC) but felt industry calling. She then spent six happy years working for Nortel and Oracle as part of development teams. She worked on telephone network fault visualisations, managing vast quantities of live telephone fraud data from generated by genetic matching algorithms (SuperSleuth) and interactive UML models of code (Oracle Jdeveloper). She is named on two patents from this work.

Once Lisa had her second child she choose to leave corporate life. She had a teaching fellowship at Bath University in 2005. In 2007 she started a consultancy based around "positive technology". She worked as a UX mentor with over 50 companies remotely via Skype from her kitchen. Many of these were start ups in Silicon Valley. In 2011 she was awarded an honorary Research fellowship at Imperial College.

Four years ago she trained as a secondary Maths teacher and has a huge interest in special needs. She tutors students of all abilities and age groups in maths, english and reading each week. Most recently she returned to the corporate world working as a Senior User Experience Architect for St James Place. On the 5th January 2017 she became self employed and is looking to return to the academic research arena with a focus on education, play and outdoor learning. Action research is where she wants to be. 

Lisa is also a community activist, hands on parent to three lively children and a disability rights campaigner. She has lived with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a rare genetic connective tissue disorder, her whole life. She is also a keen photographer, iPad artist (www.tweepics.wordpress.co.uk), writer, maker and has run numerous book clubs.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisatweedie/

lisa@wheatridge.co.uk

Speaker: Paul Keir

In the last decade, high-performance computing has made increasing use of heterogeneous many-core parallelism. Typically the individual processor cores within such a system are radically simpler than their predecessors; and an increased portion of the challenge in executing relevant programs efficiently is reassigned. Tasks, previously the responsibility of hardware, are now delegated to software. Fast, on-chip memory, will primarily be exposed within a series of trivially distinct programming languages, through a handful of address spaces annotations, which associate discrete sections of memory with pointers; or similar low-level abstractions. Traditional CPUs would provide a hardware data cache for such functionality. Our work aims to improve the programmability of address spaces by exposing new functionality within the existing template metaprogramming system of C++

Speaker: Dr Spela Brown, Ms Aline Orr, Mr Steven Kendrick

The event will consist of two parts:

• Seminar (SAWB/422). To date we have two confirmed speakers:

• 2.30pm: Dr Spela Brown (Sophrodine, Glasgow) on Starting own business after a PhD

• 3pm: Ms Aline Orr / Mr Steven Kendrick (SICSA officers at Glasgow Uni) on SICSA opportunities for Postdocs

Lunch will be provided from 2.15pm.

• Laser quest (sponsored by the School!) at 124 Portman Street, Kinning Park, Glasgow, G41 1EJ. The venue is 5 minute walk from the Kinning Park Subway Station, so we plan to go there by the subway, leaving the SAWB foyer at 4.10pm. The game itself will be from 4.45pm until 7pm.

   

Please, email either Amol (Amol.Deshmukh@glasgow.ac.uk) or Natalia (Natalia.Chechina@glasgow.ac.uk) if you’d like to join the laser quest!

Speaker: Tyler Sorensen

GPUs are co-processors originally designed to accelerate graphics computations. However, their high bandwidth and low energy consumption have led to general purpose applications running on GPUs. To remain relevant in the fast-changing landscape of GPU frameworks, GPU programming models are often vague or underspecified. Because of this, several programming constructs have been developed which violate the official programming models, yet execute successfully on a specific GPU chip, enabling more diverse applications to be written for that specific device. During my PhD, we have examined one such construct: a global synchronisation barrier (or GSB). In this talk, we will address three key questions around this rogue programming construct: (1) Is it *possible* to write a portable GSB that successfully executes on a wide range of today's GPUs? (2) Can a GSB be *useful* for accelerating applications on GPUs? And (3) can a programming model that allows a GSB be *sustainable* for future GPU frameworks? Our hope is that this investigation will help the GSB find a permanent home in GPU programming models, enabling developers to exciting new applications in a safe and portable way.

Short Bio: Tyler’s research interests are in developing and understanding models for testing and safely developing GPU applications which contain irregular computations. In particular, he examines issues related to the GPU relaxed memory model and execution model. He received his MSc from University of Utah in 2014 and worked as an intern for the Nvidia compiler team during the summers of 2013 and 2014.

Speaker: Abeer Ali

Traditional network security systems consist of deploying high-performance and high-cost appliances (middleboxes) in fixed locations of the physical infrastructure to process traffic to prevent, detect or mitigate attacks.  This limits their provisioning abilities to a static specification, hindering extensible functionality and resulting in vendor lock-in.Virtualizing security function avoids these problems and increases the efficiency of the system. In this talk, we present the requirements and challenges of building a framework to deploy and manage virtualized security functions in a multitenant virtualized infrastructure like Cloud and how we can exploit latest advances in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and network services offered by Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to implement it.

Speaker: Avishek Anand

There have been numerous efforts recently to digitize previously published content and preserving born-digital content leading to the widespread growth of large temporal text repositories. Temporal collections are continuously growing text collections which contain versions of documents spanning over long time periods and present many opportunities for historical, cultural and political analyses. Consequently there is a growing need for methods that can efficiently access, search and mine them. In this talk we deal with approaches in each of these aspects -- access, search and enrichment. First, I describe some of the access methods for searching temporal collections. Specifically, how do we index text to support temporal workloads? Secondly, I will describe retrieval models, which exploit historical information, essential in searching such collections. That is, how do we rank documents given temporal query intents? Finally, I will present some of the ongoing efforts to mine such collections for enriching Knowledge sources like Wikipedia.

Speaker: Quintin Cutts

Education Scotland, the organisation tasked with developing school curricula, will shortly announce a new computing science curriculum.  This is for the "Broad General Education" - the education that all pupils are entitled to receive from ages 3-15.  The underlying structure of the curriculum is largely the work of Quintin here at Glasgow, Richard Connor at Strathclyde, and Judy Robertson at Moray House/Edinburgh.  This structure captures key aspects of computing science and computational thinking and sheds light on why we have over the decades found it so hard to teach CS.  In this talk, Quintin will outline the structure, make links to CS education research findings and other curricula, and give an overview of the new Scottish curriculum.  If you have young children, come along and find out what they are about to be subjected to!

Speaker: Mark Girolami

One of the challenges of 21st-century science is to model the evolution of complex systems.  One example of practical importance is urban structure, for which the dynamics may be described by a series of non-linear first-order ordinary differential equations.  Whilst this approach provides a reasonable model of spatial interaction as are relevant in areas diverse as public health and urban retail structure, it is somewhat restrictive owing to uncertainties arising in the modelling process. 

We address these shortcomings by developing a dynamical singly constrained spatial interaction model, based on a system of stochastic differential equations.   Our model is ergodic and the invariant distribution encodes our prior knowledge of spatio-temporal interactions.  We proceed by performing inference and prediction in a Bayesian setting, and explore the resulting probability distributions with a position-specific metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm. Insights from studies of interactions within the city of London from retail structure are used as illustration

Speaker: SICSA Event
The SICSA Future Cities Research Challenge Workshop 'The Economy of Collaboration' is taking place on Thursday 2 March 2017 at the University of Dundee Following on from the SICSA Future Cities “Bottom-Up” workshop 2014, this one-day workshop will return to explore current and future initiatives in grassroots future cities, focussing the role of digital technologies and the collaborative economy: the mobilisation and infrastructuring of communities for engagement, resource sharing, empowerment, and innovation. Amidst the drive toward smarter cities, there is a growing movement of technologists, innovators and makers who are developing inspiring digital solutions to local issues and social challenges. Examples range from collaborative economy applications to support better sharing of resources, to initiatives that harness the collective awareness and intelligence of people environmental monitoring. These movements demonstrate the potential for bottom-up approaches to cities. However, this grassroots vision of future cities must overcome many challenges and barriers to participation, including access and ownership of data, human-centeredness and comprehensibility. At the same time, there are obvious and nuanced challenges to collaboration and innovation, including trust, reliability, competition and privacy. This workshop will frame and explore and highlight the current and state of the art, discuss research questions and computing and design challenges for developments that support a collaborative economy. Themes and provocations include: Resilience to global and local threats Decentralisation of ownership and control to allow communal use and innovation New models for small cities of the future Citizens’ understanding of smart cities and ability to leverage them to their advantage Data context and the lived experience Speakers Mara Balestrini - Participatory Sensing in Barcelona, Making Sense H2020. IAAC and Ideas for Change Dr Drew Hemment – City Verve – Bottom up and collaborative approaches in the UK’s most recent Smart City Demonstrator, Manchester. Dr Nick Taylor – Grassroots Innovation around Community Technologies in Ardler, Dundee. ESPRC Hacking for Situated Civic Engagement. Stewart Murdoch – Smart City notes from a Small City Dundee City Council (tbc) - further announcements to come For more information on the workshop and details of registration please visit the Economy of Collaboration Eventbrite page

Speaker: Dr. Jan de Muijnck-Hughes

Communicating protocols are a cornerstone of modern system design. However, there is a disconnect between the different tooling used to design, implement and reason about these protocols and their implementations. Session Types are a typing discipline that help resolve this difference by allowing protocol specifications to be used during type-checking to ensure that implementations adhere to a given specification.

Idris is a general purpose programming language that supports full-dependent types, providing programmers with the ability to reason more precisely about programs. This talk introduces =Sessions=, our implementation of Session Types in Idris, and demonstrates =Sessions= ability to design and realise several common protocols.

=Sessions= improves upon existing Session Type implementations by introducing value dependencies between messages and fine-grained channel management during protocol design and implementation. We also use Idris' support for EDSL construction to allow for protocols to be designed and reasoned about in the same language as their implementation. Thereby allowing for an intrinsic bond to be introduced between a protocol's implementation and specification, and also with its verification.

Using =Sessions=, we can reduce the existing disconnect between the tooling used for protocol design, implementation, and verification.

Speaker: António Ravara

Abstract: Stateful objects typically have a non-uniform behaviour, as the availability of their methods depend on their internal state.  For instance, in an object that implements file access the method to read a file should not be invoked before calling the method to open that file. Similarly, in an iterator object, calls to the next method should be preceded by calls to the hasNext method.

Behavioural types are particularly well-suited to object-oriented programming, as they make it possible to statically guarantee that method calls happen when an object has an internal state that is safe for the method's execution. Following the typestates approach, one may declare for each possible state of the object the set of methods that can be safely executed in that state.

Several languages already associate with a class a dynamic description of objects' behaviour declaring the admissible sequences of method calls. These descriptions, herein called usages, can be used to ensure at compile time that, in a given program, all the sequences of method calls to each object follow the order declared by its usage. To ensure usages to be followed, objects are linear to prevent interferences unexpectedly changing their state.

However, the typing systems referred to above have two shortcomings. First, type checking is typically inefficient, as a method's body is checked each time that method appears in a usage. Second, said typing systems limit themselves to just verifying that method calls follow the usage, and do not necessarily prevent the typed program from ``going wrong'' (e.g., getting stuck or producing a null pointer exception).

Our work addresses these weaknesses:

1) We attain a stronger type-safety result, by including de-referencing a null reference in the definition of errors and by including in type-checking a form of null pointer analysis. Thus, type-safety in our setting means no run-time errors and complete execution of objects' usages.

2) We attain more efficient type-checking by analysing methods' bodies only once. Instead of checking the code following the usage, we introduce client usages, behavioural descriptions of how a methods' code changes the state of objects in fields (and variables/parameters), type the method bodies following that information and check the consistency of the usages independently.

Client usages have another advantage: they can, not only be inferred from the code, but also be used to produce pre- and post-conditions to methods that then allow to infer usages.

We are developing this work in stages. First, we define a type system only with usages and prove type-safety (our enhanced version). Subsequently, we extend the type system with client usages and get a more efficient type-checking. Afterwards we infer the client usages from the code, and finally, we infer pre- and post-conditions from client usages. Our aim is to provide an approach that takes a program in a Java-like language and automatically infers class usages that describe safe orders of method calls, but also type-checks (client) code against usages (either inferred or user-defined) so as to guarantee that the whole program does not go wrong.

Short bio: Assistant Professor at DI FCT UNL PT, on Sabbatical leave during 2016/17 visiting SCS Glasgow.

Main research problem addressed is how to ensure that inherently concurrent, highly distributed, software systems behave correctly. The focus is on the development of techniques, program constructions, and tools that help creating safe and well-behaved systems, provably providing correctness guarantees. The toolbox used includes static analysis of source code, capturing defects before deployment, with decidable, low complexity, property-driven, proof systems, using behavioural descriptions of programs.

Speaker: Nyi Nyi Htun

Presentation of 2 papers to appear at CHIIR 2017.

Paper 1:

Title: How Can We Better Support Users with Non-Uniform Information Access in Collaborative Information Retrieval?

Abstract: The majority of research in Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR) has assumed that collaborating team members have uniform information access. However, practice and research has shown that there may not always be uniform information access among team members, e.g. in healthcare, government, etc. To the best of our knowledge, there has not been a controlled user evaluation to measure the impact of non-uniform information access on CIR outcomes. To address this shortcoming, we conducted a controlled user evaluation using 2 non-uniform access scenarios (document removal and term blacklisting) and 1 full and uniform access scenario. Following this, a design interview was undertaken to provide interface design suggestions. Evaluation results show that neither of the 2 non-uniform access scenarios had a significant negative impact on collaborative and individual search outcomes. Design interview results suggested that awareness of team’s query history and intersecting viewed/judged documents could potentially help users share their expertise without disclosing sensitive information.

Paper 2:

Title: An Interface for Supporting Asynchronous Multi-Level Collaborative Information Retrieval

Abstract: Case studies and observations from different domains including government, healthcare and legal, have suggested that Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR) sometimes involves people with unequal access to information. This type of scenario has been referred to as Multi-Level CIR (MLCIR). In addition to supporting collaboration, MLCIR systems must ensure that there is no unintended disclosure of sensitive information, this is an under investigated area of research. We present results of an evaluation of an interface we have designed for MLCIR scenarios. Pairs of participants used the interface under 3 different information access scenarios for a variety of search tasks. These scenarios included one CIR and two MLCIR scenarios, namely: full access (FA), document removal (DR) and term blacklisting (TR). Design interviews were conducted post evaluation to obtain qualitative feedback from participants. Evaluation results showed that our interface performed well for both DR and FA scenarios but for TR, team members with less access had a negative influence on their partner’s search performance, demonstrating insights into how different MLCIR scenarios should be supported. Design interview results showed that our interface helped the participants to reformulate their queries, understand their partner’s performance, reduce duplicated work and review their team’s search history without disclosing sensitive information.

Speaker: Prof. Lars Erik Holmquist

Speaker: Dr Steven J Johnston

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) have peaked in the hype curve and have demonstrated they are here to stay in one form or another. Many cities have attempted to retrofit 'smart' capabilities and there is no shortage of disconnected, often proprietary CPS addressing city infrastructure.

In the same way that online activity evolved from simplistic webpages to feature rich web 2.0, CPS also need to evolve. What will the Smart City 2.0 of tomorrow will look like, how will the architectures will evolve and most importantly how does this address the key challenges of cities; energy, environment and citizens. (Audience interaction welcomed)

Speaker: Levente Csikor

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers a new way to operate, manage, and deploy communication networks and to overcome many of the long-standing problems of legacy networking. However, widespread SDN adoption has not occurred yet, due to the lack of a viable incremental deployment path and the relatively immature present state of SDN-capable devices on the market. While continuously evolving software switches may alleviate the operational issues of commercial hardware-based SDN offerings, lagging standards-compliance, performance regressions, and poor scaling, they fail to match the cost-efficiency and port density. In this paper, we propose HARMLESS, a new SDN switch design that seamlessly adds SDN capability to legacy network gear, by emulating the OpenFlow switch OS in a separate software switch component. This way, HARMLESS enables a quick and easy leap into SDN, combining the rapid innovation and upgrade cycles of software switches with the port density and cost-efficiency of hardware-based appliances into a fully dataplane-transparent and vendor-neutral solution. HARMLESS incurs an order of magnitude smaller initial expenditure for an SDN deployment than existing turnkey vendor SDN solutions while, at the same time, yields matching, or even better, data plane performance.

Speaker: Lei Fang

Abstract:
Human activity recognition plays a significant role in enabling pervasive applications as it abstracts low-level noisy sensor data into high-level human activities, which applications can respond to. In this paper, we identify a new research question in activity recognition -- discovering and learning unknown activities that have not been pre-defined or observed. As pervasive systems intend to be deployed in a real-world environment for a long period of time, it is infeasible, to expect users will only perform a set of pre-defined activities. Users might perform the same activities in a different manner, or perform a new type of activity. Failing to detect or update the activity model to incorporate new patterns or activities will outdate the model and result in unsatisfactory service delivery. To address this question, we propose a solution to not only discover and learn new activities over time, but also support incremental updating the activity model by employing directional statistical model (hierarchical mixtures of von Mises-Fisher Distributions) and active learning strategies.

Short bio:
Lei Fang is a Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews. His research interests include sensor networks, sensor data processing, statistical modelling, human activity recognition, etc. Currently, he is a postdoc working on the EPSRC Science of Sensor Systems Software (S4) project. He got his Ph.D. from the University of St Andrews in 2015.

Speaker: SICSA Event
The SICSA Research Challenge Next Generation Mixed Reality Systems is holding a workshop on Tuesday 21 February at the University of Glasgow Introduction - This will be an informal, “working” workshop; the aim is to identify and discuss the most pressing questions posed by the widespread deployment of Mixed-Reality systems with a focus on: - The “Savannah experience”, modelling and analysis techniques for Mixed-Reality systems, limitations and exploration of future research directions with emphasis on IoT infrastructure, security and adaptive behaviours, - probabilistic and quantitative aspects, - new case studies “in the wild”, - identifying further partners/collaborators and funding sources. Programme 10:00 - 10:20 Coffee and Tea 10:20 - 10:30 Welcome and introductions 10:30 - 12:00 Morning session 12:00 - 13:00 Lunch Break 13:00 - 14:00 Lei Fang;s (St Andrews) FATA talk in SAWB 423 14:00 - 14:15 Coffee/Tea Break 14:15 - 15:20 Afternoon session 15:20 - 15:30 Concluding remarks If you would like to attend this workshop or if you have any questions please contact the Research Challenge Leader Michele Sevegnani

Speaker: Dr. Christian Frisson

Speaker: Paul Siebert

Paul will discuss highlights from ECCV 2016 and EUCOG 2016

Speaker: Dr Marwan Fayed

Netflix, YouTube, iPlayer, are increasingly targets of the following complaint: "How come my child gets HD streams on her phone, while I'm stuck with terrible quality on my 50 inch TV?" Recent studies observe that competing adaptive video streams generate flows that lead to instability, under-utilization, and unfairness behind bottleneck links. Additional measurements suggest there may also be a negative impact on users' perceived quality of experience as a consequence. Intuitively, application-generated issues should be resolved at the application layer. In this presentation I shall demonstrate that fairness, by any definition, can only be solved in the network. Moreover, that in an increasingly HTTP-S world, some form of client interaction is required. In support, a new network-layer 'QoE-fairness' metric will be be introduced that reflects user experience. Experiments using our open-source implementation in the home environment reinforce the network-layer as the right place to attack the general problem.

Refs

[1] http://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/networking/networking2015/1570066341.pdf

[2] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2940144

Bio: Marwan Fayed received his MA from Boston University and his PhD from the University of Ottawa, in 2003 and 2009 respectively, and in between worked at Microsoft as a member of the Core Reliability Group. He joined the faculty at the University of Stirling, UK in 2009 as under the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) scheme. He recently held the appointment of 'Theme Leader' for networking research in Scotland. His current research interests lie in wireless algorithms, as well as general network, transport, and measurement in next generation edge networks. He is a co-founder of HUBS c.i.c., an ISP focussed on rural communities; recipient of an IEEE CCECE best paper award; and serves on committees at IEEE and ACM conferences.

Speaker: Joel Mackenzie

We present an empirical comparison between document-at-a-time (DaaT) and score-at-a-time (SaaT) document ranking strategies within a common framework. Although both strategies have been extensively explored, the literature lacks a fair, direct comparison: such a study has been difficult due to vastly different query evaluation mechanics and index organizations. Our work controls for score quantization, document processing, compression, implementation language, implementation effort, and a number of details, arriving at an empirical evaluation that fairly characterizes the performance of three specific techniques:WAND (DaaT), BMW (DaaT), and JASS (SaaT). Experiments reveal a number of interesting findings. The performance gap between WAND and BMW is not as clear as the literature suggests, and both methods are susceptible to tail queries that may take orders of magnitude longer than the median query to execute. Surprisingly, approximate query evaluation in WAND and BMW does not significantly reduce the risk of these tail queries. Overall, JASS is slightly slower than either WAND or BMW, but exhibits much lower variance in query latencies and is much less susceptible to tail query effects. Furthermore, JASS query latency is not particularly sensitive to the retrieval depth, making it an appealing solution for performance-sensitive applications where bounds on query latencies are desirable.

Bio:

Joel is a PhD candidate at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He works with Dr J. Shane Culpepper and Assoc Prof. Falk Scholer on efficient and effective candidate generation for multi-stage retrieval. His research interests include index efficiency, multi-stage retrieval and distributed IR.

Speaker: John O'Donnell

The computer program AlphaGo made history in 2016 by defeating Lee Sedol, one of the top professional go players, in a five game match.  A few weeks ago, an updated version of AlphaGo played 60 games against professionals and won them all.  The current generation of strong go programs use neural networks and Monte Carlo tree search.  These programs have a distinctive playing style and occasionally make astonishing moves, raising questions that are presently the focus of intensive research.  This talk will explore some of these issues, and illustrate them with incidents from the history of go as well as from the recent games by computers.

Speaker: Dr. Yulan He

This talk consists of two parts. In the first part, I will present our proposed Latent Event and Categorisation Model (LECM) which is an unsupervised Bayesian model for the extraction of structured representations of events from Twitter without the use of any labelled data. The extracted events are automatically clustered into coherence event type groups. The proposed framework has been evaluated on over 60 millions tweets and has achieved a precision of 70%, outperforming the state-of-the-art open event extraction system by nearly 6%. The LECM model has been extended to jointly modelling event extraction and visualisation which performs remarkably better than both the state-of-the-art event extraction method and a pipeline approach for event extraction and visualisation.

In the second part of my talk, I will present a non-parametric generative model to extract structured representations and evolution patterns of storylines simultaneously. In the model, each storyline is modelled as a joint distribution over some locations, organisations, persons, keywords and a set of topics. We further combine this model with the Chinese restaurant process so that the number of storylines can be determined automatically without human intervention. The proposed model is able to generate coherent storylines from new articles.

Bio:
 
Yulan He is a Reader and Director of the Systems Analytics Research Institute at Aston University. She obtained her PhD degree in Spoken Language Understanding in 2004 from the University of Cambridge, UK. Prior joining Aston, she was a Senior Lecturer at the Open University, Lecturer at the University of Exeter and Lecturer at the University of Reading. Her current research interests lie in the integration of machine learning and natural language processing for text mining and social media analysis. Yulan has published over 140 papers with most appeared in high impact journals and at top conferences such as IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Intelligent Systems, KDD, CIKM, ACL, etc. She served as an Area Chair in NAACL 2016, EMNLP 2015, CCL 2015 and NLPCC 2015
and co-organised ECIR 2010 and IAPR 2007.

Speaker: Dr. Mark Post

Driven by ever more demanding applications, modern embedded computing and automation systems have reached unprecedented levels of complexity. Dr. Post’s research focuses on applying novel software and hardware architectures to simplify and distribute the structure of robots and other embedded systems, to make them robust and able to operate under uncertainty, and also allow to for more efficient and automated development processes. One way to achieve this is via the unification of programming and data, made possible by using probabilistic abstractions of exact data. In a new methodology for embedded programming developed through this research, exact variables are replaced with random variables and a computation process is defined based on evidence theory and probabilistic inference. This has many advantages including the implicit handling of uncertainty, a guarantee of deterministic program execution, and the ability to apply both statistical on-line learning and expert knowledge from relational semantic sources. Implementation on real-time systems is made reliable and practical by applying modular and lock-free inter-process communication, semantic introspection and stochastic characterization of processes to build robust embedded networks based on wide-computing concepts. This methodology in general has a vast array of potential real-world applications, and some aspects have been applied successfully to embedded programming of planetary rovers and agricultural robots.

Speaker: Robbie Simpson

Systems Engineering makes extensive use of modelling and analysis methodologies to design and analyse systems. However, it is rare for these methodologies to be effectively validated for correctness or utility. Additionally, the common use of case studies as an implicit validation mechanism is undermined by the lack of validation of these case studies themselves. This talk explores the problem of validation with specific reference to requirements engineering and safety analysis techniques, identifies the main shortcomings and attempts to propose some potential solutions.

Speaker: Robbie Simpson

Speaker: Kitty Meeks

A set A of natural numbers is said to be sum-free if it does not contain distinct x, y and z such that x + y = z.  Sum-free sets have been studied extensively in additive combinatorics (Paul Erdős was particularly interested in these sets) but algorithmic questions relating to sum-free sets have thus far received very little attention. We consider the problem, given a set A, of determining whether A contains a sum-free subset of size at least k.  We show that this problem is NP-complete in general, but is tractable with respect to certain parameterizations; in the cases where the decision problem is tractable, we also consider the complexity of counting all sum-free subsets of size exactly k.

This is joint work (in progress) with Andrew Treglown (University of Birmingham).

Speaker: Dr Kostas Kyriakopoulos

The talk will go through the overview of research conducted in the "Signal Processing and Networks" group at Loughborough University, with a strong emphasis on the “Networks" side. We have developed algorithms for fusing cross layer measurements using the Dempster Shafer evidence framework to make decisions on whether packets/frames in the network are coming from a malicious source or from the legitimate Access Point. We are currently researching on how to infuse this system with contextual information besides the direct measurements from the network. The talk will also discuss other Networks relevant topics, including Ontologies for management of networks and some brief introduction to the group’s Signal Processing expertise in Signal Processing for defence areas.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Assistant Professor Sam Tobin-Hochstadt from Indiana University, Bloomington will be giving a talk on “Pycket: A Tracing JIT for functional language” on Wednesday 1 February at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow Abstract: Functional languages have traditionally had sophisticated ahead-of-time compilers such as GHC for Haskell, MLton for ML, and Gambit for Scheme. But other modern languages often use JIT compilers, such as Java, Smalltalk, Lua, or JavaScript. Can we apply JIT compilers, in particular the technology of so-called tracing JIT compilers, to functional languages? I will present a new implementation of Racket, called Pycket, which shows that this is both possible and effective. Pycket is very fast on a wide range of benchmarks, supports most of Racket, and even addresses the overhead of gradual typing-generated proxies. Bio: Sam Tobin-Hochstadt is an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. He has worked on dynamic languages, type systems, module systems, and metaprogramming, including creating the Typed Racket system and popularizing the phrase “scripts to programs”. He is a member of the ECMA TC39 working group responsible for standardizing JavaScript, where he co-designed the module system for ES6, the next version of JavaScript. He received his PhD in 2010 from Northeastern University under Matthias Felleisen. The host of this SICSA DVF is Dr Patrick Maier, University of Glasgow

Speaker: Sam Tobin-Hochstadt

Functional languages have traditionally had sophisticated ahead-of-time compilers such as GHC for Haskell, MLton for ML, and Gambit for Scheme. But other modern languages often use JIT compilers, such as Java, Smalltalk, Lua, or JavaScript. Can we apply JIT compilers, in particular the technology of so-called tracing JIT compilers, to functional languages? I will present a new implementation of Racket, called Pycket, which shows that this is both possible and effective. Pycket is very fast on a wide range of benchmarks, supports most of Racket, and even addresses the overhead of gradual typing-generated proxies.

Biography: Sam Tobin-Hochstadt is an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. He has worked on dynamic languages, type systems, module systems, and metaprogramming, including creating the Typed Racket system and popularizing the phrase "scripts to programs." He is a member of the ECMA TC39 working group responsible for standardizing JavaScript, where he co-designed the module system for ES6, the next version of JavaScript. He received his PhD in 2010 from Northeastern University under Matthias Felleisen.

Speaker: Sven Linker

Abstract:
Due to the increasing use of automated car controllers, mathematical correct formalisms are needed to describe these controllers and verify their safety. Typical approaches refer to the dynamical behaviour of cars via differential equations. In this way, spatial aspects of cars, like the current position and the space needed for safe braking in case of emergencies, are only available indirectly. However, for the verification of safety properties, e.g., collision freedom, these properties are of inherent importance.
In this talk, I present an approach with the intention to simplify safety proofs by abstracting away from the concrete dynamics of cars. Within proofs, explicit assumptions about the behaviour of cars have to be used. These assumptions, e.g. that cars are able to calculate their braking distance, can then be instantiated with more detailed approaches.
The contributions of this work are divided into three parts. I present an abstract model of traffic on multi-lane highways which hides the dynamics and only considers a local neighbourhood of each car. Subsequently, I define and briefly explain a modal logic based on this model to specify and verify safety properties of highway traffic.
Finally, I present the application of this logic in form of a case study exploring minimal constraints for controllers ensuring safety on motorways.

Bio:
Sven Linker received his PhD with the topic "Proofs for Traffic Safety - Combining Diagrams and Logic" in 2015 from the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany. From 2015 to 2016 he was part of the project "The Readability of Proofs in Diagrammatic Logic" at the University of Brighton, UK. Since 2016, he works at the University of Liverpool in the project "Science of Sensor Systems Software".
His main research areas are the application of logics to verification and specification of computer systems, especially modal logics and their proof systems, as well as formal diagrammatic systems.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Assistant Professor Sam Tobin-Hochstadt from Indiana University, Bloomington will be giving a talk on “Languages as Libraries" on Friday 27 January at the University of St Andrews Abstract: Programming language design benefits from constructs for extending the syntax and semantics of a host language. While C’s string-based macros empower programmers to introduce notational short-hands, the parser-level macros of Lisp encourage experimentation with domain-specific languages. The Scheme programming language improves on Lisp with macros that respect lexical scope. The design of Racket - a descendant of Scheme - goes even further with the introduction of a full-fledged interface to the static semantics of the language. A Racket extension programmer can thus add constructs that are indistinguishable from "native" notation, large and complex embedded domain-specific languages, and even optimizing transformations for the compiler backend. This power to experiment with language design has been used to create a series of sub-languages for programming with first-class classes and modules, numerous languages for implementing the Racket system, and the creation of Typed Racket, a complete and fully integrated typed sister language to Racket's untyped base language. In this talk, I'll review the power of Lisp macros for metaprogramming, describe how Scheme introduced lexical scope for macros, and then show how Racket builds upon these foundation to support the development of full-fledged languages as libraries. Bio: Sam Tobin-Hochstadt is an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. He has worked on dynamic languages, type systems, module systems, and metaprogramming, including creating the Typed Racket system and popularizing the phrase “scripts to programs”. He is a member of the ECMA TC39 working group responsible for standardizing JavaScript, where he co-designed the module system for ES6, the next version of JavaScript. He received his PhD in 2010 from Northeastern University under Matthias Felleisen. The host of this SICSA DVF is Dr Patrick Maier, University of Glasgow

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Assistant Professor Sam Tobin-Hochstadt from Indiana University, Bloomington will be giving a talk on "Typed Racket and Gradual Typing" on Tuesday 24 January at the Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh Abstract: The trend toward constructing large-scale applications in scripting languages has inspired recent research in gradual typing, which adds types incrementally to existing languages. This idea has also now been adopted in industry, with Typed Clojure, TypeScript, and Facebook's Hack as recent example. Over the last decade, my collaborators and I have developed Typed Racket, the first practical gradual type system, to enable adding types to existing untyped Racket programs. Building Typed Racket has required work at every level of programming language research, from runtime systems and compilers, to type and contract system design, to IDE tool support, and even to new proof techniques. In this talk, I'll survey this landscape of work, explain how the needs of Typed Racket has driven all of these areas, and discuss future challenges that remain to be tackled. Bio: Sam Tobin-Hochstadt is an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. He has worked on dynamic languages, type systems, module systems, and metaprogramming, including creating the Typed Racket system and popularizing the phrase "scripts to programs". He is a member of the ECMA TC39 working group responsible for standardizing JavaScript, where he co-designed the module system for ES6, the next version of JavaScript. He received his PhD in 2010 from Northeastern University under Matthias Felleisen. The host of this SICSA DVF is Dr Patrick Maier, University of Glasgow

Speaker: Jeremy Singer

Jermey presents an analysis of beginner Haskell code.

Speaker: Charles Sutton

One of the first and most fundamental tasks in data mining is what we might call data understanding. Given a dump of data, what's in it? If modern machine learning methods are effective at finding patterns in data, then they should be effective at summarizing data sets so as to help data analysts develop a high-level understanding of them.

I'll describe several different approaches to this problem. First I'll describe a new approach to classic data mining problems, such as frequent itemset mining and frequent sequence mining, using a new principled model from probabilistic machine learning. Essentially, this casts the problem of pattern mining as one of structure learning in a probabilistic model. I'll describe an application to summarizing the usage of software libraries on Github.

A second attack to this general problem is based on cluster analysis. A good clustering can help a data analyst to explore and understand a data set, but what constitutes a good clustering may depend on domain-specific and application-specific criteria. I'll describe a new framework for interactive clustering that allows the analyst to examine a clustering and guide it in a way that is more useful for their information need.

Finally, topic modelling has proven to be a highly useful family of methods for data exploration, but it still requires a large amount of specialized effort to develop a new topic model for a specific data analysis scenario. I'll present new results on highly scalable inference for latent Dirichlet allocation based on recently proposed deep learning methods for probabilistic models.

Slides and relevant papers will be available at http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/csutton/talks/

Speaker: Hans Gellersen

Eye movements are central to most of our interactions. We use our eyes to see and guide our actions and they are a natural interface that is reflective of our goals and interests. At the same time, our eyes afford fast and accurate control for directing our attention, selecting targets for interaction, and expressing intent. Even though our eyes play such a central part to interaction, we rarely think about the movement of our eyes and have limited awareness of the diverse ways in which we use our eyes --- for instance, to examine visual scenes, follow movement, guide our hands, communicate non-verbally, and establish shared attention. 

This talk will reflect on use of eye movement as input in human-computer interaction. Jacob's seminal work showed over 25 years ago that eye gaze is natural for pointing, albeit marred by problems of Midas Touch and limited accuracy. I will discuss new work on eye gaze as input that looks beyond conventional gaze pointing. This includes work on: gaze and touch, where we use gaze to naturally modulate manual input; gaze and motion, where we introduce a new form of gaze input based on the smooth pursuit movement our eyes perform when they follow a moving object; and gaze and games, where we explore social gaze in interaction with avatars and joint attention as multi-user input . 

Hans Gellersen is Professor of Interactive Systems at Lancaster University. Hans' research interest is in sensors and devices for ubiquitous computing and human-computer interaction. He has worked on systems that blend physical and digital interaction, methods that infer context and human activity, and techniques that facilitate spontaneous interaction across devices. In recent work he is focussing on eye movement as a source of context information and modality for interaction. 

Speaker: Arindam Dey

Speaker: Dr Timothy M Jones

Many modern data processing and HPC workloads are heavily memory-latency bound. Current architectures and compilers perform poorly on these applications due to the highly irregular nature of the memory access patterns involved. This leads to CPU stalling for the majority of the time. However, on closer inspection, these applications contain abundant memory-level parallelism that is currently unexploited. Data accesses are, in many cases, well defined and predictable in advance, falling into a small set of simple patterns. To exploit them though, we require new methods for prefetching, in hardware and software.

In this talk I will describe some of the work my group has been doing in this area over the past couple of years. First, I'll show a compiler pass to automatically generate software prefetches for indirect memory accesses, a special class of irregular memory accesses often seen in high-performance workloads. Next, I'll describe a dedicated hardware prefetcher that optimises breadth-first traversals of large graphs. Finally, I'll present a generic programmable prefetcher that embeds an array of small microcontroller-sized cores next to the L1 cache in a high-performance processor. Using an event-based programming model, programmers are able to realise performance increases of over 4x by manual creation of prefetch code, or 3.5x for the same application using an automatic compiler pass.

Speaker: Christopher Stone

Hyper-Heuristics is a search method for selecting and generating heuristics to solve combinatorial optimisation problems taking advantage of the abundance of heuristics developed to tackle a wide range of problem classes. Unfortunately heuristics, and the solutions they operate on, tend to have their own specific representation both in terms of underlying data structure and in the taxonomy used to describe their approach. This talk will present an approach based on graphs and graph transformations able to model multiple problem classes using the same data structure. This will include a discussion on the trade-offs of this approach and an overview of the latest empirical results.

Bio: Christopher L. Stone received his MEng degree in Software Engineering from Edinburgh Napier University. He is currently a PhD student under the supervision of Emma Hart and Ben Peachter at the same university. His main research interests are related to computational intelligence with a focus on representation of NP-Hard problems (Routing, packing and scheduling), generation of heuristics and graph transformations.

Speaker: Fabrizio Silvestri

Sponsored search aims at retrieving the advertisements that in the one hand meet users’ intent reflected in their search queries, and in the other hand attract user clicks to generate revenue. Advertisements are typically ranked based on their expected revenue that is computed as the product between their predicted probability of being clicked (i.e., namely clickability) and their advertiser provided bid. The relevance of an advertisement to a user query is implicitly captured by the predicted clickability of the advertisement, assuming that relevant advertisements are more likely to attract user clicks. However, this approach easily biases the ranking toward advertisements having rich click history. This may incorrectly lead to showing irrelevant advertisements whose clickability is not accurately predicted due to lack of click history. Another side effect consists of never giving a chance to new advertisements that may be highly relevant due to their lack of click history. To address this problem, we explicitly measure the relevance between an advertisement and a query without relying on the advertisement’s click history, and present different ways of leveraging this relevance to improve user search experience without reducing search engine revenue. Specifically, we propose a machine learning approach that solely relies on text-based features to measure the relevance between an advertisement and a query. We discuss how the introduced relevance can be used in four important use cases: pre-filtering of irrelevant advertisements, recovering advertisements with little history, improving clickability prediction, and re-ranking of the advertisements on the final search result page. Offline experiments using large-scale query logs and online A/B tests demonstrate the superiority of the proposed click-oblivious relevance model and the important roles that relevance plays in sponsored search.

Speaker: SICSA Event
A meeting of the SICSA PhD Conference 2017 organising committee. For more details about the conference, please see SICSA PhD Conference.

Speaker: Bob Sturm

I will discuss research aimed at making computers intelligent and sensitive enough to working with music data, whether acoustic or symbolic. Invariably, this includes a lot of work in applying machine learning to music collections in order to divine distinguishing and identifiable characteristics of practices that defy strict definition. Many of the resulting machine music listening systems appear to be musically sensitive and intelligent, but their fraudulent ways can be revealed when they are used to create music in the styles they have been taught to identify. Such "evaluation by generation” is a powerful way to gauge the generality of what a machine has learned to do. I will present several examples, focusing in particular on our work applying deep LSTM networks to modelling folk music transcriptions, and ultimately generating new music traditions.

References:

https://github.com/IraKorshunova/folk-rnn

https://highnoongmt.wordpress.com/2015/05/22/lisls-stis-recurrent-neural-networks-for-folk-music-generation/ 

https://highnoongmt.wordpress.com/?s=%22Deep+learning+for+assisting+the+process%22&submit=Search

https://youtu.be/YMbWwU2JdLg

https://youtu.be/RaO4HpM07hE 

https://soundcloud.com/sturmen-1

Speaker: SICSA Event
The 17th SCONE meeting will be held at the University of Glasgow on Thursday 12 January 2017 SCONE is the Scottish Networking Event, an informal gathering of networking and systems researchers in and around Scotland. The goal of the meeting is to encourage discussion and interaction between those working on systems-related things in Scotland. PhD students and RAs are encouraged to offer short (20 minute) talks on their work, and there will be time for announcements of interest to the community (job adverts, CFPs, data sets, tools, etc.). The goal is to be informal, to give chance of students to practice talks in a friendly atmosphere, and to give everyone chance to meet and chat to others working in similar areas. The schedule for the day is: 12:00 - 13:00 Lunch 13.00 - 14:30 Talks and announcements (Richard Cziva and Yuchen Zhao) 14:30 - 15:00 Coffee 15:00 - 16:00 Interactive session 16:00 - 16:20 Break 16:20 - 17:00 Talks (Stephen McQuistin) 17:00 Close (likely followed by drinks and dinner) Attendance is free, but registration is required (so we can order enough lunch and coffee…). Please email Colin Perkins to register, or to offer a talk. For more information please see the SCONE web-site

Speaker: Michael P. Oakes

Automatic author identification is a branch of computational stylometry, which is the computer analysis of writing style. It is based on the idea that an author’s style can be described by a unique set of textual features, typically the frequency of use of individual words, but sometimes considering the use of higher level linguistic features. Disputed authorship studies assume that some of these features are outside the author’s conscious control, and thus provide a reliable means of discriminating between individual authors. Many studies have successfully made use of high frequency function words like “the”, “of” and “and”, which tend to have grammatical functions rather than reveal the topic of the text. Their usage is unlikely to be consciously regulated by authors, but varies substantially between authors, texts, and even individual characters in Jane Austen’s novels. Using stylometric techniques, Oakes and Pichler (2013) were able to show that the writing style of the document “Diktat für Schlick” was much more similar to that of Wittgenstein than that of other philosophers of the Vienna Circle. Michael Oakes is currently researching the authorship of “The Dark Tower”, normally attributed to C. S. Lewis.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA sponsored Cyber Security Lecture is taking place at Glasgow Caledonian University on Friday 16 December 2016 at 12.30pm The Christmas lectures have been running since 2012, always the week before Christmas and always in Universities across Scotland. The lectures have been aimed at School pupils and the intention is to inspire a new generation into careers in cyber security and the digital sector. Supported by Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, SICSA, Young Scot, (ISC)2, BSides and Skills Development Scotland the free lectures compliment the three themes that the new National Progression Award in Cyber Security are based on: Digital Forensics Ethical Hacking Data Security Cyber Security is a fast evolving area of technology with many more well paid and fulfilling jobs than can be filled for many years. Scotland is taking a global lead in protecting and educating. These lectures, provided by industry experts, will bring the subject area to life in a educational but fun session. For information and how to register please see the Eventbrite Page

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA sponsored Cyber Security Lecture is taking place at Glasgow Caledonian University on Friday 16 December 2016 at 10.00am The Christmas lectures have been running since 2012, always the week before Christmas and always in Universities across Scotland. The lectures have been aimed at School pupils and the intention is to inspire a new generation into careers in cyber security and the digital sector. Supported by Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, SICSA, Young Scot, (ISC)2, BSides and Skills Development Scotland the free lectures compliment the three themes that the new National Progression Award in Cyber Security are based on: Digital Forensics Ethical Hacking Data Security Cyber Security is a fast evolving area of technology with many more well paid and fulfilling jobs than can be filled for many years. Scotland is taking a global lead in protecting and educating. These lectures, provided by industry experts, will bring the subject area to life in a educational but fun session. For information and how to register please see the Eventbrite Page

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA sponsored Cyber Security Lecture is taking place at the University of Edinburgh on Thursday 15 December 2016 at 12.30pm The Christmas lectures have been running since 2012, always the week before Christmas and always in Universities across Scotland. The lectures have been aimed at School pupils and the intention is to inspire a new generation into careers in cyber security and the digital sector. Supported by Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, SICSA, Young Scot, (ISC)2, BSides and Skills Development Scotland the free lectures compliment the three themes that the new National Progression Award in Cyber Security are based on: Digital Forensics Ethical Hacking Data Security Cyber Security is a fast evolving area of technology with many more well paid and fulfilling jobs than can be filled for many years. Scotland is taking a global lead in protecting and educating. These lectures, provided by industry experts, will bring the subject area to life in a educational but fun session. For information and how to register please see the Eventbrite Page

Speaker: Rod Murray-Smith

Rod will debrief us on NIPS 2016.

Speaker: Rod & Bjørn

Rod & Bjørn will discuss what was new at last week's NIPS conference https://nips.cc/Conferences/2016/ 

You can see the proceedings:

http://papers.nips.cc/book/advances-in-neural-information-processing-systems-29-2016 

And tutorials:

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pabbeel/nips-tutorial-policy-optimization-Schulman-Abbeel.pdf

http://www.iangoodfellow.com/slides/2016-12-04-NIPS.pdf

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~blei/talks/2016_NIPS_VI_tutorial.pdf

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~cristian/index_files/NIPS_NLP_for_CSS_tutorial.pdf  

New test environments for e.g. Reinforcement learning:

https://gym.openai.com/

https://deepmind.com/blog/open-sourcing-deepmind-lab/

Best paper

Value Iteration networks https://papers.nips.cc/paper/6046-value-iteration-networks.pdf

Interesting papers

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/LayerNormalization.pdf

Weight normalisation https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07868

https://github.com/reedscot/nips2016  and https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.03242v1.pdf

https://github.com/liuzhuang13/DenseNet

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.01164v2.pdf

https://papers.nips.cc/paper/6135-the-multiscale-laplacian-graph-kernel.pdf

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02282v3.pdf

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA sponsored Cyber Security Lecture is taking place at the University of Edinburgh on Thursday 15 December 2016 at 10.00am The Christmas lectures have been running since 2012, always the week before Christmas and always in Universities across Scotland. The lectures have been aimed at School pupils and the intention is to inspire a new generation into careers in cyber security and the digital sector. Supported by Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, SICSA, Young Scot, (ISC)2, BSides and Skills Development Scotland the free lectures compliment the three themes that the new National Progression Award in Cyber Security are based on: Digital Forensics Ethical Hacking Data Security Cyber Security is a fast evolving area of technology with many more well paid and fulfilling jobs than can be filled for many years. Scotland is taking a global lead in protecting and educating. These lectures, provided by industry experts, will bring the subject area to life in a educational but fun session. For information and how to register please see the Eventbrite Page

Speaker: Prof Sven-Bodo Scholz

Traditionally, programs are specified in terms of data structures and successive modifications of these. This separation dictates at what time which piece of data is located in what space, be it main memory, disc or registers. When aiming at high-performance, parallel executions of programs, it turns out that the choice of this time / space separation can have a vast impact on the performance that can be achieved. Consequently, a lot of work has been spent on compiler technology for identifying dependencies between data and on techniques for rearranging codes for improved locality with respect to both, time and space. As it turns out, the programmer specified choice of data-structures often limits what can be achieved by such optimisation techniques. In this talk, we argue that a new way of formulating parallel programs that is based on a unified view on space and time not only matches much better typical scientific specifications, it also increases the re-usability of programs and, most importantly, it enables more radical space-time optimisations through compilers.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA sponsored Cyber Security Lecture is taking place at the University of Dundee on Wednesday 14 December 2016 at 12.30pm The Christmas lectures have been running since 2012, always the week before Christmas and always in Universities across Scotland. The lectures have been aimed at School pupils and the intention is to inspire a new generation into careers in cyber security and the digital sector. Supported by Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, SICSA, Young Scot, (ISC)2, BSides and Skills Development Scotland the free lectures compliment the three themes that the new National Progression Award in Cyber Security are based on: Digital Forensics Ethical Hacking Data Security Cyber Security is a fast evolving area of technology with many more well paid and fulfilling jobs than can be filled for many years. Scotland is taking a global lead in protecting and educating. These lectures, provided by industry experts, will bring the subject area to life in a educational but fun session. For information and how to register please see the Eventbrite Page

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA sponsored Cyber Security Lecture is taking place at the University of Dundee on Wednesday 14 December 2016 at 10.00am The Christmas lectures have been running since 2012, always the week before Christmas and always in Universities across Scotland. The lectures have been aimed at School pupils and the intention is to inspire a new generation into careers in cyber security and the digital sector. Supported by Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, SICSA, Young Scot, (ISC)2, BSides and Skills Development Scotland the free lectures compliment the three themes that the new National Progression Award in Cyber Security are based on: Digital Forensics Ethical Hacking Data Security Cyber Security is a fast evolving area of technology with many more well paid and fulfilling jobs than can be filled for many years. Scotland is taking a global lead in protecting and educating. These lectures, provided by industry experts, will bring the subject area to life in a educational but fun session. For information and how to register please see the Eventbrite Page

Speaker: Colin Perkins

Over the last few months, the Section has been engaged in a review of our undergraduate curriculum and teaching. This talk will outline the changes we’re proposing, and what we hope to achieve by doing so

Speaker: Craig Reilly

When a small pattern graph does not occur inside a larger target graph, we can ask how to find “as much of the pattern as possible” inside the target graph. In general, this is known as the maximum common subgraph problem, which is much more computationally challenging in practice than subgraph isomorphism. We introduce a restricted alternative, where we ask if all but k vertices from the pattern can be found in the target graph. This allows for the development of slightly weakened forms of certain invariants from subgraph isomorphism which are based upon degree and number of paths. We show that when k is small, weakening the invariants still retains much of their effectiveness. We are then able to solve this problem on the standard problem instances used to benchmark subgraph isomorphism algorithms, despite these instances being too large for current maximum common subgraph algorithms to handle. Finally, by iteratively increasing k, we obtain an algorithm which is also competitive for the maximum common subgraph problem.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA sponsored Cyber Security Lecture is taking place at Robert Gordon University on Tuesday 13 December 2016 at 12.30pm The Christmas lectures have been running since 2012, always the week before Christmas and always in Universities across Scotland. The lectures have been aimed at School pupils and the intention is to inspire a new generation into careers in cyber security and the digital sector. Supported by Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, SICSA, Young Scot, (ISC)2, BSides and Skills Development Scotland the free lectures compliment the three themes that the new National Progression Award in Cyber Security are based on: Digital Forensics Ethical Hacking Data Security Cyber Security is a fast evolving area of technology with many more well paid and fulfilling jobs than can be filled for many years. Scotland is taking a global lead in protecting and educating. These lectures, provided by industry experts, will bring the subject area to life in a educational but fun session. For information and how to register please see the Eventbrite Page

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA sponsored Cyber Security Lecture is taking place at Robert Gordon University on Tuesday 13 December 2016 at 10.00am The Christmas lectures have been running since 2012, always the week before Christmas and always in Universities across Scotland. The lectures have been aimed at School pupils and the intention is to inspire a new generation into careers in cyber security and the digital sector. Supported by Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, SICSA, Young Scot, (ISC)2, BSides and Skills Development Scotland the free lectures compliment the three themes that the new National Progression Award in Cyber Security are based on: Digital Forensics Ethical Hacking Data Security Cyber Security is a fast evolving area of technology with many more well paid and fulfilling jobs than can be filled for many years. Scotland is taking a global lead in protecting and educating. These lectures, provided by industry experts, will bring the subject area to life in a educational but fun session. For information and how to register please see the Eventbrite Page

Speaker: Walid Magdy

Information retrieval (IR) is mainly concerned with retrieving relevant documents to satisfy the information needs of users. Many IR tasks involving different genres and search scenarios have been studied for decades. Typically, researchers aim to improve retrieval effectiveness beyond the current “state-of-the-art”. However, revisiting the modeling of the IR task itself is often essential before seeking improvement of results. This includes reconsidering the assumed search scenario, the approach used to solve the problem, or even the conducted evaluation methodology. In this talk, some well-known IR tasks are explored to demonstrate that beating the state-of-the-art baseline is not always sufficient. Novel modeling, understanding, or approach to IR tasks could lead to significant improvements in user satisfaction compared to just improving “objective” retrieval effectiveness. The talk includes example IR tasks, such as printed document search, patent search, speech search, and social media search.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA sponsored Cyber Security Lecture is taking place at An Loch, Inverness Campus on Monday 12 December 2016 a 12.30pm The Christmas lectures have been running since 2012, always the week before Christmas and always in Universities across Scotland. The lectures have been aimed at School pupils and the intention is to inspire a new generation into careers in cyber security and the digital sector. Supported by Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, SICSA, Young Scot, (ISC)2, BSides and Skills Development Scotland the free lectures compliment the three themes that the new National Progression Award in Cyber Security are based on: Digital Forensics Ethical Hacking Data Security Cyber Security is a fast evolving area of technology with many more well paid and fulfilling jobs than can be filled for many years. Scotland is taking a global lead in protecting and educating. These lectures, provided by industry experts, will bring the subject area to life in a educational but fun session. For information and how to register please see the Eventbrite Page

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA sponsored Cyber Security Lecture is taking place at An Loch, Inverness Campus on Monday 12 December 2016 The Christmas lectures have been running since 2012, always the week before Christmas and always in Universities across Scotland. The lectures have been aimed at School pupils and the intention is to inspire a new generation into careers in cyber security and the digital sector. Supported by Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, SICSA, Young Scot, (ISC)2, BSides and Skills Development Scotland the free lectures compliment the three themes that the new National Progression Award in Cyber Security are based on: Digital Forensics Ethical Hacking Data Security Cyber Security is a fast evolving area of technology with many more well paid and fulfilling jobs than can be filled for many years. Scotland is taking a global lead in protecting and educating. These lectures, provided by industry experts, will bring the subject area to life in a educational but fun session. For information and how to register please see the Eventbrite Page

Speaker: SICSA Event
The first general meet-up of the new SICSA Artificial Intelligence Research Theme will take place on Friday 9 December at Edinburgh Napier University. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a broad area: it covers reasoning, planning, knowledge representation, sensory perception, language understanding, learning, optimisation and other related areas, and has been approached in a variety of ways, ranging from biologically inspired ideas (including neural networks), to logic (of various sorts), to emulation of experts. The aim of this, and future theme meetings are: Strengthen research collaborations between SICSA members working in AI and related disciplines, leading to long-lasting interdisciplinary research partnerships; Stimulate improved collaboration between the various research sub-groups to identify new and emerging research areas; Share knowledge, expertise and tools to enhance AI research The schedule for the day is: 0930-1000: Arrival and coffee 1000-1010: Welcome address from Principal of Napier University 1010-1030: Introduction to the day: aim of the meeting, and outline of the day: LSS and EH 1030-1115: Research Snapshots Session 1 (PechaKucha[1]) 1115-1140: Coffee 1140-1225: Research Snapshots session 2 (PechaKucha) 1225-1250: Collation of Delegates Research Topics (Well-sorted[2]) 1250-1400: Lunch 1400-1415: Research Topics: Grouping (Well-sorted stage 2) 1415-1500: Research Snapshots session 3 (Pecha-Kucha) 1500-1505: Research Topic Groups revealed (Well-sorted stage 3) 1505-1600: Coffee and Group discussions 1600-1640: Feedback from groups 1640-1700: Summing up, and discussion of next stage for AI Theme 1700 onwards: delegates retire to nearby hostelry to continue discussions. [1] For information of PekkaKucha, see http://www.pechakucha.org [2] For more information on Well sorted, see http://www.well-sorted.org The Research Theme Leaders for Artificial Intelligence are Professor Emma Hart (e.hart@napier.ac.uk) and Professor Leslie Smith (l.s.smith@cs.stir.ac.uk).

Speaker: Mr Adrian Jackson

The hardware used in HPC systems is becoming much more diverse than we have been used to in recent times. Intel's latest Xeon Phi processor, the Knights Landing (KNL), is one example of such change, however bigger changes in memory technologies and hierarchies are on the way. In this talk I will outline our experiences with the KNL, how future memory technologies are likely to impact the hardware in HPC systems, and what these changes might mean for users.

Speaker: Dhahi Alshammari

Much cloud computing research is performed using simulators. There are many simulators available. One of the most common simulators is "CloudSim", which is widely used as a cloud research tool.  This talk will review briefly the CloudSim system and its various extensions. The extensions provide additional usability features and improved simulation fidelity. I will further present results of an empirical study to evaluate the precision of CloudSim by comparing it with actual test-bed results from the Glasgow Raspberry Pi Cloud infrastructure

Speaker: Ruth Hoffman

With the wide applicability of probabilistic and stochastic hybrid systems in the real world, it is now more important than ever to be able to verify these systems for safety and reliability. Hybrid systems can be found anywhere, from thermostats to processes passing messages. We will discuss the different types of hybrid systems and their discrete abstractions. The probabilistic hybrid systems we will be focusing on are autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles. The abstracted structures allow for existing quantitative and model checking tools to verify and analyse the system.

Speaker: Catherine Higham

This meeting will comprise demos (MATCONVNET http://www.vlfeat.org/matconvnet/ using pre-trained models) for

 1.Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation

 https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jonlong/long_shelhamer_fcn.pdf;

 2. Fast R-CNN (Region-based Convolutional Network)

 https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.08083

see also Faster R-CNN https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.01497 though demo is only for Fast R-CNN.

 To put these demos in context, pages 35-47 (sematic segmentation), 48-61 (object detection), 62 (fast RCNN) and 68 (faster RCNN) in the following “Convolutional Networks for Computer Vision Applications” document are useful

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vedaldi/assets/teach/vedaldi16deepcv.pdf

Speaker: Mr Andy Till

The BEAM virtual machine has flexible and powerful tooling for introspection, statistics and debugging without affecting the running application. Erlyberly is an ongoing project to lower the barrier for entry for using these capabilities, focusing on tracing.

Speaker: Philip Petersen and Stefan Raue

Join us for the next in our series of meet-ups for aspiring technology entrepreneurs.  Our meet-ups bring you a range of inspiring speakers - from undergrad students who are just starting out with their first app venture, all the way to experienced CEOs who have built successful businesses, and everything in between.  The message is simple: creating your own start-up is hard work, heaps of fun, and an unparalleled learning experience.  All delivered with free pizza and refreshments, and lots of opportunities to network with other prospective entrepreneurs.

This month our speakers are:

STEFAN RAUE

Stefan Raue is a technology entrepreneur. After working with blue-chip companies like Vodafone and Bayer, he started his own company Bizvento in 2013. Bizvento offers scalable web and mobile technology for a global customer base in the event management industry. Developing and growing Bizvento provided Stefan with a wealth of insights, networks and experiences that he is now applying to the successful launch of GRN - a wearable and data analytics company based in Glasgow. In his talk Stefan will speak about the importance of the right team composition, start-up responsibilities, corporate life, support, funding, and discusses why "playing" start-up can be dangerous.

PHILIP PETERSEN

Philip Petersen has worked in the B2B ICT industry for over 30 years.  His experience ranges from working in large, international corporations to small businesses and bootstrapped start-ups, up to board level.  He has raised investment, has self-funded and he has exited.  Having moved to live in Scotland recently, he is getting involved in helping start-ups and scale-ups to grow.

Philip will talk about some of the things he has learned from the successes and failures in his career so far.  He will highlight the importance of sales and understanding the customer because without selling there is no business and there will be no investment.

Speaker: Dejice Jacob

In a sensor network, using sensor nodes with significant compute 
capability can enable flexible data collection, processing and reaction. This
can be done using commodity single-board computers. In this talk, we will be
describing initial deployment, software architecture and some preliminary analysis.

Speaker: Wei Chen

Abstract: Automatic malware classifiers often perform badly on the detection of new malware, i.e., their robustness is poor. We study the machine-learning-based mobile malware classifiers and reveal one reason: the input features used by these classifiers can't capture general behavioural patterns of malware instances. We extract the best-performing syntax- based features like permissions and API calls, and some semantics-based features like happen-befores and unwanted behaviours, and train classifiers using popular supervised and semi-supervised learning methods. By comparing their classification performance on industrial datasets collected across several years, we demonstrate that using semantics- based features can dramatically improve robustness of malware classifiers.

Bio: Dr Wei Chen is a Research Associate in School of Informatics at University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from University of Nottingham on Type Theory supervised by Prof. Roland C. Backhouse. In 2012 Wei worked with Prof. Martin Hofmann on type-based verification in Munich. He started his current RA with Prof. David Aspinall since 2013, focusing on learning policies for mobile security. Wei's main research interests are in formal methods, in particular, type theory, combinatorial games, and Buechi automata with their applications in program analysis and verification. He is currently working on combining formal methods and machine learning to help with mobile security.

Speaker: SICSA Event
The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community meets yearly to celebrate the strength of the research and to discuss how to move forward. This year we want to have attendees from all HCI or HCI-related groups in Scotland, since we are looking at how to move further and make HCI and your research stronger. We have invited two Keynotes: Professor Albrecht Schmidt (Stuttgart Uni) and Professor Alan Dix (Birmingham), we'll have everyone represented, and there will be plenty opportunities to network (with and without a Pint in hand). To register to attend the SICSA HCI All Hands Meeting, please visit the Eventbrite page - Registration is free~!! The meeting is organised by Miguel (St Andrews) and Martin (Strathclyde) who are the SICSA HCI Theme co-leaders. Their goal is to build on the extensive research base of the SICSA HCI groups in Scotland to make it even more collaborative, successful, and visible to the world.

Speaker: Dr. Mark Stevenson

The modern evidence-based approach to medicine is designed to ensure that patients are given the best possible care by basing treatment decisions on robust evidence. But the huge volume of information available to medical and health policy decision makers can make it difficult for them to decide on the best approach. Much of the current medical knowledge is stored in textual format and providing tools to help access it represents a significant opportunity for Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. However, automatically processing documents in this domain is not straightforward and doing so successfully requires a range of challenges to be overcome, including dealing with volume, ambiguity, complexity and inconsistency.  This talk will present a range of approaches from Natural Language Processing that support access to medical information. It will focus on three tasks: Word Sense Disambiguation, Relation Extraction and Contradiction Identification. The talk will outline the challenges faced when developing approaches for accessing information contained in medical documents, including the lack of available gold standard data to train systems. It will show how existing resources can help alleviate this problem by providing information that allows training data to be created automatically.

Speaker: Hui-Shyong Yeo

Screen sizes on devices are becoming smaller (eg. smartwatch and music player) and larger (eg. phablets, tablets) at the same time. Each of these trends can make devices difficult to use with only one hand (eg. fat-finger or reachability problem). This Single-Handed Interaction Problem (SHIP) is not new but it has been evolving along with a growth of larger and smaller interaction surfaces. The problem is exacerbated when the other hand is occupied (encumbered) or not available (missing fingers/limbs). The use of voice command or wrist gestures can be less robust or perceived as awkward in the public. 

This talk will discuss several projects (RadarCat UIST 2016, WatchMI MobileHCI 2016, SWIM and WatchMouse) in which we are working towards achieving/supporting effective single-handed interaction for mobile and wearable computing. The work focusses on novel interaction techniques that are not being explored thoroughly for interaction purposes, using ubiquitous sensors that are widely available such as IMU, optical sensor and radar (eg. Google Soli, soon to be available).

Biography:

Hui-Shyong Yeo is a second year PhD student in SACHI, University of St Andrews, advised by Prof. Aaron Quigley. Before that he worked as a researcher in KAIST for one year. Yeo has a wide range of interest within the field of HCI, including topics such as wearable, gestures, mixed reality and text entry. Currently he is focusing on single-handed interaction for his dissertation topic. He has published in conferences such as CHI, UIST, MobileHCI (honourable mention), SIGGRAPH and journals such as MTAP and JNCA.

Visit his homepage http://hsyeo.com or twitter @hci_research

Speaker: Hui-Shyong Yeo

This demo session will present the Google Soli Radar and Smartwatch interaction system

Biography:

Hui-Shyong Yeo is a second year PhD student in SACHI, University of St Andrews, advised by Prof. Aaron Quigley. Before that he worked as a researcher in KAIST for one year. Yeo has a wide range of interest within the field of HCI, including topics such as wearable, gestures, mixed reality and text entry. Currently he is focusing on single-handed interaction for his dissertation topic. He has published in conferences such as CHI, UIST, MobileHCI (honourable mention), SIGGRAPH and journals such as MTAP and JNCA.

Visit his homepage http://hsyeo.com or twitter @hci_research

Speaker: Scott MacKenzie

Speaker: Prof. Ann Blandford

Abstract: There is a plethora of technologies for helping people manage their health and wellbeing: from self-care of chronic conditions (e.g. renal disease, diabetes) and palliative care at end of life through to supporting people in developing mindfulness practices or managing weight or exercise. In some cases, digital health technologies are becoming consumer products; in others, they remain under the oversight of healthcare professionals but are increasingly managed by lay people. How (and whether) these technologies are used depends on how they fit into people’s lives and address people’s values. In this talk, I will present studies on how and why people adopt digital health technologies, the challenges they face, how they fit them into their lives, and how to identify design requirements for future systems. There is no one-size-fits-all design solution for any condition: people have different lifestyles, motivations and needs. Appropriate use depends on fitness for purpose. This requires either customisable solutions or solutions that are tailored to different user populations.

Biography: Ann Blandford is Professor of Human–Computer Interaction at University College London and Director of the UCL Institute of Digital Health. Her expertise is in human factors for health technologies, and particularly how to design systems that fit well in their context of use. She is involved in several research projects studying health technology design, patient safety and user experience. She has published widely on the design and use of interactive health technologies, and on how technology can be designed to better support people’s needs.

Speaker: Prof Greg Michaelson

In formalising denotational semantics, Strachey introduced a higher order update function for the modelling of stores, states and environments. This function relies solely on atomic equality types, lambda abstractions and conditions to represent stack disciplined association sequences as structured closures, without recourse to data structure constructs like lists.

Here, we present higher order functions that structure closures to model queue, linear ordered and tree disciplined look up functions, again built from moderately sugared pure lambda functions. We also discuss their type properties and practical implementation.

Speaker: None

Masters Prizes 2015-16

Speaker: John O'Donnell

Speaker: André Nichterlein

Parameterized complexity analysis is a flourishing field dealing with the exact solvability of "intractable" problems. Appropriately parameterizing polynomial-time solvable problems helps reducing unattractive polynomial running times. In particular, this "FPT in P" approach sheds new light on what makes a problem far from being solvable in linear time, in the same way as classical FPT algorithms help in illuminating what makes an NP-hard problem far from being solvable in polynomial time. Surprisingly, this very interesting research direction has been too little explored so far; the known results are rather scattered and do not systematically refer to or exploit the toolbox of parameterized algorithm design.

In this talk, I will introduce the field of "FPT in P". To this end, I will outline known results, explain some of the corresponding techniques, and highlight similarities and differences to the classical design of parameterized algorithms for NP-hard problems.

Speaker: everyone

A chance to catch up informally with members of the IDA section in the Computing Science Common Room.

Speaker: Dr. Gianluca Demartini

Human Computation is a novel approach used to obtain manual data processing at scale by means of crowdsourcing. In this talk we will start introducing the dynamics of crowdsourcing platforms and provide examples of their use to build hybrid human-machine information systems. We will then present ZenCrowd: a hybrid system for entity linking and data integration problems over linked data showing how the use of human intelligence at scale in combination with machine-based algorithms outperforms traditional systems. In this context, we will then discuss efficiency and effectiveness challenges of micro-task crowdsourcing platforms including spam, quality control, and job scheduling in crowdsourcing.

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA Conference on Big Data Science Innovations: Prospects in Smart Cities, Media and Governance will take place on Friday 18th November at the University of Stirling Big Data Science has undoubtedly gained relevance in various sectors of society, and efforts to harness its potential have become a priority for the industry, government, and academia alike. The recent, Scottish Government driven Smart Cities Alliance initiative is a prime example of an imminent shift towards future data-driven societies, whereby big data empowers: a) city governments, including through e-governance and open data platforms; b) journalists, for example, through the adoption of web metrics to develop news agenda, Big data/content management systems and embryonic forms of artificial intelligence for newsrooms; and c) citizens, including through their active engagement in compiling, disseminating and interpreting Big Data, subsequently leading to the development of smart applications with the potential to enhance civic society. Last year’s announcement by the Scottish Infrastructure and Cities Secretary, Keith Brown, that a 15 million euro (£11.1 million) fund would be allocated to help make Scotland's cities "smarter" through the use of new cutting-edge technological infrastructure, has made it clear that the development and management of big data analytic systems is to be a priority within the strategic planning of seven Scottish cities forming the Scottish Cities Alliance. Within this ecosystem, it is of paramount importance that academia becomes a complementary actor assisting in the design, evolution, explanation and evaluation of the technological infrastructures mediating public life. This first of its kind, one-day SICSA funded Conference seeks to create networking space where data scientists, technologists and scholars involved with journalism, governance, and civic life can deliberate on best ways to boost the development and exploitation of big data analytics, particularly in Scotland. The goal is to impart an understanding of the strengths and limitations of some of the key data science technologies as they impact the future development of smart cities, open governance and data journalism. In particular, we will explore implications of current approaches to data analysis within city government, local news, academic public research and civic engagement, and ask whether they are compatible with a healthy, democratic and self-sustainable agenda of innovation. We invite multi-disciplinary academics, PhD research students, technologists, policy makers, media practitioners, community developers and think tanks interested in Big Data Science. The conference is intended to stimulate discussions on the following key themes: The current state-of-the-art within the emerging Scottish (and global) socio-technical ecosystem in smart cities, open governance, data journalism and civic innovation. The potential risks and benefits to this ecosystem emerging from current trends in data science and artificial intelligence NOTE for SICSA PhD students SICSA, as part of its sponsorship of this Conference, is covering the full registration fee for ALL (SICSA and non-SICSA funded) PhD students in computer science departments of SICSA member Scottish universities (for a full list of SICSA Universities, see: http://www.sicsa.ac.uk/about-us/our-members/). The number of SICSA students is limited and a decision on ranking may be taken if necessary. Note that SICSA sponsored PhD students will be responsible for their own travel arrangements and expenses to get to Stirling – they should be able to access local support from their own Schools/Departments to support such travel. All SICSA PhD students are required to include a short statement on their research interests and achievements (no more than 200 words - including career stage and publication details if any) - at the time of submitting their Abstract. Registration will open via Eventbrite soon. Please see the Conference Web-Site for more details.  

Speaker: John Rooksby

In this talk I’ll discuss a paper I’ll be presenting at OzCHI 2016.

Abstract: "This paper discusses the ethical dimensions of a research project in which we deployed a personal tracking app on the Apple App Store and collected data from users with whom we had little or no direct contact. We describe the in-app functionality we created for supporting consent and withdrawal, our approach to privacy, our navigation of a formal ethical review, and navigation of the Apple approval process. We highlight two key issues for deployment-based research. Firstly, that it involves addressing multiple, sometimes conflicting ethical principles and guidelines. Secondly, that research ethics are not readily separable from design, but the two are enmeshed. As such, we argue that in-action and situational perspectives on research ethics are relevant to deployment-based research, even where the technology is relatively mundane. We also argue that it is desirable to produce and share relevant design knowledge and embed in-action and situational approaches in design activities.”

Authors: John Rooksby, Parvin Asadzadeh, Alistair Morrison, Claire McCallum, Cindy Gray, Matthew Chalmers. 

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Professor Philip J Scott from the University of Ottawa will be giving a talk titled “A Coorinatization of Countable MV algebras” at Heriot-Watt University. Abstract: The algebras of many-valued Lukasiewicz logics (MV algebras) as well as the algebras of quantum measurement (Effect algebras) have undergone major development since the 1980s and 1990s; they have connections with a wide range of areas, from logic to operator algebras to mathematical physics. I will give a brief introduction to MV algebras, as well as the moregeneral world of effect algebras. Time permitting, I hope to illustrate these notions by sketching recent results (with Mark Lawson) on coordinatization of countable MV-algebras using inverse semigroup theory. The structures involved, Boolean inverse monoids, have recently arisen in areas related to non-commutative Stone duality, aperiodic tilings, etc. We prove that every countable MV algebra is isomorphic to the lattice of principal ideals of certain Boolean inverse monoids. The specific class involved in the proof, AF inverse monoids, corresponds to AF C*-algebras and arises from Bratteli diagrams of countable dimension groups. If there's time, further new directions by F. Wehrung, D. Mundici, et. al. will be discussed. Bio: P. J. Scott is a mathematical logician working in category theory, proof theory, and theoretical computer science. In 1986 he published the book Introduction to Higher Order Categorical Logic (Cambridge University Press) with J. Lambek, which has been highly inuential both in the development of categorical logic, and in its applications in theoretical computer science. In particular, the book establishes the close connections between various type theories, categories, and logics. It thus motivated later works on using category theory and related machinery in programming languages, as well as operational and denotational semantics. Professor Scott is currently Associate Editor of the Cambridge journal Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, and a Coordinating Editor of the North-Holland journal Annals of Pure and Applied Logic. In Canada, his research funding comes from NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada). Since the early 1990s, Prof. Scott has published foundational papers in areas relating categorical logic to theoretical computer science. Chris Heunen is hosting Professor Philip Scott’s visit to Scotland and the local organiser for this talk is Laura Ciobanu Radomirovic

Speaker: Mr Stan Manilov

Automatic parallelisation is an old research topic, but unfortunately, it
has always been over-promising and under-performing. In this talk, we'll
look at the main approaches towards automatically detecting parallelism in
legacy sequentialcode and we'll follow with some fresh ideas we're working
on, aiming to bring us beyond the ubiquitous dependence analysis.

Speaker: Tosan Atele-Williams

Speaker: Patrick Prosser

In the maximum clique problem, we are given a simple graph (with vertices and edges), and we are to find a largest set of vertices such that all pairs of vertices in that set are adjacent. In the maximum weight clique problem (mwc), vertices have weight, and we are to find a set of pair-wise adjacent vertices such that the sum of the weights of those vertices is as big as can be. In my talk I will present an exact algorithm for this problem, present some real-world problems (one that is very close to home) that are in fact instances of mwc. I'll review the current state of empirical studies of mwc and suggest future directions of study.

Speaker: everyone

A chance to catch up informally with members of the IDA section in the Computing Science Common Room.

Speaker: SICSA Event
DEMOfest is our annual technology showcase of leading Informatics and Computer Science research from Scottish Universities and it creates an environment for industry partners and academics to come together and identify opportunities for: Collaborative Innovation Studentships, Placements and Recruitment Technology Licensing & Consultancy Feasibility & Proof of Concept Studies DEMOfest 2016 takes place on 11th November 2016 (4-7pm) at the Technology and Innovation Centre, University of Strathclyde. The event is organised in partnership with ScotlandIS - Scotland's trade body for the ICT sector. This free event is open to businesses large and small; the public sector; academics and research students. The 2016 event will feature: Keynote presentations on Cyber-Security and Big Data 50 researcher exhibitions on Big Data; Cyber-Security; User-Experience; Robotics and Autonomous Systems; Artificial Intelligence; and Networks and the Cloud Exhibitions from key stakeholders in the technology sector We have opportunities for Event-Partners at the 2016 event, who wish to exhibit in the main hall. If you would like to raise the profile of your brand at DEMOfest 2016, please contact admin@sicsa.ac.uk. Thank you to our 2016 Event Partners

Speaker: Rod Murray-Smith

I will present an empirical comparison of four models from manual control theory on their ability to model targeting behaviour by human users using a mouse: McRuer's Crossover, Costello's Surge, second-order lag (2OL), and the Bang-bang model. Such dynamic models are generative, estimating not only movement time, but also pointer position, velocity, and acceleration on a moment-to-moment basis. We describe an experimental framework for acquiring pointing actions and automatically fitting the parameters of mathematical models to the empirical data. We present the use of time-series, phase space and Hooke plot visualisations of the experimental data, to gain insight into human pointing dynamics. We find that the identified control models can generate a range of dynamic behaviours that captures aspects of human pointing behaviour to varying degrees. Conditions with a low index of difficulty (ID) showed poorer fit because their unconstrained nature leads naturally to more dynamic variability. We report on characteristics of human surge behaviour in pointing.

We report differences in a number of controller performance measures, including Overshoot, Settling time, Peak time, and Rise time. We describe trade-offs among the models. We conclude that control theory offers a promising complement to Fitts' law based approaches in HCI, with models providing representations and predictions of human pointing dynamics which can improve our understanding of pointing and inform design.

Speaker: John Williamson

John Williamson will cover probabilistic programming in Python. He will quickly go over using PyMC to put together (very) simple probabilistic models by simply writing down the graphical model, and then perform inference on them with a MCMC sampler. The materials can be found  at https://github.com/johnhw/prob_prog as a notebook. 

Speaker: Prof Quintin Cutts, Dr Alice Miller, Prof Simon Gay

The BIG RA event is an opportunity for RAs to get together, learn some useful information, and then socialise in a relaxing atmosphere. The event will consist of two parts: seminar and bowling.

Seminar (SAWB/422) -- all are welcome! (including PhD students and academics)
                2pm – Prof Quintin Cutts – Teaching opportunities and recognition within the School
                2.30pm -- Dr Alice Miller -- Athena Swan: role and activities
                3pm – Prof Simon Gay – Promotion at Glasgow University

Bowling (Glasgow Bowl, Springfield Quay, Glasgow G5 8NP)
                Time: 5.30pm

Please, get in touch with either Natalia (Natalia.Chechina@glasgow.ac.uk) or Waqar (Syed.Nabi@glasgow.ac.uk) if for some reason you haven't booked a place for the bowling yet.

Speaker: SICSA Event
Scottish Programming Languages Seminar (SPLS) The Scottish Programming Languages Seminar is an informal meeting for the discussion of any aspect of programming languages. The next SPLS will take place on Wednesday 9 November at the University of Strathclyde. Information and updates about the November edition of SPLS will be sent via the SPLS Mailing List. Registration Please register using this form. Time and place 12:00–17:45, 9 November, McCance Building, (Room 301) University of Strathclyde. Programme 12.00 Lunch (provided) 13.00 Consistency of Quine’s NF using nominal techniques - Jamie Gabbay 14.00 Coffee 14.30 Relating Channels and Actor-based Languages in Concurrent Lambda-Calculi - Simon Fowler 15.00 Provably Correct Transformation of Specifications into Programs - Martin Ward 15.30 Update on new SICSA Research Themes and funding - Katya Komendantskaya 15.45 Coffee 16.15 Type-Driven Design of Communicating Systems using Idris - Jan de Muijnck-Hughes 16.45 The essence of Frank programming - Craig McLaughlin 17.15 Irrelevant classical logic in Agda - Stephen Dolan 17.45 Pub For more information please see https://msp-strath.github.io/spls-16/

Speaker: Multiple

The Scottish Programming Languages Seminar is an informal meeting for the discussion of any aspect of programming languages. The next SPLS will take place on Wednesday 9 November at the University of Strathclyde.

Details: https://msp-strath.github.io/spls-16/

Programme

Speaker: Patrick Maier

The AJITPar project aims to automatically tune skeleton-based parallel
programs such that the task granularity falls within a range that
promises decent performance: Tasks should run long enough to amortise
scheduling overheads, but not too long.

In this talk, I will sketch how AJITPar uses dynamic cost models to
accurately estimate mean task runtimes, despite irregular task sizes.
The key is random scheduling and robust linear regression.

(Joint work with Magnus Morton and Phil Trinder.)

Speaker: Hans Hüttel

The framework of psi-calculi introduced by Bengtson et al. makes it possible to give a general account of variants of the pi-calculus. We use this framework to describe a generic session type system for variants of the pi-calculus. In this generic system, standard properties, including fidelity, hold at the level of the framework and are then guaranteed to hold when the generic system is instantiated.

We show that our system can capture existing systems including the session type system due to Gay and Hole, a type system for progress due to Vieira and Vasconcelos and a refinement type system due to Baltazar et al.  The standard fidelity property is proved at the level of the generic system, and automatically hold when the system is instantiated.

Speaker: everyone

A chance to catch up informally with members of the IDA section in the Computing Science Common Room.

Speaker: Dr. Leif Azzopardi

Interactive Information Retrieval (IR) systems often provide various features and functions, such as query suggestions and relevance feedback, that a user may or may not decide to use. The decision to take such an option has associated costs and may lead to some benefit. Thus, a savvy user would take decisions that maximises their net benefit. In this talk, we will go through a number of formal models which examine the costs and benefits of various decisions that users, implicitly or explicitly, make when searching. We consider and analyse the following scenarios: (i) how long a user's query should be? (ii) should the user pose a specific or vague query? (iii) should the user take a suggestion or re-formulate? (iv) when should a user employ relevance feedback? and (v) when would the "find similar" functionality be worthwhile to the user? To this end, we analyse a series of cost-benefit models exploring a variety of parameters that affect the decisions at play. Through the analyses, we are able to draw a number of insights into different decisions, provide explanations for observed behaviours and generate numerous testable hypotheses. This work not only serves as a basis for future empirical work, but also as a template for developing other cost-benefit models involving human-computer interaction.

This talk is based on the recent ICTIR 2016 paper with Guido Zuccon: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2970412

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Professor Philip J Scott from the University of Ottawa will be giving a talk titled "An introduction to many-valued logics and effect algebras" at the University of Strathclyde on Wednesday 2 November. Abstract: The algebras of many-valued Lukasiewicz logics (MV algebras) as well as the theory of quantum measurement (Effect algebras) have undergone considerable development in the 1980s and 1990s; they now constitute important research fields, with connections to several contemporary areas of mathematics, logic, and theoretical computer science. Both subjects have recently attracted considerable interest among groups of researchers in categorical logic and foundations of quantum computing. I will give a leisurely introduction to MV algebras (and their associated logics), as well as the more general world of effect algebras. If time permits, we will also illustrate some new results (with Mark Lawson, Heriot-Watt) on coordinatization of some concrete MV-algebras using inverse semigroup theory. Bio: P. J. Scott is a mathematical logician working in category theory, proof theory, and theoretical computer science. In 1986 he published the book Introduction to Higher Order Categorical Logic (Cambridge University Press) with J. Lambek, which has been highly inuential both in the development of categorical logic, and in its applications in theoretical computer science. In particular, the book establishes the close connections between various type theories, categories, and logics. It thus motivated later works on using category theory and related machinery in programming languages, as well as operational and denotational semantics. Professor Scott is currently Associate Editor of the Cambridge journal Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, and a Coordinating Editor of the North-Holland journal Annals of Pure and Applied Logic. In Canada, his research funding comes from NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada). Since the early 1990s, Prof. Scott has published foundational papers in areas relating categorical logic to theoretical computer science. Chris Heunen is hosting Professor Philip Scott’s visit to Scotland

Speaker: Dr Rob Stewart

FPGAs are chips that can be reconfigured to exactly match the structure
of a specific algorithm. They are faster than CPUs and need less power
than GPUs, and hence are well suited for remote image processing needs.
They are however notoriously difficult to program, which is often done
by hardware experts working at a very low level. This excludes algorithm
designers across a range of real world domains from exploiting FPGA
technology. Moreover, time and space optimisation opportunities found in
compilers of high level languages cannot be applied to low level
hardware descriptions.

This talk will be in three parts. 1) I will present RIPL, our image
processing FPGA DSL. It comprises algorithmic skeletons influenced by
stream combinator languages, meaning the RIPL compiler is able to
generate space efficient hardware. 2) I will demonstrate our compiler
based dataflow transformations framework, which optimises the dataflow
IR form of RIPL programs before they are synthesised to FPGAs. 3) I will
describe the FPGA based smart camera architecture that RIPL programs
slot into, which is used for evaluation.

Speaker: SICSA Event
Dr Thomas Bolander, Technical University of Denmark (DTU) will be giving a talk at the University of Edinburgh on “Epistemic Planning with Implicit Coordination" ABSTRACT: In this talk we address the problem of learnability of action models in the context of dynamic epistemic logic. Dynamic epistemic logic is a very expressive formalism for reasoning about (higher-order) knowledge of agents, and for reasoning about the dynamics of such knowledge under the execution of actions. Dynamic epistemic logic provides a very expressive formalism for epistemic planning: planning in which the agents are enriched with the ability to do (higher-order) reasoning about their own knowledge and ignorance, and the knowledge and ignorance of other agents. The ultimate goal of the current work is to integrate learning of actions via observations into epistemic planning. We consider two basic learnability criteria in our setting: finite identifiability (conclusively inferring the appropriate action model in finite time) and identifiability in the limit (inconclusive convergence to the right action model). We show that deterministic actions are finitely identifiable, while arbitrary (non-deterministic) actions require more learning power---they are identifiable in the limit. We then move on to a particular learning method, i.e., learning via update, which proceeds via restriction of a space of events within a learning-specific action model. We show how this method can be adapted to learn conditional and non-conditional action models. This is joint work with Nina Gierasimczuk. BIO: Thomas Bolander is an associate professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in Copenhagen. His research interests are include logic, artificial intelligence, social intelligence, multi-agent systems and automated planning. Of special interest is the modelling of social phenomena and social intelligence with the aim of creating computer systems that can interact intelligently with humans and other computer systems. His recent research focus has been on epistemic planning: enriching the theories of automated planning with the powerful and expressive concepts and structures from dynamic epistemic logic. HOST: Ron Petrick (R.Petrick@hw.ac.uk)

Speaker: Natalia Chechina

I’m going to give this talk at the end of November at BuildStuff developer conferences in Vilnius (Lithuania) and Kiev (Ukraine).  So it’s a bit skewed towards developer community rather than research community.  Any feedback will be very much appreciated.

I’ll talk about scalability and fault tolerance features of distributed Erlang. In particular, what makes it so good for large scale distributed applications on commodity hardware, where devices are inherently non-reliable and can disappear and re-appear at any moment.

The talk is based on experience of developing Scalable Distributed Erlang (SD Erlang -- a small extension of distributed Erlang for distributed scalability) and integrating Erlang in robotics. So, I’ll share rationale behind design decisions for SD Erlang, lessons learned, advantages, limitations, and plans for the further development. And then talk about benefits of Erlang in distributed robotics, initial findings, and plans.

Speaker: David Manlove

The Hospitals / Residents problem with Couples (HRC) models the allocation of intending junior doctors to hospitals, where couples are allowed to submit joint preference lists over pairs of (typically geographically close) hospitals. In this context we seek a stable matching of doctors to hospitals, but for some instances, such a matching may not exist.  We thus consider MIN BP HRC, the problem of finding a matching that is "as stable as possible" (i.e., admits the minimum number of blocking pairs).  We present some new complexity results for this problem - in general it is NP-hard and difficult to approximate.  We then present the first Integer Programming (IP) and Constraint Programming (CP) models for MIN BP HRC.  Finally, we discuss an empirical evaluation of these models applied to randomly-generated instances of the problem.  We find that on average, the CP model is about 1.15 times faster than the IP model, and when presolving is applied to the CP model, it is on average 8.14 times faster.  We further observe that the number of blocking pairs admitted by a solution is very small, i.e., usually at most 1, and never more than 2, for the (28,000) instances considered.

Speaker: everyone

A chance to catch up informally with members of the IDA section in the Computing Science Common Room.

Speaker: Martin White

For the last 46 years Martin has been a professional information scientist, though often in secret. Since founding Intranet Focus Ltd he has found that the awareness of research into topics such as information behaviour, information quality and information seeking in his clients is close to zero. This is especially true in information retrieval. In his presentation Martin will consider why this is the case, what the impact might be and what (if anything) should and could be done to change this situation.

Speaker: Douglas McCallum

Our speaker tonight will be Douglas McCallum asking "How come none of you are using Cobol?"

Thanks to our sponsors Cultivate, SkyScanner and Glasgow University for making the event possible.

Send any questions to either @KevinBrolly, @aaronbassett or @wattid
The event starts at 6:30pm on the 5th Floor, 18 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow University, G12 8QQ

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Professor Philip Scott from the University of Ottawa will be giving a talk entitled "From Goedel to Lambek: studies in the foundations of logic and computation" on Wednesday 26 October at Heriot-Watt University. Abstract: In this talk, I want to re-examine some foundations of mathematics and computability theory, based on more recent results in type theory and categorical logic. We shall focus on some themes surrounding computability: What is a computable function? What are "natural" theories of computable functions? What is truth and what are Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorems? Finally, if time permits, I would like to discuss a candidate for an "ideal" model for a moderate constructivist, allowing us to reconcile various competing foundational philosophies. Many of these issues come from my early work with my late colleague Joachim Lambek (McGill). Bio: P. J. Scott is a mathematical logician working in category theory, proof theory, and theoretical computer science. In 1986 he published the book Introduction to Higher Order Categorical Logic (Cambridge University Press) with J. Lambek, which has been highly inuential both in the development of categorical logic, and in its applications in theoretical computer science. In particular, the book establishes the close connections between various type theories, categories, and logics. It thus motivated later works on using category theory and related machinery in programming languages, as well as operational and denotational semantics. Professor Scott is currently Associate Editor of the Cambridge journal Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, and a Coordinating Editor of the North-Holland journal Annals of Pure and Applied Logic. In Canada, his research funding comes from NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada). Since the early 1990s, Prof. Scott has published foundational papers in areas relating categorical logic to theoretical computer science. The host of Professor Philip Scott visit to Scotland is Chris Heunen.

Speaker: Prof Kevin Hammond

Evolutionary multi-agent systems (EMAS) play a critical role in many artificial intelligence applications that are in use today. This talk will describe a new parallel pattern for parallel EMAS computations, and its associated skeleton implementation, written in Erlang using the Skel library. The skeleton enables us to flexibly capture a wide variety of concrete evolutionary computations that can exploit the same underlying parallel implementation. The use of the skeleton is shown on two different evolutionary computing applications: i) computing the minimum of the Rastrigin function; and ii) solving an urban traffic optimization problem. We can obtain very good speedups (up to 142.44× the sequential performance) on a variety of different parallel hardware from Raspberry Pis to large-scale multicores and Xeon Phi accelerators, while requiring very little parallelisation effort.

Speaker: Blair Archibald

 I have recently returned from a summer working at EPCC, one of the
  largest high performance computing (HPC) centres in the UK. In this
  talk I'll give give a whirlwind tour of what I got up to during my
  time there!

  I'll start by describing EPCC itself and how it fits into the wider
  HPC community. Then will dive into two of the projects I was involved
  in over summer.

  Firstly, the Adept project which tackles the challenges presented by
  the need for energy efficient computing. This project relies heavily
  on custom hardware to gain fine grain knowledge of power usage. We
  will see how at how energy scales with parallel efficiency, the
  potential hidden cost of programming languages, and some interesting
  future research directions.

  Next, the ExaFLOW project aimed at providing the next generation of
  computational fluid dynamics codes (ready for the "Exa-scale" era).
  We will dive into mixed precision analysis and discover how we can
  analyse floating-point behaviour of scientific codes by way of binary
  instrumentation.

Speaker: Fiona Skerman

An important problem in network analysis is to identify highly connected components or `communities'. Most popular clustering algorithms work by approximately optimising modularity. Given a graph G, the modularity of a partition of the vertex set measures the extent to which edge density is higher within parts than between parts; and the maximum modularity q*(G) of G is the maximum of the modularity over all partitions of V(G) and takes a value in the interval [0,1) where larger values indicates a more clustered graph.
Knowledge of the maximum modularity of random graphs helps determine the significance of a division into communities/vertex partition of a real network. We investigate the maximum modularity of Erdos-Renyi random graphs and find there are three different phases of the likely maximum modularity. This is joint work with Prof. Colin McDiarmid.

Bio: Fiona is a postdoc at Bristol University after a doctorate with Colin McDiarmid in Oxford. She has a particular interest in identifying community structure in networks and also more broadly in phase transitions, random graphs, network coding and positional games.

Speaker: everyone

A chance to catch up informally with members of the IDA section in the Computing Science Common Room.

Speaker: Dr Mauro Dragone

Building smart spaces combining IoT technology and robotic
capabilities is an important and extended challenge for EU R&D&I, and a key
enabler for a range of advanced applications, such as home automation,
manufacturing, and ambient assisted living (AAL). In my talk I will provide an
overview of robotic ecologies, i.e. systems made up of sensors, actuators and
(mobile) robots that cooperate to accomplish complex tasks. I will discuss the
Robotic Ecology vision and highlight how it shares many similarities with the
Internet of Things (IoT): The ideal aim on both fronts is that arbitrary
combinations of devices should be able to be deployed in everyday environments,
and there efficiently provide useful services. However, while this has the
potential to deliver a range of disruptive services and address some of the
limitations of current IoT efforts, their effective realization necessitates
both novel software engineering solutions and artificial intelligence methods
to simplify their large scale application in real world settings. I will
illustrate these issues by focusing on the results of the EU project RUBICON
(fp7rubicon.eu). RUBICON built robotic ecologies that can learn to adapt to
changing and evolving requirements with minimum supervision. The RUBICON
approach builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics,
machine learning, wireless sensor networks and software engineering. I will
summarise the lessons learned by adopting such an approach and outline
promising directions for future developments.

Biography:

Mauro Dragone is Assistant Professor with the Research Institute of Signals,
Sensors and Systems (ISSS), School of Engineering & Physical Sciences at
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. Dr. Dragone gained more
than 12 years of experience as a software architect and project manager in the
software industry before his involvement with academia. His research expertise
includes robotics, human-robot interaction, wireless sensor networks and
software engineering. Dr. Dragone was involved in a number of EU projects
investigating Internet of Things (IoT) and intelligent control solutions for
smart environments, before initiating and leading the EU project RUBICON
(fp7rubicon.eu).

Speaker: SICSA Event
SICSA DVF Professor Philip Scott from the University of Ottawa will be giving a talk entitled "An introduction to many-valued logics and effect algebras" on Tuesday 18 October at the Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh. Abstract: The algebras of many-valued Lukasiewicz logics (MV algebras) as well as the theory of quantum measurement (Effect algebras) have undergone considerable development in the 1980s and 1990s; they now constitute important research fields, with connections to several contemporary areas of mathematics, logic, and theoretical computer science. Both subjects have recently attracted considerable interest among groups of researchers in categorical logic and foundations of quantum computing. I will give a leisurely introduction to MV algebras (and their associated logics), as well as the more general world of effect algebras. If time permits, we will also illustrate some new results (with Mark Lawson, Heriot-Watt) on coordinatization of some concrete MV-algebras using inverse semigroup theory. Bio: P. J. Scott is a mathematical logician working in category theory, proof theory, and theoretical computer science. In 1986 he published the book Introduction to Higher Order Categorical Logic (Cambridge University Press) with J. Lambek, which has been highly inuential both in the development of categorical logic, and in its applications in theoretical computer science. In particular, the book establishes the close connections between various type theories, categories, and logics. It thus motivated later works on using category theory and related machinery in programming languages, as well as operational and denotational semantics. Professor Scott is currently Associate Editor of the Cambridge journal Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, and a Coordinating Editor of the North-Holland journal Annals of Pure and Applied Logic. In Canada, his research funding comes from NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada). Since the early 1990s, Prof. Scott has published foundational papers in areas relating categorical logic to theoretical computer science. Chris Heunen is hosting Professor Philip Scott's visit.

Speaker: Simon Jouet

OpenFlow has established itself as the defacto standard for Software Defined Networking (SDN) by separating the network's control and data planes. In this approach a central controller can alter the match-action pipeline of the individual switches using a limited set of fields and actions preventing. This inherent rigidity prevents the rapid introduction of new data plane functionality that would enable the design of new forwarding logic and other packet processing such as custom routing, telemetry, debugging, security, and quality of service.

In this talk I will present BPFabric a platform, protocol, and language-independent architecture to centrally program and monitor the data plane. It will cover the design of the switches and how they defer from "legacy" or OpenFlow switches and the design of a control API to orchestrate the infrastructure.

Speaker: All FATA members

Speaker: Gianni Amati

There is a growing interest to know how fast information spreads on social networks, how many unique users are participating to an event, the leading opinion polarity in a stream. Quantifying distinct elements on a flow information is thus becoming a crucial problem in many real time information retrieval or streaming applications. We discuss the state-of-art of quantification and show that many problems can be interpreted within a common framework. We introduce a new probabilistic framework for quantification and show as examples how to count opinions in a stream and how to compute the degrees of separation of a network.

Speaker: Dr Boris Grot

Web-scale online services mandate fast access to massive quantities of
data. In practice, this is accomplished by sharding the datasets across a
pool of servers within a datacenter and keeping each shard within a
server's main memory to avoid long-latency disk I/O. Accesses to non-local
shards take place over the datacenter network, incurring communication
delays that are 20-1000x greater than accesses to local memory. In this
talk, I will introduce Scale-Out NUMA -- a rack-scale architecture with an
RDMA-inspired programming model that eliminates chief latency overheads of
existing networking technologies and reduces the remote memory access
latency to a small factor of local DRAM. I will overview key features of
Scale-Out NUMA and will describe how it can bridge the semantic gap
between software and hardware through integrated support for atomic object
reads.

Bio:

Boris Grot is a Lecturer in the School of Informatics at the University of
Edinburgh. His research seeks to address efficiency bottlenecks and
capability shortcomings of processing platforms for big data. His recent
accomplishments include an IEEE Micro Top Pick and a Google Faculty
Research Award. Grot received his PhD in Computer Science from The
University of Texas at Austin and spent two years as a post-doctoral
fellow at the Parallel Systems Architecture Lab at EPFL.

Speaker: Phil Trinder

This session is essential for all members of the Systems Section. We will

• Meet new PhD students in the section
• Discuss progress since the Away Day
• Discuss strategic plans, including:
  • A Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) proposal
  • A high-profile Section Workshop as part of the School’s 60^th anniversary celebrations

 Feel free to propose other topics by email to Phil.Trinder@glasgow.ac.uk

Speaker: Phil Trinder

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is the de facto standard middleware

for modern robots. However, communication between 

ROS nodes has scalability and reliability issues in practice. This talk reports 

an  investigation into whether Erlang’s lightweight concurrency

and reliability mechanisms have the potential to address these issues.

The basis of the investigation is a pair of simple but typical

robotic control applications, namely two face-trackers: one using

ROS publish/subscribe messaging, and the other a bespoke Erlang

communication framework.

The talk reports experiments that compare five key aspects of the ROS

and Erlang face trackers. We find that Erlang communication scales

better, supporting at least 3.5 times more active processes (700 processes)

than its ROS-based counterpart (200 nodes) while consuming

half of the memory. However, while both face tracking prototypes

exhibit similar detection accuracy and transmission latencies

with 10 or fewer workers, Erlang exhibits a continuous increase in

the total time taken to process a frame as more agents are added,

which we have identified is caused by function calls from Erlang

processes to Python modules via ErlPort. A reliability study shows

that while both ROS and Erlang restart failed computations, the

Erlang processes restart 1000–1500 times faster than ROS nodes,

reducing robot component downtime and mitigating the impact of

the failures.

Joint work with Andreea Lutac, Natalia Chechina, and Gerardo Aragon-Camarasa

Speaker: Dr. Deepak Padmanabhan

Conventional unsupervised data analytics techniques have largely focused on processing datasets of single-type data, e.g., one of text, ECG, Sensor Readings and Image data. With increasing digitization, it has become common to have data objects having representations that encompass different "kinds" of information. For example, the same disease condition may be identified through EEG or fMRI data. Thus, a dataset of EEG-fMRI pairs would be considered as a parallel two-view dataset.  Datasets of text-image pairs (e.g., a description of a seashore, and an image of it) and text-text pairs (e.g., problem-solution text, or multi-language text from machine translation scenarios) are other common instances of multi-view data. The challenge in multi-view data analytics is about effectively leveraging such parallel multi-view data to perform analytics tasks such as clustering, retrieval and anomaly detection. This talk will cover some emerging trends in processing multi-view parallel data, and different paradigms for the same. In addition to looking at the different schools of techniques, and some specific techniques from each school, this talk will also be used to present some possibilities for future work in this area.

Dr. Deepak Padmanabhan is a lecturer with the Centre for Data Sciences and Scalable Computing at Queen's University Belfast. He obtained his B.Tech in Comp. Sc. and Engg. from Cochin University (Kerala, India), followed by his M.Tech and PhD, all in computer science, from Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Prior to joining Queen's, he was a researcher at IBM Research - India. He has over 40 publications across top venues in Data Mining, NLP, Databases and Information Retrieval. He co-authored a book on Operators for Similarity Search, published by Springer in 2015. He is the author on ~15 patent applications to the USPTO, including 4 granted patents. He is a recipient of the INAE Young Engineer Award 2015, and is a Senior Member of the ACM and the IEEE. His research interests include Machine Learning, Data Mining, NLP, Databases and Information Retrieval. Email: deepaksp@acm.org  URL: http://member.acm.org/~deepaksp

Speaker: John Williamson

For the IDI journal club, we'll be looking at t-SNE dimensional reduction, from the paper L.J.P. van der Maaten and G.E. Hinton.

Visualizing High-Dimensional Data Using t-SNE. Journal of Machine Learning Research 9(Nov):2579-2605, 2008. PDF https://lvdmaaten.github.io/publications/papers/JMLR_2008.pdf

 We'll be doing this one as an interactive notebook, with live code. The notebook is at https://github.com/johnhw/tsne_demo/blob/master/tsne_demo.ipynb

Speaker: Daniel Archambault

As we enter the big data age, the fields of information visualisation and data mining need to work together to tackle problems at scale.  Both of these areas provide complimentary techniques for big data.  Machine learning provides automatic methods that quickly summarise very large data sets which would otherwise be incomprehensible.  Information visualisation provides interfaces that leverage human creativity that can facilitate the discovery of unanticipated patterns.  This talk presents an overview of some of the work conducted in graph mining - an area of data mining that deals specifically with network data.  Subsequently, the talk considers synergies between these two areas in order to scale to larger data sets and examples of projects are presented.  We conclude with a discussion of how information visualisation and data mining can collaborate effectively together in the future.

Speaker: Jeremy Singer

This week, our Functional Programming in Haskell course began. We have around 4000 learners signed up for this massive open online course. Wim and I have spent the past six months developing the learning materials, mostly adapted from the traditional Functional Programming 4 course.

In this talk, I will give an overview of the challenges involved in setting up and running an online course. In short, hard work but very rewarding!

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/functional-programming-haskell/1

Speaker: WAVENET: A GENERATIVE MODEL FOR RAW AUDIO

This paper introduces WaveNet, a deep neural network for generating raw audio waveforms. The model is fully probabilistic and autoregressive, with the predictive distribution for each audio sample conditioned on all previous ones; nonetheless we show that it can be efficiently trained on data with tens of thousands of samples per second of audio. When applied to text-to-speech, it yields state-of-the-art performance, with human listeners rating it as significantly more natural sounding than the best parametric and concatenative systems for both English and Chinese. A single WaveNet can capture the characteristics of many different speakers with equal fidelity, and can switch between them by conditioning on the speaker identity. When trained to model music, we find that it generates novel and often highly realistic musical fragments. We also show that it can be employed as a discriminative model, returning promising results for phoneme recognition.

Speaker: Professor Saji Hameed

This old saying among weather forecasters is correct. Yet it does give little insight into the workings of the climate system.  While weather can be understood and simulated as instabilities arising within  the atmosphere,  climate involves interactions and exchanges of properties among a wide variety of subsystems that include for example the atmosphere, the ocean and land subsystems. I will first discuss an example of these interactions at play showcasing the El Nino phenomenon.  In the rest of the talk, I will endeavor to describe how software for climate models integrates experiences and expertise  across a wide range of disciplines and the computational challenges faced by the climate modeling community in doing so.

Biography: Professor Hameed is a Senior Associate Professor at the University of Aizu in Fukushima, Japan. He was the Director of Science at APCC, Korea and has been appointed a Senior Visiting Scientist at Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTECH).

He is credited with the discovery of an ocean-atmosphere coupled mode "Indian Ocean Dipole" which radically changed the prevailing paradigms. At APCC he pioneered an information technology based approach for generating and distributing climate information for societal benefit. He has also worked with APCC and its international partners to develop a climate prediction based approach to managing severe haze and forest fires in Southeast Asia, a severe environmental pollution issue in the area. He is also closely working with scientists at the National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology (Japan) to apply climate and weather science for renewable energy applications.

His current work includes investigating Super El Nino using computational modeling approaches, analyzing climate data using machine learning algorithms, tracking clouds and rain with low cost GPS chips, and continuing investigation into Indian Ocean Dipole that affects global climate.

Speaker: Julie Williamson, Hans-Wolfgang Loidl, Niall Barr, Jeremy SInger

How do we teach Computer Science to our university students? Do we make good use of technology to enhance our learning and teaching?

A SICSA Education sponsored workshop --- TEL4CS --- will take place at the School of Computing Science in the University of Glasgow on Friday 9th September 2016. Participation is welcomed from teachers and academics at all levels of Computing education. The workshop will be interactive, featuring:

• Raspberry Pi system development
• App-based classroom voting
• Arduino development
• Interactive Haskell programming tutorials

Speaker: Marc Roper

In recent years, software testing research has produced notable advances in the area of automated test data generation. It is now possible to take an arbitrary system and automatically generate volumes of high-quality test data. But the problem of checking the correctness or otherwise of the outputs (termed the "oracle problem") still remains.
This talk examines how machine learning techniques can be used to cluster and classify test outputs to separate failing and passing cases.
The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated and shown to have the potential to reduce by an order of magnitude the numbers of outputs that need to be examined following a test run.

This is joint work carried out with Rafig Almaghairbe

Biography: Dr Marc Roper is a Reader in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde. He has an extensive background in software engineering, particularly in understanding and addressing the problems associated with designing, testing, and evolving large software systems. Much of his research has incorporated significant empirical investigations: either based around controlled participant-based experiments or through the the analysis of open-source systems and large-scale repositories. His more recent work has explored the application of search-based strategies and machine learning techniques to software engineering problems such as test data generation, the identification of security anomalies, and automatic fault detection. His current interests lie in the area of software analytics, in particular building models of software systems behaviour to automatically identify and locate faults.

Speaker: Quintin, Rose and Joe - but it's a workshop with everyone participating

We have used broadly the same assessment and feedback practices in the School for decades - and they were designed when we had maximum class sizes of 20-30.  We now have L3 / L4 / M level classes regularly above 100 and occasionally up to and over 140.

We know that coursework and exam marking are the most onerous tasks of teaching a course.  Students are also reporting in the NSS that turnaround times and levels of feedback are an issue.

The purpose of the workshop therefore is to explore methods for handling these numbers, hopefully with a view to finding light-touch improvements that would be implementable this session.

Even if you can't make the whole session, please do come along for some of it.  We'll be breaking for coffee at around 11.

Tea / coffee and hopefully home-baking from Rose on offer too.

Speaker: Adam Linson

In this talk, I present my research on improvisation as a general form of adaptive expertise. My interdisciplinary approach takes music as a tractable domain for empirical studies, which I have used to ground theoretical insights from HCI, AI/robotics, psychology, and embodied cognitive science. I will discuss interconnected aspects of digital musical instrument (DMI) interface design a musical robotic AI system, and a music psychology study of sensorimotor influences on perceptual ambiguity. I will also show how I integrate this work with an inference-based model of neural functioning, to underscore implications beyond music. On this basis, I indicate how studies of musical improvisation can shed light on a domain-general capacity: our flexible, context-sensitive responsiveness to rapidly-changing environmental conditions.

Speaker: Sebastian Stein

Activity recognition research in computer vision and pervasive computing has made a remarkable trajectory from distinguishing full-body motion patterns to recognizing complex activities. Manipulation activities as occurring in food preparation are particularly challenging to recognize, as they involve many different objects, non-unique task orders and are subject to personal idiosyncrasies. Video data and data from embedded accelerometers provide complementary information, which motivates an investigation of effective methods for fusing these sensor modalities.

In this talk I present a method for multi-modal recognition of manipulation activities that combines accelerometer data and video at multiple stages of the recognition pipeline. A method for accelerometer tracking is introduced that provides for each accelerometer-equipped object a location estimate in the camera view by identifying a point trajectory that matches well the accelerometer data. It is argued that associating accelerometer data with locations in the video provides a key link for modelling interactions between accelerometer-equipped objects and other visual entities in the scene. Estimates of accelerometer locations and their visual displacements are used to extract two new types of features: (i)

Reference Tracklet Statistics characterizes statistical properties of an accelerometer’s visual trajectory, and (ii) RETLETS, a feature representation that encodes relative motion, uses an accelerometer’s visual trajectory as a reference frame for dense tracklets. In comparison to a traditional sensor fusion approach where features are extracted from each sensor-type independently and concatenated for classification, it is shown that by combining RETLETS and Reference Tracklet Statistics with those sensor-specific features performs considerably better. Specifically addressing scenarios in which a recognition

system would be primarily used by a single person (e.g., cognitive situational support), this thesis investigates three methods for adapting activity models to a target user based on user-specific training data. Via randomized control trials it is shown that these methods indeed learn user idiosyncrasies.

Speaker: Dr. Chiara Renso

During the first part of this talk I will overview my recent activity in the field of mobility data mining with particular interest in the study of semantics in trajectory data and the experience with the SEEK Marie Curie project [1] recently concluded.  Then I will present two highlights of tourism recommendation works based on the idea of semantic trajectories: TripBuilder [2] and GroupFinder [3].  Tripbuilder is based on the analysis of enriched tourist trajectories extracted from Flickr photos to suggest itineraries constrained by a temporal budget and based on the travellers preferences.  The Groupfinder framework recommends a group of friends with whom to enjoy a visit to a place, balancing the friendship relations of the group members with the user individual interests in the destination location.

[1] http://www.seek-project.eu
[2] Igo Ramalho Brilhante, José Antônio Fernandes de Macêdo, Franco Maria Nardini, Raffaele Perego,Chiara Renso. On planning sightseeing tours with TripBuilder. Inf. Process. Manage. 51(2): 1-15 (2015)
[3]  Igo Ramalho Brilhante, José Antônio Fernandes de Macêdo, Franco Maria Nardini, Raffaele Perego,Chiara Renso. Group Finder: An Item-Driven Group Formation Framework. MDM 2016: 8-17

Bio:

Dr. Chiara Renso holds a PhD and M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from University of Pisa (1992, 1997).  She is permanent researcher at ISTI Institute of CNR, Italy.  Her research interests are related to spatio-temporal data mining, reasoning, data mining query languages, semantic data mining, trajectory data mining.  She has been involved in several EU projects about mobility data mining.  She has been the scientific coordinator of an FP7 Marie-Curie project on semantic trajectories knowledge discovery called SEEK (www.seek-project.eu).  She was also coordinator of a bilateral CNR-CNPQ Italy-Brazil project on mobility data mining with Federal University of Cearà.  She is author of more than 90 peer-reviewed publications.  She is co-editor of the book "Mobility Data: Modelling, Management, and Understanding" edited by Cambridge Press in 2013; co-editor of the special issue for Journal on Knowledge and Information system (KAIS) on Context aware data mining; co-editor of International Journal of Knowledge and Systems Science (IJKSS) on Modelling Tools for Extracting Useful Knowledge and Decision Making.  She has been co-chair of three editions of the Workshop on Semantic Aspects of Data Mining in conjunction with IEEE ICDM conference.  She is a regular reviewer of ACM CIKM, ACM KDD, ACM SIGSPATIAL and many journals on these topics.

Speaker: Logitech staff

Logitech are visiting the school on Monday. As part of the visit they are going to talk about the company and their research interests. If you want to come along it will be at 11:00 in F121. Will be about 30-40 mins.

Speaker: Prof Neil Bergmann

Wireless sensor networks are becoming the eyes and ears (and other senses) of the Internet, allowing high temporal and spatial sampling of data from both the natural and the built environment.  The benefits of wireless operation often mean that such sensor nodes are battery powered, perhaps with some energy harvesting.  Usually, such sensors are limited in their temporal resolution by their limited energy.  "Dumb" sensors simply record and transmit raw transducer data streams for subsequent data analysis by powerful processors.  The majority of the energy used by such sensors is in the radio transmission of the raw data.  Communications energy can be saved, if the data can be compressed or otherwise on a "smart" sensor node, and only compressed or summary information sent, but this requires energy-efficient on-node processing.  This seminar summarises results from a past project using machine-learning techniques for on-sensor processing, and discusses proposals for how this on-sensor processing can be done in a more energy efficient fashion using reconfigurable hardware (FPGAs).

Biography. Prof. Neil Bergmann has been the Chair of Embedded Systems in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia since 2001.  He has Bachelors degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Arts from the University of Queensland, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh in 1984.  His research interests and in computer systems, especially reconfigurable computing and Wireless Sensor Networks.  He is on sabbatical leave, visiting University of Edinburgh during August 2016.

Speaker: Dr Stephen Kell

Today's diversity of languages, libraries and virtual machines ought to be a boon for programmers, but instead,they fragment our infrastructure, creating integration problems which limit the re-usability of code and the insight of tools. This is particularly evident in how language virtual machines (VMs) continue to exist within Unix processes rather than (as originally anticipated) replacing them. I'll motivate an alternative approach of embracing and extending Unix-like services, and illustrate this with two pieces of technical work: the libcrunch system for run-time type checking (to appear at OOPSLA this year), and an in-progress extension to support spatial memory safety using a technique reminiscent of safe virtual machines. Finally I'll highlight some other potential and/or in-progress applications of the underlying infrastructure, including a precise whole-process garbage collector and a "wide-spectrum" multi-language programming environment.

Speaker: Angie Maguire

Speaker: Granit Luzhnica

In this talk I will present a study we performed in to investigate the communication of natural language messages using a wearable haptic display. Our research experiments investigated both the design of the haptic display, as well as the methods for communication that use it. First, three wearable configurations are proposed basing on haptic perception fundamentals and evaluated in the first study. To encode symbols, we use an overlapping spatiotemporal stimulation (OST) method, that distributes stimuli spatially and temporally with a minima gap. Second, we propose an encoding for the entire English alphabet and a training method for letters, words and phrases. A second study investigates communication accuracy. It puts four participants through five sessions, for an overall training time of approximately 5 hours per participant. 

Speaker: journal club

We will be reading 

Learning to Generate Images with Perceptual Similarity Metrics, Karl Ridgeway, Jake Snell, Brett D. Roads, Richard S. Zemel, Michael C. Mozer 

http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06409

Speaker: Prof Steve Benford

It’s terrifically exciting to see to arrival of Pokémon Go as the first example of a mixed reality game to  reach a mass audience. Maybe we are witnessing the birth of a new game format? As someone who  has been involved in developing and studying mixed reality entertainment for over fifteen years now, it’s also unsurprising to see people getting hot and bothered about how such games impact on the public settings in which they is played – is Pokémon Go engaging, healthy and social on the one hand or inappropriate, annoying and even dangerous on the other?

 My talk will draw on diverse examples of mixed reality entertainment – from artistic performances and games to museum visits and amusement rides (and occasionally on Pokémon Go too) to reveal the opportunities and challenges that arise when combining digital content with physical experience. In response, I will introduce an approach to creating engaging, coherent and appropriate mixed reality experiences based on designing different kinds of trajectory through hybrid structures of digital and physical content.

 Steve Benford is Professor of Collaborative Computing in the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham where he also directs the ‘Horizon: My Life in Data’ Centre for Doctoral Training. He was previously an EPSRC Dream Fellow, Visiting Professor at the BBC and Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research. He has received best paper awards at the ACM’s annual Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference in 2005, 2009, 2011 and 2012. He also won the 2003 Prix Ars Electronica for Interactive Art, the 2007 Nokia Mindtrek award for Innovative Applications of Ubiquitous Computing, and has received four BAFTA nominations. He was elected to the CHI Academy in 2012. His book Performing Mixed Reality was published by MIT Press in 2011.

Speaker: Bernard Goossens

Manycore processors mark time. They barely reach a hundred of cores after ten years of existence. According to Moore's law, we should have more than a thousand. The GPU themselves have more than 5000 SP+DP cores. In the talk I will show that it mainly comes from a useless complexity of the memory (tens of MB when a GPU uses only a few MB) and the interconnect (a NoC or a ring, when in a GPU, cores are simply abutted). I will inventoriate the needed hardware to compute in parallel. I will insist on the importance of determinism, the uselessness of memory and I will point out a favoured communication direction, from the cause to the effect of a causality. I will describe the design of a parallelizing core, build to be combined with itself to form a 3000 core processor. The core design is simple because it embarks quite no memory and it has connections only with two neighbours.

On the software side, I will present a new parallel programming model, not based on an OS thread parallelization but on a hardware parallelization relying on a new "fork" machine instruction added to the ISA. I will present various patterns to parallelize imperative language programming structures: functions, for and while loops, reductions. I will show how such patterns can be used to parallelize classical C functions and how the created threads populate the available hardware thread slots in the processor cores.

The hardware does not use memory. Instead, each core uses a set of registers and functional units which are enough to compute scalars from scalars. In our parallel programming model, we avoid data structures: no arrays, no structures, no pointers, no lists. A parallel computation gets the elements of structured data from parallel inputs and puts the computed elements of structured data from parallel outputs. Inside the computation, only scalars are handled.

The proposed parallel programming model is deterministic. The semantic of a parallel execution is given by a referential sequential order. Hence, running the code sequentially or in parallel produces the same result. Testing and debugging parallel programs is as easy as testing and debugging a sequential run.

Our parallel programming model has strong connections with the functional programming paradigm from the composition of no side effect functions.

Speaker: Henning Pohl
Casual interaction strives to enable people to scale back their engagement with interactive systems, while retaining the level of control they desire. In this talk, we will take a look on two recent developments in casual interaction systems. The first p

Casual interaction strives to enable people to scale back their engagement with interactive systems, while retaining the level of control they desire. In this talk, we will take a look on two recent developments in casual interaction systems. The first project to be presented is an indirect visual feedback system for smartwatches. Embedding LEDs into the back of a watch case enabled us to create a form of feedback that is less disruptive than vibration feedback and blends in with the body. We investigated how well such subtle feedback works in an in-the-wild study, which we will take a closer look at in this talk. Where the first project is a more casual form of feedback, the second project tries to support a more casual form of communication: emoji. Over the last years these characters have become more and more popular, yet entering them can take quite some effort. We have developed a novel emoji keyboard around zooming interaction, that makes it easier and faster to enter emoji.

Speaker: Muffy Calder (University of Glasgow)

Evaluation of how users engage with applications is part of software engineering, informing redesign and/or design of future apps.  Good evaluation is based on good analysis –  but users are difficult to analyse – they adopt different styles at different times!  What characterises usage style, of a user and of populations of users, how should we characterise the different styles,  how do characterisations evolve, e.g. over an individual user trace,and/or over a number of sessions over days and months, and how do characteristics of usage inform evaluation for redesign and future design?

I try to answer these questions in 30 minutes by outlining a formal, probabilistic approach based on discrete time Markov chains and stochastic temporal logic properties, applying it to a mobile app developed right here in Glasgow and used by tens of thousands of users worldwide.    A new version of the app, based on our analysis and evaluation, has just been deployed. This is experimental design and formal analysis in the wild.  You will be surprised how accessible I can make the formal material.

Speaker: Eva Navarro Lopez
School Seminar

Speaker: by Professor Simon Peyton Jones FRS

Haskell had international parents, but Glasgow can lay strong claim to be its birthplace, as home to five of the fourteen members of the Haskell committee. One of the first implementations of Haskell, GHC, was built in Lilybank Gardens, and a quarter of a century later is still the world's leading Haskell compiler.

 In this talk I'll look back to those early days, and reflect on what makes Haskell so special and influential.

Speaker: Helen Purchase

It is now commonplace to collect data from ‘the crowd’. This seminar will summarise discussions that took place during a recent Dagstuhl seminar entitled “Evaluation in the Crowd: Crowdsourcing and Human-Centred Experiments” – with contributions from psychology, sociology, information visualisation and technology researchers. Bring your favourite definition of ‘Crowdsourcing’ with you!

Speaker: Dr Tanita Casci, Head of Research Policy (Research Strategy and Innovation Office (RSIO))

Tanita will lead a session on practical tips for enhancing your research  and its impact: topics include pitching and presenting your research  outputs effectively, interacting with editors, and making you and your  research more visible. The content will partly draw on what we have  learned from the REF UoA reviews but also from knowledge of the sector.

This is an informal session that should give some quick 'top tips' that are of value for all but it is also a chance to find out what else RSIO can do for you. Your input will help inform the support you receive from  the research strategy office.

Speaker: Alistair Edwards (University of York)

Articulatory directness is a property of interaction first described by Don Norman. The favourite examples are steering a car or scrolling a window. However, I suggest (with examples) that these are arbitrary, learned mappings.  This has become important in work which we have been doing on interactive audio-tactile maps for blind people. Unlike conventional tactile maps, ours can be rotated, maintaining an ego-centric frame of reference for the user. Early experiments suggest that this helps the user to build a more accurate internal representation of the real world - and that a steering wheel does not show articularly directness.

Speaker: David Manlove

Speaker: Dr Ke Zhou,

Native advertising is a specific form of online advertising where ads replicate the look-and-feel of their serving platform. In such context, providing a good user experience with the served ads is crucial to ensure long-term user engagement. 

In this talk, I will explore the notion of ad quality, namely the effectiveness of advertising from a user experience perspective. I will talk from both the pre-click and post-click perspective for predicting quality for native ads. With respect to pre-click ad quality, we design a learning framework to detect offensive native ads, showing that, to quantify ad quality, ad offensive user feedback rates are more reliable than the commonly used click-through rate metrics. We translate a set of user preference criteria into a set of ad quality features that we extract from the ad text, image and advertiser, and then use them to train a model able to identify offensive ads. In terms of post-click quality, we use ad landing page dwell time as our proxy and exploit various ad landing page features to predict ad landing page with high dwell time.

Speaker: Janet Read (University of Central Lancashire)

It is commonly touted in HCI that engagement with users is essential for great product design.  Research reports only successes in participatory design research with children but in reality there is much to be concerned about and there is not any great case to be made for children's engagement in these endeavors.  This talk will situate the work of the ChiCI group in designing with children for children by exploring how two games were designed for, and built for, children in rural Madagascar.  There is something in the talk for anyone doing research in HCI.. and for anyone doing research with human participants.  

Speaker: Jorge A. Perez

By classifying behaviors (rather than data values), behavioral types abstract structured protocols and enforce disciplined message- passing programs. Many different behavioral type theories have been proposed: they offer a rich landscape of models in which types delineate
concurrency and communication. Unfortunately, studies on formal relations between these theories are incipient. In this talk I will argue that clarifying the relative expressiveness of these type systems is a pressing challenge for formal techniques in distributed systems. I will briefly overview works that
address this issue and discuss promising research avenues. (This talk is based on a short position paper to be presented at FORTE'16.)

Speaker: Dr. Tobias Becker

Dataflow computing is a novel way of performing computation which is
fundamentally different from instruction-driven computing with conventional CPUs
and GPUs. Dataflow computers focus on optimising the movement of data in an
application and exploit massive parallelism among thousands of tiny ‘dataflow
cores’. Maxeler Technologies is pioneering this efficient approach to computing
through its Multiscale Dataflow techno­logy. Application experts in science,
engineering or finance can develop and customise their algorithms in a high
level language and optimise their application across several layers of
abstraction, targeting Maxeler’s highly efficient dataflow computers. Compared
to industry standard servers, one to two orders of magnitude improvements in
terms of performance per unit of rack space and performance per Watt are
typically achieved. This has been demonstrated in a range of application
domains, including finance, geology, weather modelling, genomics, and data
analytics.

Speaker: Baharak Rastegari

Speaker: Dr Milad Shokoushi

Query logs contain valuable information about how users interact with search engines. For instance, frequency and duration of clicks on search results have been widely used as implicit feedback for inferring search success. In this talk, we follow the footprints of users in the logs for inferring additional signals about search satisfaction. In particular, we show how user interactions during query formulation (and reformulation) can be interpreted as implicit feedback. We also demonstrate how these signals can be used to generate pseudo-labels for training auto-completion and voice recognition systems.

Speaker: Dr Milad Shokoushi

Query logs contain valuable information about how users interact with search engines. For instance, frequency and duration of clicks on search results have been widely used as implicit feedback for inferring search success. In this talk, we follow the footprints of users in the logs for inferring additional signals about search satisfaction. In particular, we show how user interactions during query formulation (and reformulation) can be interpreted as implicit feedback. We also demonstrate how these signals can be used to generate pseudo-labels for training auto-completion and voice recognition systems.

Speaker: James Clarkson

As the popularity of “big data” frameworks grow, a lot of effort is
currently being exerted trying to improve the performance of JVM (Java Virtual
Machine) based languages, such as Java and Scala. One way of doing this is to
develop mechanisms that allow these languages to make use of hardware
accelerators, such as GPGPUs. As a result there has been a number of projects,
such as Project Sumatra (OpenJDK) [4], Rootbeer [5] and APARAPI (AMD) [6], that
have attempted to support programming GPGPUs from Java. However, a lot of this
prior art only focuses on accelerating simple workloads or providing a interface
into another programming language - making it difficult for them to be used to
create real-world applications. In this talk I will discuss how we have
developed a framework that moves beyond the prior art and allows developers to
accelerate complex Java applications.

Our Java based framework, Tornado, provides developers with a simple a
task-based programming model which allows the assignment of task to device.
Typically, tasks are assigned to execute on a GPGPU, but could equally be
assigned to a multi-core processor or even an FPGA. Moreover, the design of
Tornado means that this assignment can be changed dynamically - meaning that
applications are not artificially restricted to using a specific class of
device. Additionally, the Tornado API has been designed to avoid the need to
re-engineer applications to utilise the framework: to do this we have had to
support a wider range of language features than the prior art - exceptions,
inheritance and objects to name a few.

Finally, we will share our experiences porting a complex CUDA C++ application
into pure Java.

Bio: James Clarkson is a 3rd year PhD student from the University of Manchester
in the UK. He is a member of the Advanced Processor Technologies (APT) group,
working under the supervision of Mikel Lujan. His research interests are
programming languages and programming exotic hardware architectures (in Java!).
He is actively contributing to the EPSRC funded AnyScale [1] and PAMELA [2]
projects, and has previously contributed to the EU funded Mont Blanc project
[3].

[1] AnyScale project - http://anyscale.org
[2] PAMELA project - http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/PAMELA/
[3] Mont Blanc project - https://www.montblanc-project.eu
[4] Project Sumatra - http://openjdk.java.net/projects/sumatra/
[5] Rootbeer - https://github.com/pcpratts/rootbeer1
[6] APARAPI - https://code.google.com/archive/p/aparapi/

Speaker: Josue Ortega

I study the many-to-many matching problem induced by the popular dating app Tinder. I provide empirical evidence suggesting that its matching procedure is unstable, and show, in a simplified setting, that its assignments can be setwise and even pairwise blocked. Tinder's mechanism can be improved by a known two-step procedure which guarantees setwise stability whenever achievable, i.e. when agents' preferences are strongly substitutable, a restriction compatible with men preferences in online dating. I establish a link between strong substitutability and the maximin property that connects two areas of the literature that remained unrelated, and that can be merged to obtain a useful result: deciding who proposes first generates a tradeoff between the optimality versus the simplicity and privacy of the matching. 

Speaker: Prof. Derek McAuley
Derek McAuley is Professor of Digital Economy in the School of Computer Science and Director of Horizon at the University of Nottingham, UK. After a PhD and lectureship in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge he moved to a chair in Depa

For years people have been putting weird things on the Internet and 

considering the technologies required and possibilities of giving 

virtual existence to everyday mundane objects - we put a coffee pot 

online in the late 1980s! The reduction in cost of communications, 

computing and storage mean that these possibilities are now starting to 

encroach into the everyday lives of the public and consumers, and the 

phrase “Internet of Things” (IoT) has been coined. This term mostly 

denotes a sociological phenomena - the increasing awareness, not least 

amongst industry analysts, of the practice of putting “things” online. 

So having been working on the technology for so long, “what could 

possibly go wrong?”. The talk will look at how the modern context, 

including smart phones, location awareness, social media, and pervasive 

personal data mining, is radically altering how we need to perceive 

future deployments of IoT. It requires us to re-evaluate the 

technologies and how they are developed in order to have any chance of 

building the trust into these IoT systems that is needed to make the IoT 

a success, and deliver the many associated societal benefits the 

proponents have promised.

Speaker: Evgenij Belikov

Work stealing is an adaptive decentralised load balancing mechanism used in many parallel language run-time systems. A key work stealing decision is the choice of the spark, which represents potential parallelism, to donate in response to a received request for work. Commonly, the oldest spark is donated as it often corresponds to a sub-computation with relatively large granularity.This talk explores the effect of colocating sparks based on the maximum prefix matching on encodings of their position within the computation, rather than using their age, on execution time, stealing success, and fragmentation of the virtual shared heap. A comparison is made to the default mechanism used in the
GUM run-time system for Glasgow parallel Haskell.

Speaker: Ruth Hoffmann

With the rising popularity of autonomous systems and their increased deployment within the public domain, ensuring the safety of these systems is crucial.

Although testing is a necessary part in the process of deploying such systems, simulation and formal verification are key tools, especially at the early stages of design. Simulation allows us to view the continuous dynamics and monitor behaviour of a system. On the other hand, formal verification of autonomous systems allows for a cheap, fast, and extensive way to check for safety and correct functionality of autonomous systems, that is not possible using simulations alone.

In this talk I will demonstrate a simulation and the corresponding probabilistic model of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in an exemplary autonomous scenario and present results of the discrete models. Further, I discuss a possible formal framework to abstract autonomous systems using simulations to inform probabilistic models.

Speaker: Dr. Pavlos Petoumenos

Optimisation techniques depend on representative workloads for their training, fine tuning, and evaluation. Traditional research areas have workloads which at least try to be representative. Research on smartphones on the other hand utilises completely inappropriate benchmarks. Typical work on the field fails to deal with interactivity, user perception, different classes of mobile applications, significant variation in usage patterns amongst users, and even reproducibility. With the majority of our computing experience revolving around these devices, it's imperative that we find ways to test our optimisations on them properly. In my talk, I will present two novel workload creation techniques targeted at mobile devices. Both of them are lightweight, easy to use, and capture how real users interact with their devices. They do not require any instrumentation, knowledge of the application's internals, or access to the application source code. We use them to drive personalised iterative compilation with almost no negative effect on the user experience and to show that available ANDROID frequency governors leave substantial room for improvement, up to 27% lower energy consumption for the same user experience.

Speaker: Florian Weber

Session types are used to describe communication protocols. We use a case study to show the applicability of session types in the real world and how we bridge the gap between the
abstract message format used in a session type protocol and the concrete message format used by a naturally occurring server. The case study uses POP3, a standard protocol used to retrieve messages from an email server, as an example, presenting an introduction on how to describe standard internet protocols as session types. We use the protocol description language Scribble, which is based on multiparty session types, to express POP3 in the form of a global protocol from which the local protocols for the client and the server are derived. We use a tool called StMungo to translate the Scribble local protocol into a typestate specification, which defines the order in which the communication methods are called, written in Java. We use Mungo, a Java typestate checking tool and compiler, to show that the implementation follows the typestate specification. Mungo checks the correctness of the sequence of method calls. The case study highlights several points of interest for future work on Scribble and the translation process. Furthermore it provides insight into the relationship between Scribble and the real world protocol implementations, suggesting the use of session types for protocol documentation.

Speaker: Juan Ye (University of St Andrews)

Past research in pervasive computing focuses on location-, context-, activity-, and behaviour-awareness; that is, systems provide personalised services to users adapting to their current locations, environmental context, tasks at hand, and ongoing activities. With the rising of requirements in new types of applications, emotion recognition is becoming more and more desirable; for example, from adjusting the response or interaction of the system to the emotional states of users in the HCI community, to detecting early symptoms of depression in the health domain, and to better understanding the environmental impact on users’ mood in a more wide-scale city engineering area. However, recognising different emotional types is a non-trivial task, in terms of the computation complexity and user study designs; that is is, how we inspire and capture natural expressions of users in real-world tasks. In this talk, I will introduce two emotion recognition systems that are recently developed by our senior honour students in St Andrews, and share our experiences in conducting real-world user studies. One system is a smartphone-based application that unobtrusively and continuously monitor and collect users’ acceleration data and infer their emotional states such as neutral, happy, sad, angry, and scared. The other system infers social cues of a conversation (such as positive and negative emotions, agreement and disagreement) through streaming video captured in imaging glasses.

Speaker: Gavin Davidson

General purpose graphics hardware represents a powerful and affordable tool for climate scientists who look to model the vastly complex systems that make up the Earth's atmosphere. However, levering these highly parallel devices in this field requires an understanding of tools like OpenCL and effective strategies for parallelisation. We present a source to source compiler that automatically detects parallelism in scientific Fortran code and produces programs parallelised using OpenCL. Our approach requires no directives or extra information from the user and output code is composed with use of algorithmic skeletons. We evaluate our work using a version of the large eddy simulator along with synthetic test cases and show that this approach yields performance increases with minimal effort.

Speaker: Simon Gay

Session types are type-theoretic specifications of communication protocols, introduced by Kohei Honda and collaborators in the mid-1990s. They define the type and sequence of messages exchanged via a communication medium, and allow type-checking techniques to be used
to verify protocol implementations. Whereas data types codify the static structure of information in a computer program, session types codify the dynamic structure of communication in a software
system. The classic slogan "algorithms + data structures = programs" can be generalised to "programs + communication structures = systems", and the full range of type-checking = technology can be generalised too.

In the simplest form, a session type specifies a straightforward sequence of messages. The type !int.?bool.end describes how to run a protocol on an endpoint of a communication channel: first send an integer, then receive a boolean, then terminate. The other endpoint has the dual type ?int.!bool.end. More complex protocols include choice and repetition. For example, the recursive type S defined by S = &< start}: ?int.!bool.S, stop: end > describes a protocol that offers a choice between start and stop, each with its own continuation protocol. The basic idea for protocol verification is to match the structure of a session type with the use of communication operations in a program.

The twenty years since the introduction of session types have seen a dramatic growth in research activity. There is now a substantial community, and most programming language conferences regularly include papers on session types.

The seminar will introduce session types, survey the main themes and achievements of the field, and suggest directions for future work that are likely to be of interest to researchers from the wider area of programming language design and type theory.

Speaker: Carsten Eickhoff

In the case of general or ambiguous Web search queries, retrieval systems rely on result set diversification techniques in order to ensure an adequate coverage of underlying topics such that the average user will find at least one of the returned documents.

Speaker: Karen Renaud

I have been seconded to the Scottish Business Resilience Centre this year, trying to answer the question in the title. I will explain how I went about carrying out my study and what my findings were.

Speaker: Dimitrios Kouzapas

Speaker: Dan Archambault (Swansea University)

Drawing sets of elements and their intersections is important for many applications in the sciences and social sciences. In this talk, we presented a method for improving the appearance of Euler diagrams. The approach works on any diagram drawn with closed curves using polygons. It is based on a force system derived from curve shortening flow. In this talk we present this method and discuss its use on practical data sets.

Speaker: John Rooksby

Speaker: Dr. Guido Zuccon
A talk about why IR researchers should care about health search

In this talk I will discuss research problems and possible solutions related to helping the general public searching for health information online. I will show that although in the first instance this appears to be a domain-specific search task, research problems associated with this task have more general implications for IR and offer opportunities to develop advances that are applicable to the whole research field. In particular, in the talk I will focus on two aspects related to evaluation: (1) the inclusion of multiple dimensions of relevance in the evaluation of IR systems and (2) the modelling of query variations within the evaluation framework.

Speaker: Dr Jocelyn Spence (University of Nottingham)

The University of Nottingham's Mixed Reality Lab is renowned for its work at the forefront of experience design using artistic performance to drive public interactions with technology. However, there is far more going on at the MRL than its inspiring collaborations with Blast Theory. Jocelyn Spence has worked at the intersection of performance and HCI by focusing on more private, intimate groupings involving storytelling. She is now a visiting researcher at the MRL, leading and contributing to projects that take a similarly personal approach to public performance with digital technologies. This talk will cover her current and previous work in Performative Experience Design.

Speaker: Dr. Michele Weiland

EPCC is the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh and the home of ARCHER, the UK’s national HPC service. In this talk, I will give an overview of EPCC, which will include a whistlestop tour of our HPC and data analytics research, our involvement in teaching and service provision, as well as what facilities we have and how you can work with us.

Speaker: Patrick Prosser

In subgraph isomorphism we have a target graph T and a pattern graph P and the question is “does T contain P?”.  This problem is NP-Complete. One of the problems in BIG DATA is, given a graph database (i.e. a collection of target graphs) does a given query (a pattern graph) exist in the database. Therefore, there are many target graphs and many patterns graphs.  Current state of the art produces an index for each target and pattern graph, where an  index captures a summary of the features in a graph. Prior to performing a subgraph isomorphism test between a pattern P and target T the indices are used to determine if P is trivially not in T. If this test succeeds then T is not a candidate, and if the test fails then a call to a backtracking  search algorithm is made for verification. This is the “filter-verification paradigm”. The BIG DATA approach is to spend considerable effort creating sophisticated indices to avoid having to resort to backtracking search i.e. attempt to answer the decision problem with polynomial effort. This only pays off when the majority of decision problems are unsatisfiable, and therefore problems must exist in the easy unsat region for filtering to work. But what happens if we take a different approach? What happens if we put little effort into creating indices and more effort into crafting smarter subgraph isomorphism algorithms? In this talk I will report on work in progress (with Iva Babukova, Ciaran McCreesh and Christine Solnon) in our new approach “a light filter with smart verification”.

Speaker: Dr. Patrick Maier

The proliferation of parallel compute devices (multicore CPUs, GPGPUs,
manycore coprocessors) has increased the demand for parallel programming
languages. More specifically, it has increased the demand for parallel
extensions of existing languages, and a popular extension route has been
embedding a parallel DSL into a host language.

Haskell is known as a playground for programming language development, and also
offers good support for embedding DSLs (eg. type class overloading, Template
Haskell meta programming), so it is no surprise that there are several parallel
Haskell DSLs.

How many parallel Haskell DSLs are there? It is hard to say given the sprawling
nature of the Haskell community. Counting publications in major Haskell venues,
on average there were two new parallel DSLs per year over the last 5 years. This
diversity is daunting for novices, particularly for those who were lured to
Haskell by the promise that a pure functional language would make parallel
programming simpler.

In this talk, I will argue that the domain of parallel programming is too
diverse for there to exist a single unifying DSL. I will survey several parallel
Haskell DSLs to illustrate how programming paradigms (data vs task parallelism)
and parallel architectures (multicore vs GPGPU, shared vs distributed memory)
shape their designs.

Speaker: JamesTrimble

Kidney exchange schemes have been employed successfully in many countries (including the UK since 2007) to increase the number of kidney transplants from living donors. It is an NP-hard cycle-packing problem to determine the largest possible set of transplants for a given pool of donors and patients.

This talk will present two pieces of work we carried out recently - the first to develop a more scalable approach to optimising the kidney-exchange problem, and the second to help in policy development.

1. New compact integer-programming models for kidney exchange. I will briefly describe the new models we have developed, which frequently outperform the existing state of the art, and present some LP relaxation tightness results. (Joint work with David Manlove, John Dickerson, Benjamin Plaut and Tuomas Sandholm)

2. A simulation project which we carried out for NHS Blood and Transplant to estimate the effects of several policy options. (Joint work with David Manlove)

Speaker: Dr Martin Halvey
n this talk I present a user study that examines in detail the differences between primary and secondary assessors on a set of

The notion of relevance is fundamental to the field of Information Retrieval. Within the field a generally accepted conception of relevance as inherently subjective has emerged, with an individual's assessment of relevance influenced by numerous contextual factors. In this talk I present a user study that examines in detail the differences between primary and secondary assessors on a set of "real-world" topics which were gathered specifically for the work. By gathering topics which are representative of the staff and students at a major university, at a particular point in time, we aim to explore differences between primary and secondary relevance judgements for real-life search tasks. Findings suggest that while secondary assessors may find the assessment task challenging in various ways (they generally possess less interest and knowledge in secondary topics and take longer to assess documents), agreement between primary and secondary assessors is high.  

Speaker: Rizos Sakellariou
School Seminar

The traditional view of parallel computing has focused on minimizing
execution time.  As the complexity and the costs associated with modern
execution platforms and infrastructures grow, parallel execution time
cannot be viewed as a single objective to meet at any cost. Instead,
with such platforms consuming large amounts of energy, one needs to
assess improvements in execution time against other types of cost. Cloud
computing, despite sharing common origins with the traditional
high-performance computing world, has grown to much more than it,
following a resources-on-demand paradigm, where users can pay for what
they need. However, the underlying infrastructure suffers from
increasing complexity which is partly masked by having users pay for it.

In this respect, the talk will motivate the need to address efficiently
the issues surrounding the use of multiple and/or heterogeneous
resources offered by Cloud providers by capturing these issues as a
multi-objective optimization problem, which requires a good
understanding and appreciation of a number of different trade-offs. The
talk will make this argument by presenting extensive experience and
research on planning the parallel execution of scientific workflows on
the Cloud in a way that tries to strike a balance between execution time
and energy related costs.

Speaker: Kitty Meeks

Suppose we have a universe of n elements, and we are interested in subsets of size k that have certain properties; an example would be cycles of length k in a graph on n vertices.  We may simply want to know whether a subset with the property exists ("Does the graph contain a cycle of length k?"), but in many applications we will want more information: this might involve *finding* such a subset (rather than just saying one exists), *counting* how many such subsets there are, or *enumerating* a list of all subsets with the desired property.

For a number of problems of this kind, the fastest known exact algorithm for the decision problem is non-constructive: the algorithm returns either "yes" or "no" without finding a subset with the desired property (if one exists).  This motivates the study of what further information we can learn about our instance using only this fast, non-constructive decision algorithm.

We will model the decision algorithm as a black-box subroutine, or an oracle which answers queries of the form, "Does the subset X of the universe contain at least one witness?"  This is the approach previously adopted by Bjorklund, Kaski, and Kowalik (MFCS 2014), who addressed the problem of using a decision oracle to find a single witness.  In this talk, I will discuss some of the situations in which we can go further, using the decision oracle to find or count (almost) all witnesses.

Speaker: Prof. Udo Kruschwitz
Steps towards Profile-Based Web Site Search and Navigation

Web search in all its flavours has been the focus of research for decades with thousands of highly paid researchers competing for fame. Web site search has however attracted much less attention but is equally challenging. In fact, what makes site search (as well as intranet and enterprise search) even more interesting is that it shares some common problems with general Web search but also offers a good number of additional problems that need to be addressed in order to make search on a Web site no longer a waste of time. At previous visits to Glasgow I talked about turning the log files collected on a Web site into usable, adaptive data structures that can be used in search applications (and which we call user or cohort profiles). This time I will focus on applying these profiles to a navigation scenario and illustrate how the automatically acquired profiles provide a practical use case for combining natural language processing and information retrieval techniques (as that is what we really do at Essex).

Speaker: Christopher Jefferson

The famous Graph Isomorphism problems asks, given two graphs A and B, if there is a bijection between the vertices of A and B which preserves edges. This problem is important both theoretically, and practically.

Given a large set of graphs, which we wish to separate into isomorphic classes, it is common to take a 'Canonical Image' of each graph (there is an isomorphism between two graphs if and only if they have the same canonical image). This is much more efficient than calculating an isomorphism between each pair of graphs.

The current algorithms for generating canonical images are limited in two ways -- they only operate on graphs, and they allow any permutation of the graph. This talk will show how we can use a similar technique to find canonical images and isomorphisms of a wide range of objects and actions, in any permutation group G.

Speaker: Yoke Yie Chen
In this talk, I will focus on two knowledge sources for product recommendation: product reviews and user purchase trails.

Social recommender systems harness knowledge from social media to generate recommendations. Previous works in social recommender systems use social knowledge such as social tags, social relationship (social network) and microblogs.  In this talk, I will focus on two knowledge sources for product recommendation: product reviews and user purchase trails. In particular, I will present how we exploit the sentiment expressed in product reviews and user preferences which are implicitly contained in user purchase trails as the basis for recommendation.

Speaker: Ismail Sengor Altingovde
I will focus on the web search result diversification problem and present our novel contributions in the field.

In this talk, I will start with a short potpourri of our most recent research, emphasis being on the topics related to the web search engines and social Web. Then, I will focus on the web search result diversification problem and present our novel contributions in three directions. Firstly, I will present how the normalizaton of query relevance scores can boost the performance of the state-of-the-art explicit diversification strategies. Secondly, I will introduce a set of new explicit diversification strategies based on the score(-based) and rank(-based) aggregation methods. As a third contribution, I will present how query performance prediction (QPP) can be utilized to weight query aspects during diversification. Finally, I will discuss how these diversification methods perform in the context of Tweet search, and how we improve them using word embeddings.

Speaker: David Castro

The increasing importance of parallelism has motivated the creation of
better abstractions for writing parallel software, such as structured
parallelism using nested algorithmic skeletons. However, statically
choosing a combination of algorithmic skeletons that yield good
speedups when compared with a manually optimised solution remains a
difficult task. In order to do so, it is crucial to be able to
simultaneously reason about both the cost of, and semantic
equivalences between different parallel structures. In this talk, I
will present a new type-based mechanism for reasoning about these
properties, focusing on the introduction of parallelism to a
specification of the functional behaviour of a program. This mechanism
exploits well-known properties of a very general recursion pattern,
hylomorphisms, and a denotational semantics for structured parallel
processes described in terms of hylomorphisms. Using this approach, it
is possible to determine formally whether it is possible to introduce
a desired parallel structure to a program without altering its
functional behaviour, and choose a structure that minimises some
parameter cost model.

Speaker: Dr Adam Lopez
Multilingual natural language processing (NLP) has been enormously successful over the last decade, highlighted by offerings like Google translate. What is left to do?

Multilingual natural language processing (NLP) has been enormously successful over the last decade, highlighted by offerings like Google translate. What is left to do? I'll focus on two quite different, very basic problems that we don't yet know how to solve. The first is motivated by the development of new, massively-parallel hardware architectures like GPUs, which are especially tantalizing for computation-bound NLP problems, and may open up new possibilities for the application and scale of NLP. The problem is that classical NLP algorithms are inherently sequential, so harnessing the power of such processors requires complete rethinking the fundamentals of the field. The second is motivated by the fact that NLP systems often fail to correctly understand, translate, extract, or generate meaning. We're poised to make serious progress in this area using the reliable method of applying machine learning to large datasets—in this case, large quantities of natural language text annotated with explicit meaning representations, which take the form of directed acyclic graphs. The problem is that probabilities on graphs are surprisingly hard to define. I'll discuss work on both of these fronts.

Speaker: Muffy Calder

Speaker: Dr Wim Vanderbauwhede

In the distributed computation of finite difference grids (e.g. weather simulations), partitioning of arrays into overlapping sets is an essential step. The overlapping regions are commonly known as "halos". I present a formalism for order-preserving transformations of such halo-vector types into overlapping sections. I will show that this formalism allows to automatically derive instances of dataflow-style programs consisting of opaque element-processing functions combined using higher-order functions.

Speaker: Julie Glanville
The presentation will also describe other areas where software such as text mining and machine learning have potential to contribute to the Systematic Review process

Systematic review (SR) is a research method that seeks to provide an assessment of the state of the research evidence on a specific question.  Systematic reviews (SRs) aim to be objective, transparent and replicable and seek to minimise bias by means of extensive  searches.

The challenges of extensive searching will be summarised.  As software tools and internet interconnectivity increase, we are seeing increasing use of a range of tools within the SR process (not only for information retrieval).  This presentation will present some  of the tools we are currently using within the Cochrane SR community and UK SRs, and the challenges which remain for efficient information retrieval.  The presentation will also describe other areas where software such as text mining and machine learning have potential to contribute to the SR process.

Speaker: Foteini Katsarou
ENDS seminar talk

Graphs have great capabilities of representing complex structures such as chemical compounds and social networks. A graph dataset is a collection of many graphs. A common problem addressed is the subgraph containment query problem where given a query graph, the graphs that contain the query are retrieved from the dataset. This process involves subgraph isomorphism test. Considering that a direct isomorphism test against all the graphs in the dataset would take significant amount of time, many index-based methods have been proposed to reduce the number of candidate graphs that have to underpass the isomorphism test. However, all the existing work currently focuses on comparing against relatively small datasets in terms of number and size of graphs.

In this presentation we identify 5 fundamental aspects of the subgraph query processing: the average number of nodes and density per graph, the number of distinct labels and number graphs totally in the dataset, and the size of the query graphs in terms of number of edges. Using these fundamental aspects, we perform a systematic study and we analyze the sensitivity of the various methods. Specifically, we use 6 well-established indexing techniques and we extensively compare them against both real and synthetic datasets. We report on their indexing time and size, and on query processing performance in terms of time and false positive ratio. The aims of this study are (a) to derive conclusions about the algorithms' relative performance and (b) to stress-test all algorithms, deriving insights as to their scalability and (c) to highlight how both performance and scalability depend on the above factors.

Speaker: Dr Jeremy Singer

Imagine developing an app that can run on any device scale, from a tiny wireless mote to a massive cloud datacenter. "Write once, scale anywhere" is the vision of our Anyscale Apps project funded by EPSRC. We are now half-way through the project, so this is a good time to take stock. Key concepts that have emerged so far include:

• Task variants - interchangeable components with different non-functional characteristics but the same API - e.g. quick-and-imprecise face recognition versus more complex image processing.
• Economic utility theory to select which variants will execute at a given time
• The need for realistic benchmarks and testbeds - currently we are evaluating a multi-scale Robot platform.

Speaker: Alastair Murray

Until recently the programming of heterogeneous accelerators, such as GPUs, has largely revolved around low-level programming models that were designed to match the capabilities on the hardware. As heterogeneous programming has become more mainstream the need for higher-level models, based on the requirements of the programmer, has become apparent. Many approaches have appeared, but those extending the C++ programming model have seen the most interest as they manage to provide both high-level abstractions and low-level control if required. This has led to a standardisation of key approaches and proposed attempts to provide a unified hardware description.

This talk will describe some of the standardised approaches for parallel and heterogeneous programming in C++ that are appearing today, such as SYCL for OpenCL and the C++17 Parallel STL. Then there will be a more speculative look at how C++ could look when programming forthcoming hardware, such as the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA), where the CPU and accelerators are more tightly connected.

Speaker: Yoren Gaffary (INRIA)

The communication of emotions use several modalities of expression, as facial expressions or touch. Even though touch is an effective vector of emotions, it remains little explored. This talk concerns the exploration of the kinesthetic expression and perception of emotions in a human-computer interaction setting. It discusses on the kinesthetic expression of some semantically close and acted emotions, and its role on the perception of these emotions. Finally, this talk will go beyond acted emotions by exploring the expression and perception of a spontaneous state of stress. Results have multiple applications, as a better integration of the kinesthetic modality in virtual environment and of human-human remote communications.

Speaker: John O'Donnell

The content of many courses in computer systems, especially digital circuit design and its relationship to computer architecture, has remained stagnant for decades.  One reason is that little attention is given to the aims of hardware courses in computer science curricula.  To improve the situation, we need to think about the needs of modern computer science students, match the content to the aims, and take advantage of research.

Speaker: Jose Calderon

Using static analysis techniques compilers for lazy functional languages can identify parts of a program that can be legitimately evaluated in parallel with the main thread of execution. These techniques can produce improvements in the runtime performance of a program, but are limited by the static analyses’ poor prediction of runtime performance. This talk outlines the development of a system that uses iterative compilation in addition to well-studied static analysis techniques. Our representation of the parallel programs allows us to use traditional 'blind' search techniques or profile-directed improvement. We compare the results of different search strategies and discuss the pitfalls and limitations of our technique. Overall, the use of iterative feedback allows us to achieve higher performance than through static analysis alone.

Speaker: Alice Miller

Speaker: Sean Moran
In this talk I will introduce two novel data-driven models that significantly improve the retrieval effectiveness of locality sensitive hashing (LSH), a popular randomised algorithm for nearest neighbour search that permits relevant data-points to be ret

In this talk I will introduce two novel data-driven models that significantly improve the retrieval effectiveness of locality sensitive hashing (LSH), a popular randomised algorithm for nearest neighbour search that permits relevant data-points to be retrieved in constant time, independent of the database size.

To cut down the search space LSH generates similar binary hashcodes for similar data-points and uses the hashcodes to index database data-points into the buckets of a set of hashtables. At query time only those data-points that collide in the same hashtable buckets as the query are returned as candidate nearest neighbours. LSH has been successfully used for event detection in large scale streaming data such as Twitter [1] and for detecting 100,000 object classes on a single CPU [2].

The generation of similarity preserving binary hashcodes comprises two steps: projection of the data-points onto the normal vectors of a set of hyperplanes partitioning the input feature space followed by a quantisation step that uses a single threshold to binarise the resulting projections to obtain the hashcodes. In this talk I will argue that the retrieval effectiveness of LSH can be significantly improved by learning the thresholds and hyperplanes based on the distribution of the input data.

In the first part of my talk I will provide a high level introduction of LSH. I will then argue that LSH makes a set of limiting assumptions arising from its data-independence that hamper its retrieval effectiveness. This motivates the second and third parts of my talk in which I introduce two new models that address these limiting assumptions. 

Firstly, I will discuss a scalar quantisation model that can learn multiple thresholds per LSH hyperplane using a novel semi-supervised objective function [3]. Optimising this objective function results in thresholds that reduce information loss inherent in converting the real-valued projections to binary. Secondly, I will introduce a new two-step iterative model for learning the hashing hyperplanes [4]. In the first step the hashcodes of training data-points are regularised over an adjacency graph which encourages similar data-points to be assigned similar hashcodes. In the second step a set of binary classifiers are learnt so as to separate opposing bits (0,1) with maximum margin. Repeating both steps iteratively encourages the hyperplanes to evolve into positions that provide a much better bucketing of the input feature space compared to LSH.

For both algorithms I will present a set of query-by-example image retrieval results on standard image collections, demonstrating significantly improved retrieval effectiveness versus state-of-the-art hash functions, in addition to a set of interesting and previously unexpected results.

[1] Sasa Petrovic, Miles Osborne and Victor Lavrenko, Streaming First Story Detection with Application to Twitter, In NAACL'10.

[2] Thomas Dean, Mark Ruzon, Mark Segal, Jonathon Shlens, Sudheendra Vijayanarasimhan,  and Jay Yagnik, Fast, Accurate Detection of 100,000 Object Classes on a Single Machine, In CVPR'13.

[3] Sean Moran, Victor Lavrenko and Miles Osborne. Neighbourhood Preserving Quantisation for LSH, In SIGIR'13.

[4] Sean Moran and Victor Lavrenko. Graph Regularised Hashing. In ECIR'15.

Speaker: Ms Konstantina Panagiotopoulou

The rapidly increasing number of components in modern High Performance Computing (HPC) systems provides a challenge on their resilience; predictions of time between failures on ExaScale systems range from hours to minutes. Yet, the prevalent HPC programming model today does not tolerate faults. This talk features the design and initial implementation of transparent resilience for Chapel, a parallel HPC language following the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming model.

We address cases of hardware failure on one or multiple nodes during program execution in a distributed setup, using detection and recovery mechanisms. We focus on the runtime system, particularly on the communication (GASNet) and tasking layers to address task parallelism and extend the work on library level to handle data parallelism. Ongoing work addresses integration of distributed task adoption strategies with Chapel's default data distributions. This talk summarises results and experiences from a 2-month internship with the Chapel developer's group at Cray.

Bio: I'm a third year PhD student at Heriot-Watt University and member of the Dependable Systems Group. My research interests are in the design and implementation of Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages, in the context of High Performance Computing, with focus on resilience. PGAS languages implement the concept of a shared global address space, and use language constructs to distribute data structures over machines, providing the programmer with opportunities to tune data locality and enhance performance. Resilience, is one of the main challenging topics at ExaScale, and an area of gaining popularity among researchers.

Speaker: Patrick Prosser

Speaker: Stacy Marsella

Speaker: Tim Storer

Speaker: Dr Paul Harvey

GPU and multicore hardware architectures are commonly used in many different application areas to accelerate problem solutions relative to single CPU architectures. The typical approach to accessing these hardware architectures requires embedding logic into the programming language used to construct the application; the two primary forms of embedding are: calls to API routines to access the concurrent functionality, or pragmas providing concurrency hints to a language compiler such that particular blocks of code are targeted to the concurrent functionality. The former approach is verbose and semantically bankrupt, while the success of the latter approach is restricted to simple, static uses of the functionality.

This talk is about combining actor-based programming and OpenCL to simplify programming multicore CPUs and GPUs.

Speaker: Simon Thompson
Computing Science Distinguished Seminar Series

Refactorings are program transformations that are intended to change the way that a program works without changing what it does. Refactoring is used to make programs more readable, easier to maintain and extend, or to improve their efficiency. These changes can be complex and wide-ranging, and so tools have been built to automate these transformations.

Because refactoring involves changing program source code, someone who uses a refactoring tool needs to be able to trust that the tool will not break their code.  In this talk I'll explore what this idea means in practice, and how we provide various levels of assurance for refactorings. While the context is tools for functional programming languages like Haskell and Erlang, the conclusions apply more widely, for instance to object-oriented languages.

Simon Thompson is Professor of Logic and Computation at the University of Kent. Functional programming is his main research field, but he has worked in various aspects of logic, and testing as well. He is the author of books on Haskell, Miranda, Erlang and constructive type theory.

Speaker: Blair Archibald

Speaker: Prof Alex Yakovlev

For years people have been designing electronic and computing systems focusing on improving performance but only "keeping power and energy consumption in mind". This is a way to design energy-aware or power-efficient systems where energy is considered as a resource whose utilization must be optimized in the realm of performance constraints.

Increasingly, energy and power turn from optimization criteria into constraints, sometimes as critical as, for example, reliability and timing. Furthermore, quanta of energy or specific levels of power can shape the system's action. In other words, the system's behaviour, i.e. the way how computation and communication is carried out, can be determined or modulated by the flow of energy into the system. This view becomes dominant when energy is harvested from the environment or strictly rationed if it comes from internal sources. This view is also analogous to what happens in biological systems.

In this talk we look at the energy-modulated computing paradigm and illustrate its manifestations in system design, such as:

• Converting electric charge into causality and self-timed operation
• Using concurrency for best energy utilisation
• Models for designing energy-proportional computers (resources, modes, order graphs, partial orders)

The talk will hopefully be motivating to a wide range of audience, including electronic and computer engineers interested in physical and mathematical aspects of (concurrent) computations.

Biography. Alexandre (Alex) Yakovlev was born in 1956 in Russia. He received D.Sc. from Newcastle University in 2006, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. from St. Petersburg Electrical Engineering Institute in 1979 and 1982 respectively, where he worked in the area of asynchronous and concurrent systems since 1980, and in the period between 1982 and 1990 held positions of assistant and associate professor at the Computing Science department. Since 1991 he has been at the Newcastle University, where he worked as a lecturer, reader and professor at the Computing Science department until 2002, and is now heading the MicroSystems research group (http://async.org.uk) at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. His interests and publications are in the field of modelling and design of asynchronous, concurrent, real-time and real-power circuits and systems. He has published six monographs and more than 350 papers in academic journals and conferences, has managed over 30 research contracts and supervised over 40 PhD students. He has been a general chair and PC chair of several international conferences, including the IEEE Int. Symposium on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems (ASYNC), Petri nets (ICATPN), Application of Concurrency to Systems Design (ACSD), Network on Chip Symposium (NOCS), and  has been a chairman of the Steering committee of the ACSD conference for the last 15 years. In 2011-2013 he was a Dream Fellow of EPSRC, UK, to investigate different aspects of energy-modulated computing.

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/eee/staff/profile/alex.yakovlev

Speaker: Sarah Sharp

When directly simulated on a classical computer, quantum computations can result in an exponential slowdown, so how can we verify quantum protocols without a quantum computer to hand? In this talk I will go over a few different ways in which formal methods can be used to validate quantum protocols and what, if any, speedups can be achieved in the process.

I will start by presenting ways in which equivalence checking can be used for quantum circuits, which can be done by testing if one circuit representation is equal to another, and how to model the build up of the operations on a set of qubits comparing both mapstate and QUIDD representations and their related operations to attempt to further minimise the runtime.      
      
The previous work by Ebrahim et al. has established a model-checking technique to enable checking the equivalence of protocols described by a specific input language using the stabilizer formalism. By restricting my initial examples to the Clifford group operators, I will demonstrate how the checking of equivalence between pairs of generated circuits can be done using both stabilizer arrays and mapstate representations, looking at the pros and cons of both techniques as well as future approaches.

Speaker: Mohamed Chetouani

Social signal processing is an emerging research domain with rich and open fundamental and applied challenges. In this talk, I’ll focus on the development of social signal processing techniques for real applications in the field of psycho-pathology. I’ll overview recent research and investigation methods allowing neuroscience, psychology and developmental science to move from isolated individuals paradigms to interactive contexts by jointly analyzing behaviors and social signals of partners. From the concept of interpersonal synchrony, we’ll show how to address the complex problem of evaluating children with pervasive developmental disorders. These techniques are also demonstrated in the context of human-robot interaction by a new way of using robots in autism (moving from assistive devices to clinical investigations tools). I will finish by closing the loop between behaviors and physiological states by presenting new results on hormones (oxytocin, cortisol) and behaviors (turn-taking, proxemics) during early parent-infant interactions.

Mohamed Chetouani is the head of the IMI2S (Interaction, Multimodal Integration and Social Signal) research group at the Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics (CNRS UMR 7222), University Pierre and Marie Curie-Paris 6. He received the M.S. degree in Robotics and Intelligent Systems from the UPMC, Paris, 2001. He received the PhD degree in Speech Signal Processing from the same university in 2004. In 2005, he was an invited Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics of the University of Stirling (UK). Prof. Chetouani was also an invited researcher at the Signal Processing Group of Escola Universitaria Politecnica de Mataro, Barcelona (Spain). He is currently a Full Professor in Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning at the UPMC. His research activities, performed at the Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics, cover the areas of social signal processing and personal robotics through non-linear signal processing, feature extraction, pattern classification and machine learning. He is also the co-chairman of the French Working Group on Human-Robots/Systems Interaction (GDR Robotique CNRS) and a Deputy Coordinator of the Topic Group on Natural Interaction with Social Robots (euRobotics). He is the Deputy Director of the Laboratory of Excellence SMART Human/Machine/Human Interactions In The Digital Society.

Speaker: Prof Joe Armstrong

For the last few years I have worked at Ericsson in the "Systems and Technology" group.  This is a small group which is responsible for Ericsson's software strategy and reports directly to senior technical management.

In this group we try to identify the software that Ericsson will need for it's future projects and start projects that will enable technology transfer.  We work closely with a hardware group that does the same thing for hardware.

In this talk I'll outline the following:

    - The mechanisms for change
    - Why I think projects fail
    - How some projects succeed
    - How projects get financed
    - The Academic/Industry interface

Having looked at this I'll talk about the key areas that are the focus of current research in Ericsson, and where we wish to encourage participation.

I also have a private research agenda and have been battling away with the same old problems for the last 30 years, so I'll say a little about some unsolved problems that interest me (who knows, maybe somebody in the audience will have solved these).

Biography: Joe Armstrong is the inventor of the programming language Erlang.  He has written several books on Erlang and has a PhD from KTH (thesis title: "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors"). He has founded a successful software company and initiated a number of research projects.

Speaker:
As part of our a series of informal gatherings to discuss issues of learning and teaching, please join us for our first meeting to discuss why we lecture.

An informal discussion of our views on lectures, what is their value? Are they the best mechanism for teaching and learning? What else could we be doing? Takes place in the common room.

Speaker: Prof Joe Armstrong

Changing a popular program language is very difficult, instead of changing Erlang I define a language erl2 while compiles to erlang.

This talk discusses the following:

   - Why changing a language is difficult
   - New language, modified language or code generator?
   - What's new in erl2
   - Mutable value chains
   - "black box" crash recorders
   - Global "global" processes

This is work in progress

Speaker: Roland Perera

I'll demo a simple language of concurrent objects which explores the design space between type systems and continuous testing. In our language, finite-state programs are checked automatically for multiparty compatibility. This property of communicating automata, taken from the session types literature but here applied to terms rather than types, guarantees that no state-related errors arise during execution: no object gets stuck because it was sent the wrong message, and every message is processed.

The usual object-oriented notion of subtyping is also interpreted at the level of terms rather than types. An abstraction takes the form of a prototypical implementation against which another program can be automatically tested for behavioural conformance. Any program can act as
an abstraction, and conversely every abstraction is a concrete program that can be executed.

Speaker: Dhahi Sulaybikh D Alshammari

Currently, researchers in Cloud Computing field usually find it difficult to run their experiments on actual test-bed infrastructure for existing cloud provider. Therefore, they intend to apply their experiments using existing simulators. I am investigating cloud computing performance evaluation using various models and techniques.  I examine two models: a software simulator called CloudSim and a small-scale hardware testbed called the Glasgow Raspberry Pi Cloud. The presentation describes an empirical cross-validation of these two
models, which I performed this year.

Speaker: David Manlove

In the Stable Marriage and Roommates problems, a set of agents is given, each of them having a strictly ordered preference list over some or all of the other agents. A matching is a set of disjoint pairs of mutually acceptable agents. If any two agents mutually prefer each other to their partner, then they block the matching, otherwise, the matching is said to be stable. We investigate the complexity of finding a solution satisfying additional constraints on restricted pairs of agents. Restricted pairs can be either forced or forbidden. A stable solution must contain all of the forced pairs, while it must contain none of the forbidden pairs. In this talk we describe a range of algorithmic results for problems involving computing stable matchings in the presence of restricted edges.  Whilst in some cases NP-hardness and strong inapproximability results prevail, certain other cases give rise to polynomial-time algorithms and constant-factor approximation algorithms.  This is joint work with Agnes Cseh.

Speaker: Matthew Aylett

We all know there is something special about speech. Our voices are not just a means of communicating, although they are superb at communicating, they also give a deep impression of who we are. They can betray our upbringing, our emotional state, our state of health. They can be used to persuade and convince, to calm and to excite. Speech synthesis technology offers a means to engage the user, to personify an interface, to add delight to human computer interaction. In this talk I will present speech synthesis work that supports social interaction through the use of emotion, personalisation and audio design, we will relate this technology to requirements in dialogue systems, eyes-free data aggregation and audio interfaces, and I will discuss the challenges the technology faces for a pervasive, eyes-free future.

CereProc Chief Science Officer Dr Matthew Aylett has over 15 years’ experience in commercial speech synthesis and speech synthesis research. He is a founder of CereProc, which offers unique emotional and characterful synthesis solutions and has recently been awarded a Royal Society Industrial Fellowship to explore the role of speech synthesis in the perception of character in artificial agents.

Speaker: Patrick Maier

The recent proliferation of parallel architectures --- multicores, 
manycores, GPU accelerators, clusters --- calls for a rethink on 
portability. It is not enough to just compile and run code across 
different architectures. Portable parallel code should also perform 
reasonably across different parallel architectures and configurations, 
even if these configurations differ significantly in crucial parameters 
like number of processors or communication latency.

The AJITPar project aims to achieve a degree of performance portability, 
i.e. the same parallel code should perform decently on a certain range 
of parallel architectures (multicores, manycores and clusters). This 
requires a framework that can transform the parallelism expressed in the 
code to levels that suit the architecture. AJITPar proposes to base this 
framework on a trace-based just-in-time (JIT) compiler for a functional 
language. The reasons are threefold:

(1) Functional programs are easy to transform;

(2) dynamic compilation allows for a wider range of transformations 
including ones depending on runtime information;

(3) trace-based JIT compilers build intermediate data structure (traces) 
that can be used for cost analysis.

In this talk, I will sketch an overview of the AJITPar project and 
report on the current status. In particular, I will talk about building 
a parallel task scheduler for Pycket, a recent trace-based JIT for 
Racket. (Joint work with Magnus Morton and Phil Trinder.)

Speaker: Kyuwan Choi

In this presentation, I will present a new cognitive brain-machine interface (cBMI) using cortical activities in the prefrontal cortex. In the cBMI system, subjects conduct directional imagination which is more intuitive than the existing motor imagery. The subjects control a bar on the monitor freely by extracting the information of direction from the prefrontal cortex, and that the subject’s prefrontal cortex is activated by giving them the movement of the bar as feedback. Furthermore, I will introduce an EEG-based wheelchair system using the cBMI concept. If we use the cBMI, it is possible to build a more intuitive BMI system. It could help improve the cognitive function of healthy people and help activate the area around the damaged area of the patients with prefrontal damage such as patients with dementia, autism, etc. by consistently activating their prefrontal cortex.

Speaker: Dr Kenneth MacKenzie

The Erlang language provides features which make it very easy to implement applications distributed over large networks.  The problem then arises of how one should deploy such applications, particularly in networks where the individual nodes may have varying characteristics and where communication times may be non-uniform.

In this talk, I'll describe some work from the RELEASE project at Glasgow where we designed and implemented libraries providing methods for "semi-explicit placement", where the programmer selects nodes for spawning remote processes based on properties of nodes and communication latencies.  We claim that these methods will help programmers to achieve good performance in a portable way, without requiring detailed knowledge of the network in advance.

I'll give an introduction to Erlang and the issues that arise in deploying distributed applications, and then describe our libraries, including some topological and statistical methods used in their design and validation.  The São Tomé shorttail and other birds will also put in an appearance.

Speaker: Dimitrios Kouzapas

We are demonstrating Mungo, a tool developed for type-checking typestate for objects in Java.
Typestate is a notion that embeds a state on the type of an object, with each state allowing
only for certain methods to be called. The demonstration will focus on the relation of Mungo
and communication protocols that are based on global session types.

Speaker: Prof Jon Whittle (Lancaster University)

This talk will reflect on a major 3 year project, called Catalyst, that carried out 13 multidisciplinary, rapid innovation digital technology research projects in collaboration with community organisations “in the wild”. These projects covered a wide range of application domains including quantified self, behaviour change, and bio-feedback, but were all aimed at developing innovative digital solutions that could promote social change. Over the 3 year project, Catalyst worked in collaboration with around 90 community groups, charities, local councils and other organisations to co-develop research questions, co-design solutions, and co-produce and co-evaluate them. The talk will reflect on what worked well and badly in this kind of highly multidisciplinary research ‘in the wild’ project. www.catalystproject.org.uk

Bio: Jon Whittle is Professor of Computer Science and Head of School at Lancaster’s School of Computing and Communications. His background is in software engineering and human-computer interaction research but in the last six years, he has taken a keen interest in interdisciplinary research. During this time, he has led five major interdisciplinary research projects funded to around £6M. Through these, he has learned a lot about what works — and what doesn’t — when trying to bring researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds together.

Speaker: Simon Jouet

Over the last few years we have discussed multiple times about OpenFlow and Software Defined Networking (SDN) in the ENDS talks but we never have described what it was or why it became so popular in only a few years. In this talk I would like to cover what it SDN, the change in paradigm from traditional networking and cover it’s most predominant implementation OpenFlow.

Speaker: Myroslav Bachynskyi

Recent advances in sensor technology and computer vision allowed new computer input methods to rapidly emerge. These methods are often considered as more intuitive and easier to learn comparing to the conventional keyboard or mouse, however most of them are poorly assessed with respect to their physical ergonomics and health impact of their usage. The main reasons for this are large input spaces provided by these interfaces, absence of a reliable, cheap and easy-to-apply physical ergonomics assessment method and absence of biomechanics expertize in user interface designers. The goal of my research is to develop a physical ergonomics assessment method, which provides support to interface designers on all stages of the design process for low cost and without specialized knowledge. Our approach is to extend biomechanical simulation tools developed for medical and rehabilitation purposes to adapt them for Human-Computer Interaction setting. The talk gives an overview of problems related to the development of the method and shows answers to some of the fundamental questions.

Speaker: Mr Adam Barwell

To take advantage of increasingly parallel hardware, a simple, safe, and effective method to introduce parallelism is needed. Current approaches can be divided into two broad categories: automatic, and abstraction. Whilst fully automatic solutions mean the programmer need not lift a finger, they tend to target highly specific constructs, rendering them virtually useless in all but a few situations. Conversely, the development of better abstractions and interfaces presents a more general solution, but still requires a level of expertise from the programmer to be effective. This is especially pronounced when a program must be transformed to enable the introduction of parallelism. To reduce the burden this transformation phase places on the proverbial programmer, we propose a method that uses static analysis techniques to identify operations within tail-recursive functions that are obstructive to the introduction of parallelism, and use refactoring techniques to extract and expose potential parallelism in spite of those obstructions.

Bio: Studying under Prof Kevin Hammond and Dr Christopher Brown, Adam is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews. He is currently interested in dependency analysis and program transformation techniques, principally to enable the introduction of parallelism to sequential programs. Having cut his teeth on Prolog and Miranda back at UCL, he currently has an odd fixation with Erlang, but is not above tinkering in Haskell or perpetually intending to play with Idris.

Speaker: Craig Reilly

Enumeration of knots is a key problem for mathematicians working in knot theory, a branch of topology.  It has been since the time of Tait and Little in the late 19th century, who tabulated all prime knots up to 10 crossings. Most of the work in tabulating prime knots makes use of DT code representations of knots, however we instead make use of Gauss code representations .  This choice of encoding has the advantage that it is relatively easy to understand, however it also presents problems which will be discussed.  Our enumeration relies on constraint programming, and it appears that this meeting of CP and topology is novel.  The symmetries of the problem are of particular interest and we will explore this during the talk.  The material presented borrows heavily from my masters project.

Speaker: Faizuddin Mohd Noor

We show that when users make errors on mobile devices, they make immediate and distinct physical responses that can be observed with standard sensors. We used three

standard cognitive tasks (Flanker, Stroop and SART) to induce errors from 20 participants. Using simple low-resolution capacitive touch sensors placed around a standard device and a built-in accelerometer, we demonstrate that errors can be predicted using micro-adjustments to hand grip and movement in the period after swiping the touchscreen. In a per-user model, our technique predicted error with a mean AUC of 0.71 in Flanker and 0.60 in Stroop and SART using hand grip, while with the accelerometer the mean AUC in all tasks was ≥ 0.90. Using a pooled, non-user-specific, model, our technique achieved mean AUC of 0.75 in Flanker and 0.80 in Stroop and SART using hand grip and an AUC for all tasks > 0.90 for the accelerometer. When combining these features we achieved an AUC of 0.96 (with false accept and reject rates both below 10%). These results suggest that hand grip and movement provide strong and very low latency evidence for mistakes, and could be a valuable component in interaction error detection and correction systems.

Speaker: Ciaran McCreesh

Subgraph isomorphism involves finding a little "pattern" graph inside a larger "target" graph. The problem is NP-complete, but it has lots of important applications. Practical algorithms for the problem can now handle some patterns with up to a thousand vertices, and targets with up to ten thousand vertices---but they cannot handle all such graphs, and we need to make sure we aren't making overly bold claims based upon favourable results from particular benchmark sets.

We've been looking at how to generate really hard random instances for the problem. This isn't as simple as, for example, random maximum clique, because we have lots of parameters we can vary independently. This short talk is mostly about figuring out how we should present the data: we're going to put up some pretty charts with lots of colours, and ask whether you find them helpful in understanding what's going on.

Speaker: Ruth Aylett
Glasgow Social Robotics Seminar Series

Robots have been produced with a wild variety of embodiments, from plastic-skinned dinosaurs to human lookalikes, via any number of different machine-like robots. Why is embodiment important? What do we know about the impact of embodiment on the human interaction partners of a social robot? How naturalistic should we try to be? Can one robot have multiple embodiments? How do we engineer expressive behaviour across embodiments? I will discuss some of these issues in relation to work in the field.

Speaker: Jeremy Singer

 I visited Singapore in September, delivering Discrete Math + Linux courses to our new CS students at the Singapore Institute of Technology. In this non-technical talk I will review my experiences - academic, culinary and political. Presentation features lots of fun photos and moderately amusing anecdotes!

Speaker: Pat Langdon and Bashar Ahmad (University of Cambridge)

Current work at CUED aimed at stabilising pointing for moving touchscreen displays has met recent success in Automotive, including funding and Patents. This talk will establish the antecedents of the approach in studies aimed at improving access to computers for people with impairments of movement and vision.

One theme in the EDC has been Computer assisted interaction movement impairment using haptic feedback devices. This early approach showed some promise in mitigating extremes of movement but was dependent on hardware implementations such as the Logitech Haptic mouse. Other major studies since have examined more general issues behind the development of multimodal interfaces: for an Interactive digital TV (EU GUIDE), and for use in adaptive mobile interfaces for new developments of wireless communication, in The India UK Advanced Technology Centre (IU-ATC).
Most recently Pat Langdon’s collaboration with the department’s signal processing group has led to the realisation that predicting the users pointing intentions from extremely perturbed cursor movement is a similar problem to that of the prediction of a moving objects future position based on irregularly timed and cluttered trajectory data points from multiple sources. This raised an opportunity in the Automotive domain and Bashar Ahmad will describe in detail recent research on using software filtering as a way of improving interactions with touchscreens in a moving vehicle.

BIO

Dr Pat Langdon is a Principal Research Associate for the Cambridge University Engineering Department and lead researcher in Inclusive design within the Engineering Design Centre. He has originated numerous research project in design for inclusion and HMI since joining the department in 1997. Currently, he is PI of 2 projects, 1 commercial collaboration in automotive and a Co-I of a 4 year EPSRC research collaboration.

Dr Bashar Ahmad is a Senior Research Associate in the Signal Processing and Communications (SigProC) Laboratory, Engineering Department, Cambridge University. Prior to joining SigProC, Bashar was a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London. His research interests include statistical signal processing, Bayesian inference, multi-modal human computer interactions, sub-Nyquist sampling and cognitive radio.

Speaker: Richard Croucher

The banks have the most complex IT systems in the world.  Richard has worked on many of these and will focus on his most recent 4 years at Barclays which currently uses 60,000 servers and has around 21,000 IT employees.  Richard will briefly overview what all these computers are used for and the kind of jobs people in IT have.  He will then provide the opportunity to ask questions

As well as Barclays, Richard has consulted on IT to HSBC, RBS, DeutscheBank, CreditSuisse, Flowtraders,  JP. Morgan, Merril Lynch, Bank of America.   He has also held senior Architecture positions with both Microsoft and Sun Microsystems and can contrast jobs in the Finance sector with working for large US technology companies.

Bio: Richard is a platform architect who specializes in high performance systems, including those used by financial institutions for high frequency trading and huge compute clusters with thousands of nodes used in the Cloud. Richard discovered Erlang and OTP three years ago and has adopted this as his platform of choice.   He has designed and helped build a large and complex Cloud based application using Erlang/OTP and has been exploring the design challenges of getting this to scale to millions of users for the last 12 months.

Richard is a multi-disciplinarian with experience across hardware, storage, network, operating systems, DevOps and systems programming.  He has to use all of these when designing a new platform. Over the years, he's programmed in Assembler, Basic, Fortran, Pascal,  C, C++, Java, C# and Erlang.  He has designed and built his own computers working at the chip level and designing his own circuit boards. Richard is currently VP of High Frequency Engineering at Barclays and has had previous roles as  Chief Architect at Sun Microsystems, Principle Architect at Microsoft (Azure).

Richard is a Fellow of STAC Research, a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Chartered IT Practitioner and holds degrees from Brunel University, the University of Berkshire and the University of East London.

Speaker: John Williamson

Turning sensor engineering into advances into human computer interaction is slow, ad hoc and unsystematic. I'll discuss a fundamental approach to input device engineering, and illustrate how machine learning could have the exponentially-accelerating impact in HCI that it has had in other fields.

[caveat: This is a proposal: there are only words, not results!]

Speaker: Richard Croucher

Scaling distributed computing environments to extend from 100's to 1000's of nodes is a challenge for programming environments such as Erlang/OTP.   Traditional large scale compute environments use MPI or offer simple Grid computing using Distributed Resource Managers.   Functional languages such as Erlang provide  greater flexibility and programmer productivity than MPI or Grid based programs but don't scale as well.  This session will look at the scaling constraints of ErlangOTP and discuss opportunities for utilising some of the techniques used by MPI, such as RDMA and Multicast to improve its scalability.

Speaker: Ian Gent

The n-Queens problem is to place n chess queens on an n by n chessboard so that no two queens are on the same row, column or diagonal in either direction. This is one of the most famous puzzles there is, and is often - incorrectly - attributed to Gauss. It has very often been used as a benchmark for combinatorial search methods, and also very often criticised as a bad test cases [e.g. see *]. The reason for the criticism is that a solution can be computed in time O(n) for any n > 3. 

We show that this criticism does not apply to the completion variant of the problem. That is, given m queens which do not attack each other on an n by n chessboard, can we add n-m queens to get a solution of the n queens problem? We show that this problem is NP-Complete and #P-Complete. We also report how difficult the n-Queens completion problem is on random problems, and thereby seek to rescue the n-Queens problem - in its completion version - as a valid benchmark problem. [This is joint work with Chris Jefferson and Peter Nightingale, St Andrews.]

* see http://www.optaplanner.org/blog/2014/05/12/CheatingOnTheNQueensBenchmark.html

Speaker: Ashkan Tousimojarad

ARM is the industry's leading supplier of microprocessor technology. Today ARM technology is in use in 95% of smart phones, 80% of digital cameras, and 35% of all electronic devices.

After a brief introduction to the company and its activities, I will talk about the ARM University Program and its relationships with universities worldwide. I will then talk about my experience at ARM during the past few months, specifically about the design and implementation of an automatic grader for embedded systems courses. 

At the end of the talk, I will present a short demo and will talk about our plan to extend ARM and partner-based research and development into more universities and higher education institutions globally.

Speaker: Jerry Sobieski

The GÉANT Testbeds Service provides virtualized cyberinfrastructure environments spanning Europe for the use by the research community.   These environments offer computational resources, data transport facilities, switching elements, and other resources, allocated from physical infrastructure components, using dynamic and automated provisioning processes.  These capabilities provide wide area "at scale" testbeds for the purposes of network research and development and testing of distributed applications or other emerging services.   This talk will describe the architectural principles and key [interesting] implementation aspects that underly the GÉANT Testbeds Service.   Aspects and issues that pose future challenges and/or research or collaborative opportunities will be noted and will be discussed in the Q&A following the talk.

Speaker: Dr Mehdi Goli

Widely adumbrated as patterns of parallel computation and communication, algorithmic skeletons introduce a viable solution for efficiently programming modern heterogeneous multi-core architectures equipped not only with traditional multi-core CPUs, but also with one or more programmable Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). By systematically applying algorithmic skeletons to address complex programming tasks, it is arguably possible to separate the coordination from the computation in a parallel program, and therefore subdivide a complex program into building blocks (modules, skids, or components) that can be independently created and then used in different systems to drive multiple functionalities. By exploiting such systematic division, it is feasible to automate coordination by ad- dressing extra-functional and non-functional features such as application performance, portability, and resource utilisations from the component level in heterogeneous multi-core architecture. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to exploit the inherent features of skeleton-based applications in order to automatically coordinate them over heterogeneous (CPU/GPU) multi-core architectures and improve their performance. Our systematic evaluation demonstrates up to one order of magnitude speed-up on heterogeneous multi-core architectures.

Bio. Mehdi Goli is a software engineer at Codeplay Ltd. He has got his PhD on "Autonomic Behavioural Framework for Structural Parallelism over Heterogeneous Multi-Core Systems" at IDEAS Research Institute, Robert Gordon University. His current research interests include high-performance computing, scientific GPU computing, parallel computing. He is one of the main designers and developers of heterogeneous back-end for the FastFLow programming framework.

Speaker: Ruth Hoffmann

We will be looking at the notion of permutation pattern classes and the talk will give you a historical and current insight into the work done within permutation patterns and the applications thereof. Additionally, I will shortly talk about the work I have done during my PhD.

Speaker: Poika Isokoski
Eye trackers that can be (somewhat) comfortably worn for long periods are now available. Thus, computing systems can track the gaze vector and it can be used in interactions with mobile and embedded computing systems together with other input and output

Eye trackers that can be (somewhat) comfortably worn for long periods are now available. Thus, computing systems can track the gaze vector and it can be used in interactions with mobile and embedded computing systems together with other input and output modalities. However, interaction techniques for these activities are largely missing. Furthermore, it is unclear how feedback from eye movements should be given to best support user's goals. This talk will give an overview of the results of our recent work in exploring haptic feedback on eye movements and building multimodal interaction techniques that utilize the gaze data. I will also discuss some possible future directions in this line of research.

Speaker: Simon Rogers

Large scale measurement of the metabolites present in an organism is very challenging, but potentially highly rewarding in the understanding of disease and the development of drugs. In this talk I will describe some of the challenges in analysis of data from Liquid Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry, one of the most popular platforms for metabolomics. I will present Statistical Machine Learning solutions to several of these challenges, including the alignment of spectra across experimental runs, the identification of metabolites within the spectra, and finish with some recent work on using text processing techniques to discover conserved metabolite substructures.

Speaker: Oana Andrei

Good design of mobile apps is challenging because users are seldom homogeneous or predictable in the ways they navigate around and use the functionality presented to them. Different populations of users will engage in different ways, and redesign may be desirable or even required to support populations’ different styles of use. In this talk I will present a process of app analysis intended to support understanding of use but also redesign. This process is based on inferring activity patterns (Markov models) from usage logs and employing probabilistic formal analysis to ask questions about the use of the app and characterise the inferred activity patterns. I will illustrate this work via a case study of a mobile app presenting analytic findings and finish with discussions on how the analysis results are feeding into redesign.

Speaker: Daniel Boland

Music collections available to listeners have grown at a dramatic pace, now spanning tens of millions of tracks. Interacting with a music retrieval system can thus be overwhelming, with users offered ‘too-much-choice’. The level of engagement required for such retrieval interactions can be inappropriate, such as in mobile or multitasking contexts. Using listening histories and work from music psychology, a set of engagement-stratified profiles of listening behaviour are developed. The challenge of designing music retrieval for different levels of user engagement is explored with a system allowing users to denote their level of engagement and thus the specificity of their music queries. The resulting interaction has since been adopted as a component in a commercial music system.

Speaker: Julie Williamson (University of Glasgow)

Spherical displays present compelling opportunities for interaction in public spaces. However, there is little research into how touch interaction should control a spherical surface or how these displays are used in real world settings. This paper presents an in the wild deployment of an application for a spherical display called GlobalFestival that utilises two different touch interaction techniques. The first version of the application allows users to spin and tilt content on the display, while the second version only allows spinning the content. During the 4-day deployment, we collected overhead video data and on-display interaction logs. The analysis brings together quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how users approach and move around the display, how on screen interaction compares in the two versions of the application, and how the display supports social interaction given its novel form factor.

Speaker: Khaled Alnowaiser

Memory access times in modern manycore processors is non-uniform, since the
memory is distributed in discrete units across the physical sockets. This is known
as non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA). Parallel runtime systems attempt to
improve memory access latency by allocating memory closer to the threads that
will access that data. The Java virtual machine (JVM) hides NUMA complexity from
Java apps. However the JVM does not consider locality when processing objects
for garbage collection.

We describe how to take advantage of connected objects to improve garbage
collection performance. We evaluate our approach on Java apps and big data
workloads. Results show an improvement in GC overhead, with up to 2.5x speedup
and 37% better application performance.

Speaker: Stephen Strowes

Three years after the IPv6 Launch coordinated by the Internet Society, we're now witnessing the final allocations from ARIN's IPv4 inventory. Simultaneously, while we see significant volumes of traffic carried over IPv6, the majority of traffic is still IPv4. We're in the early stages of the transition, not the end of it.

Different networks and countries have presented wildly different deployment patterns. This talk will cover aspects of the ongoing IPv4-to-IPv6 transition, including an overview of what different networks are doing, aspects of what we see from within Yahoo based on two distinct data sets, and some of the broader challenges faced.

Speaker: Anselm Spoerri (Rutgers University)

Conflicts occur in the peer-production process of Wikipedia and can culminate in “edit wars” for specific topics. This talk will present visualizations of the similarities and differences between the most controversial topics that have been identified in 10 different language versions of Wikipedia and discuss the dominant and shared themes of the controversies across languages and cultures. In addition, it will present visualizations of the most popular topics over time in the English version of Wikipedia and visually analyze the relationship between most controversial and popular topics.

Bio: Anselm Spoerri has a PhD from MIT and is a faculty member at the School of Information & Communication at Rutgers University. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of Information Visualization, Data Fusion and Multimedia Interfaces.

Speaker: Gul Agha

Concurrent programs today are written in one of two paradigms: actors
and threads with shared memory. While scalable concurrent systems
such as twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook chat have been implemented
using actor languages, many programmers continue to use threads with
shared memory. Such concurrent programs often ensure the consistency
of their data structures through control-centric synchronization such
as locks. Because control-centric synchronization is disconnected
from the consistency invariants of the data structures, it is hard to
detect bugs caused by incorrect synchronization. Moreover, a
consistency bug may be the result of some unlikely schedule and
therefore not show up in program testing. We have developed an
efficient algorithm using Bayesian probabilistic inference to infer
the concurrency structure of programs based on traces. Annotating the
program with data centric synchronization, facilitates consistency
checking, deadlock detection, and data race prevention. Finally, I
will discuss our current research on how such inference may be used to
'actorize' programs, enforcing data encapsulation and synchronization
through session types.

Short Bio

Gul Agha is Professor of Computer Science at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Agha's research is in programming
models and languages for open distributed and embedded computation.
Dr. Agha is a Fellow of the IEEE and served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE
Concurrency: Parallel, Distributed and Mobile Computing (1994-98), and
of ACM Computing Surveys (1999-2007). He has published over 200
research articles and supervised 30 PhD dissertations. His book on
Actors, published by MIT Press, is among the most widely cited works.
Agha and his research group have done pioneering work in Statistical
Model Checking, concolic testing, and application of large smart
sensor networks to civil engineering, among other topics. Dr. Agha is
a co-founder of Embedor Technologies, a company providing solutions
for automated monitoring of civil infrastructure and the Internet of
Things.

Speaker: Babak Esfandiari

Bad things can happen when online data-sharing systems are in the hands
of a single authority. Wikipedia, the product of millions of man-hours,
could potentially suddenly disappear if the Wikimedia Foundation runs
out of funds. Google and Facebook respectively use algorithms to rank
search results and events in feeds that might be biased to maximize ad
revenue at the expense of relevance to the user. In this talk, I
investigate a paradigm we call Decentralized Social Data-Sharing (DS)^2,
which addresses such issues by maximizing the autonomy of data-sharing
participants and decoupling the addressing of data from its location. In
particular I look at the effectiveness of data queries in such a system,
the feasibility of building (DS)^2 applications and whether autonomous
peers have an incentive to cooperate and contribute in this setting.

Speaker: various
showcase of summer intern projects

Throughout the summer, various undergraduate student interns have been quietly working away in the School of Computing Science. At the InternFest, we want to celebrate their contributions to our research, and find out more about their projects. Please come along to this interactive session to discover what the interns are up to!

Speaker: m.c. schraefel (University of Southampton)

Most health applications are number centric, aren’t they? Have you noticed that we have step counters, calorie Counters heart rate monitors (another number), weight scales (another number). Have we just convinced ourselves that if we get enough numbers we will become healthier? Or is the dominance of the Number in a Device, our first blush excitement as sensors and algorithm geeks, what we can do very easily with devices: show a number. After all, if showing someone a number worked as a strategy for health, given the ubiquity of the bathroom scale, no one would be overweight (http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/360409/). What is the relationship of these numbers to sustained practice? or perhaps to what we all may actually be shooting for: a better normal? As computer scientists, what else might we do beyond quantified self/data viz with this data towards a more effortless, better normal?

In this talk I’ll overview a few concepts that are being explored around reframing health for performance rather than “illness prevention” (tinyurl.com/wellthinteractions tinyurl.com/wellthieee) and also explore some models and scenarios for joining up IoT, machine learning, vision, and HCI towards a better, because wellthier, normal.

bio
m.c. schraefel, PhD, cscs, ceng, fbc, @mcphoo holds a chair in computer science and human performance at the University of Southampton, and also holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair co-sponsored with Microsoft Research to investigate design and evaluation of methods to support creativity innovation and discovery in science. m.c. is also a certified strength and conditioning coach, nutrition coach and functional neurology coach, meaning she works with a lot of people in pain. m.c. also leads the interdisciplinary WellthLab at Southampton, the vision of which is to make better normal; the mission of which is to develop the science, engineering and design of interactive systems to support enhancing quality of life for all. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~mc WE have PhD-ships! come follow m.c. on twitter @mcphoo

Speaker: Jose Cano Reyes

In distributed (mobile) robotics environments, the different computing substrates offer flexible resource allocation options to perform computations that implement an overall system goal. The AnyScale concept that we introduce and describe in this paper exploits this redundancy by dynamically allocating tasks to appropriate substrates (or scales) to optimize some level of system performance while migrating others depending on current resource and performance parameters. In this paper, we demonstrate this concept with a general ROS-based infrastructure that solves the task allocation problem by optimising the system performance while correctly reacting to unpredictable events at the same time. Assignment decisions are based on a characterisation of the static/dynamic parameters that represent the system and its interaction with the environment. We instantiate our infrastructure on a case study application, in which a mobile robot navigates along the floor of a building trying to reach a predefined goal. Experimental validation demonstrates more robust performance (around a third improvement in metrics) under the Anyscale implementation framework.

Speaker: various
Memory Management Network meeting

The theme of this year's MMNet workshop is runtimes at every scale from mobile devices to the data centre. This one-day workshop aims to bring together UK academia and industry with the aim of establishing new links and enhancing existing collaboration within the framework of the UK Memory Management Network.

Speaker: Peter Hsu
The CAVA Computer: Exceptional Parallelism and Energy Efficiency

Designing a new computer system is a very expensive proposition. But 80% of it is exactly the same as every other computer—you need caches, multiprocessing, coherency protocols, memory systems, etc.  Getting all of that right requires skill and experience, but is taken for granted and does not command much of a premium.  Getting it wrong, on the other hand, is a commercial disaster.  At Oracle Labs we have been developing a very energy efficient, highly parallel computer—the RAPID project.  We are now starting to define a second generation project.  In this talk I propose to standardize and open-source a design for the 80% that is the same in every design, so that everyone can concentrate on adding value to their own remaining 20%.

The CAVA computer is a “cluster in a rack” architecture targeting 10nm CMOS technology. The first part of the talk describes a 1024-node system where each node consists of 96-core, 3-issue out-of-order processor chips running at 1GHz with four DDR4 memory channels. Power estimates of different components are discussed, as well as cost projections.  The second part of the talk discusses architectural tradeoffs that were made, how this architecture might play in the HPC exa-scale arena, and broader market implications.  The talk concludes with a list of research topics that I and others at Oracle Labs are actively researching and would be interested in working with students at Universities.


Bio:   Peter Hsu was born in Hong Kong and came to the United States at age 15.  He received a B.S. degree from the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis in 1979, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1983 and 1985, respectively, all in Computer Science.  His first job was at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights from 1985-1987, where he worked with the 801 compiler team on code generation for superscalar machines. He then joined his ex-professor at a startup called Cydrome, which developed an innovative VLIW machine, but unfortunately the stock market crashed and the company ran out of money. He moved on to Sun Microsystems in 1988 and tried to build a water-cooled gallium arsenide SPARC processor, but the technology was not sufficiently mature and the effort failed.  He joined Silicon Graphics in 1990 and designed the MIPS R8000 TFP microprocessor, which shipped in the SGI Power Challenge systems in 1995.  He became a Director of Engineering at SGI and worked on various other projects until 1997, when he left to co-found his own startup named ArtX.  ArtX pioneered the shared-memory out-of-order integrated PC graphics northbridge design, but is best known for being the designer of the Nintendo GameCube.  ArtX was acquired by ATI in 2000, which has since been acquired by AMD.  Peter left ArtX in 1999 and worked briefly at Toshiba America, then became a visiting industrial researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2001.  He then consulted part time at various startups, and attended the Art Academy University and the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where he learned to paint oil portraits, and a Paul Michael school where he learned to cut and color hair.  In the late 2000’s he consulted for Sun Labs, and that continued when Oracle purchased Sun, which lead to discussions about the RAPID project and eventually becoming an Oracle employee.

Speaker: Jimmy Lin
Machine learning has become the tool of choice for tackling challenges in a variety of domains, including information retrieval

Machine learning has become the tool of choice for tackling challenges in a variety of domains, including information retrieval. However, most approaches focus exclusively on effectiveness---that is, the quality of system output. Yet, real-world production systems need to search billions of documents in tens of milliseconds, which means that techniques also need to be efficient (i.e., fast).  In this talk, I will discuss two approaches to building more effective and efficient information retrieval systems. The first is to directly learn ranking functions that are inherently more efficient---a thread of research dubbed "learning to efficiently rank". The second is through architectural optimizations that take advantage of modern processor architectures---by paying attention to low-level details such as cache misses and branch mispredicts. The combination of both approaches, in essence, allow us to "have our cake and eat it too" in building systems that are both fast and good.

Speaker: Chris Speed (University of Edinburgh)
Breaching the Smart Home

This talk reflects upon the work of the Centre for Design Informatics across the Internet of Things. From toilet roll holders that operate as burglar alarms, to designing across the Block Chain, the talk will use design case studies to explore both the opportunities that an interoperability offers for designing new products, practices and markets, but also the dangers. In order to really explore the potential for an Internet of Things ethical boundaries are stressed and sometimes breached. This talk will trace the line between imaginative designing with data, and the exploitation of personal identities.

Prof Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh where his research focuses upon the Network Society, Digital Art and Technology, and The Internet of Things. 

Speaker: Jeannie Lee

Established in 2009, Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) is Singapore's 5th and newest autonomous university on the island. We will first start with some background and information about the university, and then an overview of potential HCI-related research initiatives and collaborations in the context of Singapore healthcare, hospitality, creative and technology industries. Ideas and discussions are welcome!

Speaker: Omair Inam

This talk will focus on the collaborative research work undertaken by the speaker with Dr Wim Vanderbauwhede and his team at Glasgow University, during his six month stay as a visiting researcher at the School (Jan-June 2015) . The work spanned two projects, both of which will be presented during the talk.

The first part of the talk will be on exploration of low cost interconnection networks for Many-Core Network-On-chip. A new interconnection topology called the Hierarchical Cross Connected Recursive network (HCCR) will be explored and a group based shortest path routing algorithm that was developed for the HCCR will be presented.

The second part will be related to development of System Level Simulation Platform for the TyTra Project. It is an on-going work on the development of a SystemC based simulation platform. The aim is to simulate a high-level model of heterogeneous targets for high-performance computing, along with a task-based abstraction of a given application, to find a suitable partitioning in an automated fashion, such that it can eventually be incorporated into a turn-key compiler. A very preliminary prototype will be presented.

Speaker: David Ayman Shamma (Yahoo Labs & Flickr)

Today, beyond content and metadata, information is organized by the online social actions taken upon it. These social activities contribute to the overall conversational nature of media that we create, store, and share. From this, there exists many opportunities to build a new class of social-visual systems to aid in the organization and retrieval processes; these opportunities rely heavily on the both tacit and explicit communicative nature of social multimedia. In this talk, I will discuss the new practice of photography and how the media we create have become conversational media objects. Further, I will present a multifaceted human-centered computing system used to surface geo-located weather photos for editorial inclusion in a mobile application. Using the Flickr photosharing service, we can identify explicit group behavior, implicit photo viewing patterns, and apply modern deep learning computer vision techniques to surface photos for curatorial editors. Further, I will outline new findings and challenges in social media organization including geographic annotation of photographs and regions, community congregation online, and social engagement.

David Ayman Shamma is a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs and Flickr; he leads the HCI Research Group. He received his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 2005 in Computer Science. His personal research investigates social multimedia computing and creativity. He currently serves on the steering committees for ACM Multimedia and ACM TVX. In 2013, he was co-chair of the Technical Program at ACM Multimedia. He is Arts & Digital Culture Co-Editor of SIGMM and Co-Editor of the IEEE Multimedia Special Issue on Social Multimedia and Storytelling. In 2014, he was a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Keiko-NUS CUTE Center and in 2012 he was appointed as a Senior Member of the ACM.

Speaker: Dr Paul Cockshott

The compiler implements a parallel extension of C using a data parallel notation similar to the Intel Cylk compiler. It is undergoing tests at the moment but already supports auto-vectorisation and map reduce. Within the next week or two it should have automatic multi-core parallelisation. It is implemented in Java and uses the gcc preprocessor and linker.

Speaker: Iain McBride

The Hospitals / Residents problem with Couples (HRC) is a generalisation of the classical Hospitals / Residents problem (HR) that is important in practical applications because it models the case where couples submit joint preference lists over pairs of (typically geographically close) hospitals. It is known that an instance of HRC need not admit a stable matching. Deciding whether an instance of HRC admits a stable matching is NP-complete even under some very severe restrictions on the lengths of the participants' preference lists.

Since an instance of HRC need not admit a stable matching, it is natural to seek the 'most stable' matching possible, i.e., a matching that admits the minimum number of blocking pairs. We present a gap-introducing reduction that establishes a strong inapproximability result for the problem of finding a matching in an instance of HRC that admits the minimum number of blocking pairs. Further, we show how this result might be generalised to prove that the minimisation counterpart of a number of NP-complete decision problems based on matchings (and even more general NP-complete problems) may be shown to have the same strong inapproximability bound.

Speaker: Graham Brennan (University of Glasgow)

Bio: Dr Graham Brennan is a Research Associate and Project Manager in the Institute of Health and Wellbeing with a specialisation in recruitment to behaviour change programmes at the University of Glasgow. He is interested in the impact of health behaviour change programmes on the health of the individual and society as well as the process of engagement and participation. More specifically, his work examines the process and mechanisms of engagement that affect recruitment.

Speaker: Andreas Damianou
http://staffwww.dcs.sheffield.ac.uk/people/A.Damianou/research/index.html#DeepGPs

This talk will discuss deep Gaussian process models, a recent approach to combining deep probabilistic structures with Bayesian nonparametrics. The obtained deep belief networks are constructed using continuous variables connected with Gaussian process mappings; therefore, the methodology used for training and inference deviates from traditional deep learning paradigms. The first part of the talk will thus outline the associated computational tools, revolving around variational inference. In the second part, we will discuss models obtained as special cases of the deep Gaussian process, namely dynamical / multi-view / dimensionality reduction models and nonparametric autoencoders. The above concepts and algorithms will be demonstrated with examples from computer vision (e.g. high-dimensional video, images) and robotics (motion capture data, humanoid robotics).

Speaker: Madeline Balaam (University of Newcastle)

Breastfeeding is positively encouraged across many countries as a public health endeavour. The World Health Organisation recommends breastfeeding exclusively for the first six months of an infant’s life. However, women can struggle to breastfeed, and to persist with breastfeeding, for a number of reasons from technique to social acceptance. This paper reports on four phases of a design and research project, from sensitising user-engagement and user-centred design, to the development and in-the-wild deployment of a mobile phone application called FeedFinder. FeedFinder has been developed with breastfeeding women to support them in finding, reviewing and sharing public breastfeeding places with other breastfeeding women. We discuss how mobile technologies can be designed to support public health endeavours, and suggest that public health technologies are better aimed at communities and societies rather than individual. 

Dr Madeline Balaam is a lecturer in the School of Computing Science within Newcastle University. 

Speaker: Professor Muffy Calder
Professor Muffy Calder will give a short, informal and personal overview of Boole’s legacy for software, in particular the ways in which human and physical processes are systematised and implemented through software systems. But do these systems behave as

Two hundred years ago this year George Boole was born. Boole was a largely self-taught mathematical genius and in 1854, as first Professor of Mathematics at Queen’s College, Cork, he founded the discipline of algebraic logic when he published The Laws of Thought An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. In it he proposed the first practical system of logic in algebraic form, now known as Boolean algebra, which was subsequently the foundation for the scientific and engineering work of Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, and many others, in the development of computation and the computer.

Muffy will give a short, informal and personal overview of Boole’s legacy for software, in particular the ways in which human and physical processes are systematised and implemented through software systems. But do these systems behave as we expect, do they behave as we want them to? Can logic help us answer the questions? The talk will explore how we use logics to reason about the software systems we have built, biological systems that have evolved, and some every day uses (and misuses).

Speaker: Mr J Magnus Morton

Tracing JIT compilation generates units of compilation that are easy to analyse and are known to execute frequently. The AJITPar project aims to investigate whether the information in JIT traces can be used to make better scheduling decisions or perform code transformations to adapt the code for a specific parallel architecture. To achieve this goal, a cost model must be developed to estimate the execution time of an individual trace.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a system for ex- tracting JIT trace information from the Pycket JIT compiler. We define four increasingly parametric cost models for Pycket traces. We test the accuracy of these cost models for predicting the cost of individual traces on a set of loop-based micro-benchmarks. We also compare the accuracy of the cost models for predicting whole program execution time over the Pycket benchmark suite. Our preliminary results show the two simplest models provide only limited accuracy. The accuracy of the more com- plex models depends on the choice of parameters; in ongoing work we are systematically exploring the parameter space.

Speaker: Michalis Vazirgiannis
CS Seminar

Speaker: Foteini Katsarou

Graph Databases have great capabilities of representing complex structures such as chemical compounds and social networks. One of the problems addressed to such a database, is the graph containment queries where given a graph query, the graphs that contain the query are retrieved from the database, a process that involves subgraph isomorphism test. Considering that a direct isomorphism problem against all the graphs in the database would take significant amount of time, many indexing methods have been proposed to reduce the number of candidate graphs that have to underpass the isomorphism test. However, all the existing work currently focuses on just comparing against relatively small graphs both in size and in number of graphs. 

In this presentation we identify a set of key-factors, that influence performance of the related methods: the number of nodes, the average density, the number of distinct labels, the number of graphs, and the query size and we analyze the sensitivity of the various methods. The aims are (a) to derive conclusions about the algorithms' relative performance and (b) to stress-test all algorithms, deriving insights as to their scalability and highlight how both performance and scalability depend on the above factors. 6 well-established indexing techniques (Grapes, GraphGrepSX, CT-index, gIndex, Tree+D, gCode), representatives of the overall design space are extensively compared against both real and synthetic datasets. We report on their indexing time and size, and on query processing performance in terms of time and false positive ratio.

Speaker: Prof Dave Britton

Bio: Dave Britton is a professor of physics at the University of Glasgow and Project Leader of the GridPP project that provides Grid computing for particle physics throughout the UK. He is a member of the ATLAS collaboration, one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN with an interest in Higgs decaying to a pair of tau-leptons. Previously he worked on CMS, another of the LHC experiments, qualifying the crystals that make up the end-caps of the electromagnetic calorimeter. He has also worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (the BaBar experiment); Cornell (the CLEO experiment); and at DESY in Hamburg (the ARGUS experiment) with an emphasis on tracking detectors. Earlier work at TRIUMF in Vancouver established the most stringent limits on lepton universality through rare pion decays. He has been involved with the GridPP project since conception in 2000 and was one of the lead authors of the proposals for all three phases. Initially appointed as Project Manager, he took over as the GridPP Project leader in 2008. GridPP is a collaboration of Particle Physicists and Computing Scientists from 19 UK Universities together with the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory and CERN, who have built a Grid for Particle Physics.

Speaker: Wim Vanderbauwhede

This talk is about a proposal we intend to submit to the H2020 SESAR call on Air Traffic Management. It deals with the need for accurate weather forecasting along the trajectory of a plane and corrections to that trajectory as a result of the predictions. I want to outline our proposal and discuss the various challenges we need to address.

Speaker: Mr Majed Al Saeed

Profiling tools are essential for understanding and tuning the performance of both programs and parallel language implementations.
Assessing the performance of a program in a language with high-level parallel coordination is often complicated by the layers of abstraction present in the language and its implementation. We investigate whether it is possible to profile parallel Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) using existing host language profiling tools. The key challenge is that the host language tools report the performance of the DSL runtime system (RTS) executing the application rather than the performance of the DSL application. The key questions are whether a correct, effective and efficient profiler can be constructed using host language profiling tools; is it possible to effectively profile the DSL implementation, and what capabilities are required of the host language profiling tools? We develop a profiler for the parallel DSL, Haskell Distributed Parallel Haskell (HdpH) using the host language profiling tools. We show that it is possible to construct a profiler (HdpHProf) to support performance analysis of both the DSL applications and the DSL implementation. The implementation uses several new GHC features, including the Ghc-Events Library and ThreadScope, and for the first time two performance analysis tools for DSL HdpH internals, i.e. Spark Pool Contention Analysis, and Registry Contention Analysis.

Speaker: Tamas Fleiner

How to divide the estate among creditors in case of a bankruptcy? An entertaining story in connection with a result of Nobel laureate Aumann and Maschler from studying a long standing mystery about the Talmud with the help of Game Theory. The talk contains one or two proofs, we learn what we should say if we want to be big boys at jail and we also hear about a legal issue in connection with levirate marriage. Prerequisites are standard order and arithmetic operations. (This is joint work with Balazs Sziklai.) 

Speaker: Dr Joanne Meredith (University of Salford)

The aim of this paper is to show how conversation analysis – a method devised for spoken interaction – can be used to analyze online interaction. The specific focus of this presentation will be on demonstrating how the impact of the design features, or affordances, of an online medium can be analyzed using conversation analysis. I will use examples from a corpus of 75 one-to-one Facebook ‘chats’, collected using screen capture software, which I argue can provide us with additional information about participants’ real-time, lived experiences of online interaction.  Through examining a number of interactional practices found in my data corpus, I will show how the analysis of real-life examples of online interaction can provide us with insights in to how participants adapt their interactional practices to suit the affordances of the medium.

Jo Meredith is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Salford. Before joining the University of Salford, Jo was a Lecturer at the University of Manchester and completed her doctoral thesis at Loughborough University. She is interested in developing the use of conversation analysis for online interaction, as well as investigating innovative methods for collecting online data.  

Speaker: Colin Perkins

This talk will present an initial measurement study to determine whether Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) is usable with UDP flows that traverse the public Internet. This is interesting because ECN is an important part of current IETF proposals for congestion control of UDP-based interactive multimedia traffic, and because of increasing use of UDP as a substrate on which new transport protocols can be deployed. Our results show that UDP-based servers can be reached using packets with ECT(0) marks with very high probability. We compare reachability of the same set of servers using ECN with TCP, finding a smaller fraction can successfully negotiate and use ECN in that case.

Speaker: Mr Ciaran McCreesh

The subgraph isomorphism problem is to find a little pattern graph inside a big target graph. Most algorithms for the problem are based upon inference and backtracking search. I'll look at one of these algorithms, and discuss how to parallelise it. The main complication is backjumping: when a conflict is reached, this algorithm can sometimes prove that it is safe to backtrack several steps immediately. I'll discuss how we can refactor backjumping as a special kind of fold, and then explain why the standard fold skeleton is no good: to avoid getting an absolute slowdown, we need both controlled work-stealing, and work cancellation, neither of which have been given the attention they deserve in the literature.

Speaker: Baharak Rastegari

David Manlove and I, with the help of a handful of volunteers, organized two international events recently: (i) COST Action IC1205 meeting on Matching and Fair Division, and (ii) 3rd International Workshop on Matching Under Preferences (MATCH-UP 2015). In this talk I'll tell you about an almost one year planning that went to these events, and all the fun and the troubles!

Speaker: Prof Paul Kelly

SLAM - simultaneous location and mapping - is a key platform for understanding 3D environments for a huge range of applications, spanning robotics and augmented reality and beyond. Building a really usable map of the environment requires "dense" methods currently feasible in realtime only on powerful hardware.  This talk will introduce SLAMBench, a publicly-available software framework which represents a starting point for quantitative, comparable and validatable experimental research to investigate trade-offs in performance, accuracy and energy consumption of a dense RGB-D SLAM system. SLAMBench provides a KinectFusion implementation in C++, OpenMP, OpenCL and CUDA, and harnesses the ICL-NUIM dataset of synthetic RGB-D sequences with trajectory and scene ground truth for reliable accuracy comparison of different implementation and algorithms. We present an analysis and breakdown of the constituent algorithmic elements of KinectFusion, and experimentally investigate their execution time on a variety of multicore and GPU-accelerated platforms. For a popular embedded platform, we also present an analysis of energy efficiency for different configuration alternatives.  This work is part of a larger research agenda aiming to push the limits of compiler technology up the "food chain", to explore higher-level algorithmic aspects of the design space and low-level implementation choices together, and I will present some preliminary results showing some of the potential of this idea.

Biography: Paul Kelly is Professor of Software Technology at Imperial College London, where he heads the Software Performance Optimisation research group and serves as co-Director of Imperial's Centre for Computational Methods in Science and Engineering (http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/p.kelly).

Speaker: Dr Edwin Brady

Idris (http://idris-lang.org/) is a general-purpose programming language with an expressive type system which allows a programmer to state properties of a program precisely in its type. Type checking is equivalent to formally and mechanically checking a program's correctness. Introductory examples of programs verified in this way typically involve length preserving operations on lists, or ordering invariants on sorting.

Realistically, though, programming is not so simple: programs interact with users, communicate over networks, manipulate state, deal with erroneous input, and so on. In this talk I will give an introduction to programming in Idris, with demonstrations, and show how its advanced type systems allows us to express such interactions precisely. I will show how it supports verification of stateful and communicating systems, in particular giving an example showing how to verify properties of concurrent communicating systems.

Speaker: Henrik Gollee

An intermittent controller generates a sequence of (continuous-time) parametrised trajectories whose parameters are adjusted intermittently, based on continuous observation. This concept is related to "ballistic" control and differs from i) discrete-time control in that the control is not constant between samples, and ii) continuous-time control in that the trajectories are reset intermittently.  The Intermittent Control paradigm evolved separately in the physiological and engineering literature. The talk will give details on the experimental verification of intermittency in biological systems and its applications in engineering.

Advantages of intermittent control compared to the continuous paradigm in the context of adaptation and learning will be discussed.

Speaker: Mary Ellen Foster

Human communication is inherently multimodal: when we communicate with one another, we use a wide variety of channels, including speech, facial expressions, body postures, and gestures. An embodied conversational agent (ECA) is an interactive character -- virtual or physically embodied -- with a human-like appearance, which uses its face and body to communicate in a natural way. Giving such an agent the ability to understand and produce natural, multimodal communicative behaviour will allow humans to interact with such agents as naturally and freely as they interact with one another, enabling the agents to be used in applications as diverse as service robots, manufacturing, personal companions, automated customer support, and therapy.

To develop an agent capable of such natural, multimodal communication, we must first record and analyse how humans communicate with one another. Based on that analysis, we then develop models of human multimodal interaction and integrate those models into the reasoning process of an ECA. Finally, the models are tested and validated through human-agent interactions in a range of contexts.

In this talk, I will give three examples where the above steps have been followed to create interaction models for ECAs. First, I will describe how human-like referring expressions improve user satisfaction with a collaborative robot; then I show how data-driven generation of facial displays affects interactions with an animated virtual agent; finally, I describe how trained classifiers can be used to estimate engagement for customers of a robot bartender.

Bio: Mary Ellen Foster will join the GIST group as a Lecturer in July 2015. Her main research interest is embodied communication: understanding human face-to-face conversation by implementing and evaluating embodied conversational agents (such as animated virtual characters and humanoid robots) that are able to engage in natural, face-to-face conversation with human users. She is currently a Research Fellow in the Interaction Lab at the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, and has previously worked in the Robotics and Embedded Systems Group at the Technical University of Munich and in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.  She received her Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh in 2007.

Speaker: Robert Clipsham

In current implementations of low-level networking stacks, performance is
  favoured over safety, security, and correctness of applications. Despite
  modern languages and abstractions being available for higher levels of
  networking stacks, these have so far been dismissed due to the stringent
  performance requirements. This paper proposes using the Rust programming
  language to introduce the same level of safety and abstraction which is
  expected at higher levels of the stack, without sacrificing the expected
  performance.

Speaker: Dr Jeremy Singer

The University is expanding its portfolio of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), hosted on the FutureLearn platform. Wim and I are designing a course entitled 'Introduction to Functional Programming in Haskell'. It's going to be available to distance learners. It will also form the first part of our Functional Programming 4 course.

In this GPG meeting, we'll give some background about MOOCs. We'd be interested to hear your experiences of online learning. Then we will discuss the concepts we hope to cover in the new Haskell MOOC, as well as our strategy for course scalability. Please come along and help to shape this course!

Speaker: Ian Sommerville
CS Seminar on Software Engineering

In this talk, I will discuss some of the issues that arose when designing a national socio-technical educational system with a potential user base of over a million users. I will discuss some of the software engineering strategies that were used and why these failed as well as how the use of 'user stories' proved to be a successful approach for understanding the ways in which the system may be used. I will generalise from this experience to speculate on broader issues of government IT system failure.

Speaker: Ioannis Politis

Abstract: Multimodal displays are increasingly being utilized as driver warnings. Abstract warnings, without any semantic association to the signified event, and language-based warnings are examples of such displays. This paper presents a first comparison between these two types, across all combinations of audio, visual and tactile modalities. Speech, text and Speech Tactons (a novel form of tactile warnings synchronous to speech) were compared to abstract pulses in two experiments. Results showed that recognition times of warning urgency during a non-critical driving situation were shorter for abstract warnings, highly urgent warnings and warnings including visual feedback. Response times during a critical situation were shorter for warnings including audio. We therefore suggest abstract visual feedback when informing drivers during a non-critical situation and audio in a highly critical one. Language-based warnings during a critical situation performed equally well as abstract ones, so they are suggested as less annoying vehicle alerts.

Speaker: Karen Petrie

Symmetry in constraints has always been important but in recent years has become a major research area in its own right. A key problem in constraint programming has long been recognised: search can revisit equivalent states over and over again. In principle this problem has been solved, with a number of different techniques. Research remains very active for two reasons. First, there are many difficulties in the practical application of the techniques that are known for symmetry exclusion, and overcoming these remain important research problems. Second, the successes achieved in the area so far have encouraged researchers to find new ways to exploit symmetry.

This talk will give a whistle stop tour of symmetry elimination in constraint programming, before looking at what the open problems are which are ripe for research.

Speaker: Waqar Nabi and Wim Vanderbauwhede

The increasing use of diverse architectures resulting in heterogeneous platforms for High-Performance Computing (HPC) presents a significant programming challenge. The resultant design productivity gap is a bottleneck to achieving the maximum possible performance. Our current work aims to address this design productivity gap specifically for FPGAs, where it is a major obstacle to their wider adoption in HPC.

We will present the TyTra design flow, which is being developed in the context of our larger project that aims to create a turn-key compiler for heterogeneous target platforms.

We will discuss an evolving custom high-level language, the TyTra language, that facilitates generation of different correct-by-construction program variants through type- transformations.

We will then talk about the custom target intermediate language for the high-level TyTra language, the Tytra-IR, which is similar to LLVM, but is extended to include explicit parallelization semantics that enable it to describe the different configurations associated with each program variant. It also allows direct association of each of them with an accurate estimate of cost and performance. We will briefly discuss this cost model and our on-going work with an estimator and  code generator for FPGAs.

Speaker: Kristian Hentschel, Shinyi Breslin, Robert Clipsham

Three students from the ARRCS course will present to the ENDS group.

1. Data Centre Design and Analysis for Energy Efficiency

Presenter: Kristian Hentschel

Summary: As evidenced by different, new and carefully designed approaches in newly built datacentres across the world, data centres still have a high potential for optimization of their energy usage. Power, for both running the actual machines and the cooling system, is a large part of the total cost of ownership. Low-power systems can reduce the cost, but may not provide sufficient performance. More traditional systems do not allow efficient scaling to changing workloads. The proposed research aims to evaluate how careful analysis, planning and design of hardware and software components of such a distributed system can alleviate these issues. In the presentation, I will describe and evaluate past and present approaches to this problem, and outline directions for the proposed research.

2. Implementing a Context-Aware Mobile Operating System

Presenter: Shinyi Breslin

Summary: With the ubiquity of modern-day smartphones and the various sensors it possesses, context-aware computing becomes plausible. Context-aware computing considers the current context, obtained through analysis of sensor data, to make decisions. Chu et al. [1] argue and propose a design for context generation to be governed by the mobile operating system, where several areas such as scheduling, energy management, and I/O devices can benefit. Whilst a number of context-aware mobile systems have been developed, none have yet to fully explore and evaluate the feasibility of a context-aware mobile OS.

[1] Chu, David, et al. "Mobile apps: it’s time to move up to condos." Proceedings of the 13th USENIX conference on Hot topics in operating systems. USENIX Association, 2011.

3. A Modern Approach to Systems Programming

Presenter: Robert Clipsham

Summary: Modern systems code is primarily written using C and C++, due to the need for high, predictable performance, and direct control of the hardware. This, unfortunately, leaves critical code vulnerable to a range of preventable bugs and security vulnerabilities, ranging from buffer overflows and memory corruption, to race conditions and protocol violations. By combining recent advances in programming language research, and implementing new compiler optimisations, I assert that it is possible to design a language which can provide guaranteed correctness of systems code, without sacrificing performance.

Speaker: Craig Mclaughlin, Dimitar Petrov, Gordon Reid

1. Static Verification for Modern Software Systems

Presenter: Craig Mclaughlin

Summary: The current proposal addresses the task of verifying properties of software systems which may be concurrent, distributed and/or operating on heterogeneous architectures. Several projects have extended techniques for sequential programs to the concurrent setting to handle concurrency within GPGPU programming (principally OpenCL/CUDA). Others have taken ideas from type theory to improve static guarantees about communication systems (such as MPI). Recent work has explored combining separation logic and session types to support more powerful reasoning for distributed programs. The aim of the current proposal is to apply this hybrid logic in the context of concurrent and distributed programming models in an effort to enhance the properties one can verify statically about these systems.

2. MapReduce with CUDA to achieve inter- and intra-node parallelism

Presenter: Dimitar Petrov

Summary: As the scale of high-performance computing grows, new needs arise for increased parallelism, reduced complexity and improved programmability. The work proposed here combines MapReduce with CUDA to achieve both inter- and intra-node parallelism. Map and reduce tasks are combined into chunks and executed on the GPU with the aim of increased performance. Although similar solutions have been proposed, all of these rely on the developer's understanding of GPU programming, either CUDA or OpenCL. We propose using Rootbeer to alleviate the issue and make the system accessible to a wider developer audience. Rootbeer allows programmers to write code in Java and have the (de)serialization, kernel code generation and kernel launch done automatically. Rootbeer also provides additional abstractions so that it can run complex Java objects on a GPU.

3. Generating optimal performance portable OpenCL code from existing OpenCL code.

Presenter: Gordon Reid

Summary: OpenCL was developed as a platform-independent way of writing code for execution on a number of different device types. OpenCL guarantees functional portability, but not performance portability. There is a body of existing work in obtaining performance portability using a number of different methods. Some authors have opted for acceptable performance portability between some CPUs and GPUs, doing minimal changes to OpenCL code with some of the changes being manually written by the developer and selected using ifdefs or different source files. Other work takes a more dramatic approach, either requiring the program to be rewritten in another high-level language which is then compiled down to OpenCL code, or are attempting performance portability via a completely new compiler implementation. My plan is in two parts. The first involves using existing OpenCL code like in some previous work but going further and automatically tuning and changing more aspects of the device and kernel code for many device types, including the Intel Xeon Phi. The second involves a look into analysis and optimisations at the SPIR level to explore finer grained optimisations made possible by this new intermediate format.

Speaker: Alexandra Weilenmann (University of Gothenburg)

In this talk, I will present a few examples of methodological explorations of social media activities, trying to capture and understand them as located, situated practices. This methodological endeavor spans over analyzing patterns in big data feeds (here Instagram) as well as small-scale video-based ethnographic studies of user activities. A situated social media perspective involves examining how production and consumption of social media are intertwined. Drawing upon our studies of social media use in cultural institutions we show how visitors are orienting to their social media presence while attending to physical space during the visit, and how editing and sharing processes are formed by the trajectory through the space. I will discuss the application and relevance of this approach for understanding social media and social photography in situ. I am happy to take comments and feedback on this approach, as we are currently working to develop it.

Alexandra Weilenmann holds a PhD in informatics and currently works at the Department of Applied IT, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She has over 15 years experience researching the use of mobile technologies, with a particular focus on adapting traditional ethnographic and sociological methods to enable the study of new practices. Previous studies includes mobile technology use among hunters, journalists, airport personnel, professional drivers, museum visitors, teenagers and the elderly. Weilenmann has experience working in projects in close collaboration with stakeholders, both regarding IT development projects (e.g. Ricoh Japan) and with Swedish special interest organizations (e.g. Swedish Institute of Assistive Technology). She has served on several boards dealing with issues of the integration of IT in society, for example the Swedish Government’s Use Forum, Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (Vinnova) and as an expert for telephone company DORO.

Speaker: Ornela Dardha

A session-based process satisfies the progress property if its sessions never get stuck when it is executed in an adequate context. Pre- vious work studied how to define progress by introducing the notion of catalysers, execution contexts generated from the type of a process. In this paper, we refine such definition to capture a more intuitive notion of context adequacy for checking progress. Interestingly, our new catal- ysers lead to a novel characterisation of progress in terms of the stan- dard notion of lock-freedom. Guided by this discovery, we also develop a conservative extension of catalysers that does not depend on types, gen- eralising the notion of progress to untyped session-based processes. We combine our results with existing techniques for lock-freedom, obtaining a new methodology for proving progress. Our methodology captures new processes wrt previous progress analysis based on session types. 

Speaker: Kyle Montague (Dundee)

Laboratory-based evaluations allow researchers to control for external factors that can influence participant interaction performance. Typically, these studies tailor situations to remove distraction and interruption, thus ensuring users’ attention on the task and relative precision in interaction accuracy. While highly controlled laboratory experiments provide clean measurements with minimal errors, interaction behaviors captured within natural settings differ from those captured within the laboratory. Additionally, laboratory-based evaluations impose time restrictions on user studies. Characteristically lasting no more than an hour at a time, they restrict the potential for capturing the performance changes that naturally occur throughout daily usage as a result of fatigue or situational constraints. These changes are particularly interesting when designing for mobile interactions where the environmental factors can pose significant constraints and complications on the users interaction abilities.

This talk will discuss recent works exploring mobile touchscreen interactions from the wild involving participants with motor and visual impairments - sharing the successes and pitfalls of these approaches, and the creation of a new data collection framework to support future mobile interaction studies in-the-wild.

Speaker: Mohammad Faizuddin Md Noor

We demonstrate that users can be identified using back-of-device handgrip changes during the course of the interaction with mobile phone, using simple, low-resolution capacitive touch sensors placed around a standard device. As a baseline, we replicated the front-of-screen experiments of Touchalytics and compare with our results. We show that classifiers trained using back-of-device could match or exceed the performance of classifiers trained using the Touchalytics approach. Our technique achieved mean AUC, false accept rate and false reject rate of 0.9481, 3.52% and 20.66% for a vertical scrolling reading task and 0.9974, 0.85% and 2.62% for horizontal swiping game task. These results suggest that handgrip provides substantial evidence of user identity, and can be a valuable component of continuous authentication systems.

Speaker: Matthieu Duvinage

Disabilities affecting mobility, in particular, often lead to exacerbated isolation and thus fewer communication opportunities, resulting in a limited participation in social life. Additionally, as costs for the health-care system can be huge, rehabilitation-related devices and lower-limb prostheses (or orthoses) have been intensively studied so far. However, although many devices are now available, they rarely integrate the direct will of the patient. Indeed, they basically use motion sensors or the residual muscle activities to track the next move.

Therefore, to integrate a more direct control from the patient, Brain-Computer Interfaces

(BCIs) are here proposed and studied under ambulatory conditions. Basically, a BCI allows you to control any electric device without the need of activating muscles. In this work, the conversion of brain signals into a prosthesis kinematic control is studied following two approaches. First, the subject transmits his desired walking speed to the BCI. Then, this high-level command is converted into a kinematics signal thanks to a Central Pattern Generator (CPG)-based gait model, which is able to produce automatic gait patterns. Our work thus focuses on how BCIs do behave in ambulatory conditions. The second strategy is based on the assumption that the brain is continuously controlling the lower limb. Thus, a direct interpretation, i.e. decoding, from the brain signals is performed. Here, our work consists in determining which part of the brain signals can be used.

Speaker: Tim Storer

On a typical computing platform heterogeneous software components exist within a complex eco-system of dependencies, in which components and their dependencies must be installed alongside other, potentially conflicting systems.  Dependency management systems use specifications of a component's dependencies (typically including identifier and valid release version range) to mediate this complexity by searching for combinations of compatible component versions.  The research in this talk is based on the hypothesis that dependency descriptions may be either over-constrained (creating unnecessary conflicts between components and making the overall platform more brittle than it needs to be) or under-constrained (supposedly valid configurations result in system failures).  Mutation testing is used to validate the version ranges specified in dependency descriptors and search for counter examples of over and under specification.  The talk presents early results applying the technique to the Maven dependency management system.

Speaker: Prof Chris Pearce & Dr Lukasz Kaczmarczyk

Our research is focussed on the computational modelling of materials and structures, with particular focus on multi-scale mechanics and multi-physics problems, applied to problems ranging from safety critical structures to biomechanics, supported by EPSRC, EU, TSB and industry. The Finite Element Method (FEM) is an extremely powerful numerical technique for finding approximate solutions to a broad range of science and engineering processes that are governed by Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). It has revolutionised simulation and predictive modelling in science and engineering and has had a pervasive impact on industrial engineering analysis.

Despite the undoubted success of FEM, there is a continuous drive to push finite element technology beyond current capabilities, to solve increasingly complex real-world problems as efficiently as possible. Established commercial FE software can be relatively slow to adopt new technologies due to the dominance of out-of-date software architecture. Perhaps the greatest part of FE code development is expended in dealing with technical problems related to software implementation, rather than resolving the underlying physics. The biggest challenge is to create a computationally tractable problem, which can be solved efficiently while simultaneously delivering an accurate and robust solution by controlling the numerical error.

The presentation will first present the context of our research, briefly describing some examples from our projects, before looking at more details of our software development platform (MoFEM). This is a flexible and adaptable framework, while tackling the conflicting requirements of accuracy and computational efficiency. The catalyst for the creation of MoFEM was the need for a flexible and numerically accurate modelling environment for multi-physics problems, driven by the need of our industrial partners.

Speaker: Delaram Jarchi

Objective assessment of detailed gait patterns is important for clinical applications. One common approach to clinical gait analysis is to use multiple optical or inertial sensors affixed to the patient body for detailed bio-motion and gait analysis. The complexity of sensor placement and issues related to consistent sensor placement have limited these methods only to dedicated laboratory settings, requiring the support of a highly trained technical team. The use of a single sensor for gait assessment has many advantages, particularly in terms of patient compliance, and the possibility of remote monitoring of patients in home environment. In this talk we look into the assessment of a single ear-worn sensor (e-AR sensor) for gait analysis by developing signal processing techniques and using a number of reference platforms inside and outside the gait laboratory. The results are provided considering two clinical applications such as post-surgical follow-up and rehabilitation of orthopaedic patients and investigating the gait changes of the Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients.

Speaker: Gary Burnett (University of Nottingham)

Driving is an everyday task which is fundamentally changing, largely as a result of the rapid increase in the number of computing and communications-based technologies within/connecting vehicles. Whilst there is considerable potential for different systems (e.g. on safety, efficiency, comfort, productivity, entertainment etc.), one must always adopt a human-centred perspective.  This talk will raise the key HCI issues involved in the driving context and the effects on the design of the user-interface – initially aiming to minimise the likelihood of distraction. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of different evaluation methods commonly employed in the area will be discussed. In the final part of the talk, issues will be raised for future vehicles, particularly considering the impact of increasing amounts of automation functionality, fundamentally changing the role of the human “driver” - potentially from that of vehicle controller periodically to one of system status monitor. Such a paradigm shift raises profound issues concerning the design of the vehicle HMI which must allow a user to understand the “system" and also to seamlessly forgo and regain control in an intuitive manner. 

Gary Burnett is Associate Professor in Human Factors in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nottingham. 

Speaker: Stephen McQuistin

Speaker: Dr Alastair Donaldson

Parallel programming models for many-core systems, such as the OpenCL programming model, claim to allow the construction of portable many-core software.  Though performance portability may be an elusive goal, functional portability should not be.  Functional portability depends on reliable compilers for many-core programming languages.  This presents a real challenge for industry because many-core devices, such as GPUs, are evolving rapidly, as are the associated many-core languages (e.g., a revision of the OpenCL specification appears approximately once every 18 months). Compiler-writers are thus continually playing catch-up.

I will present recent ideas on how to apply random testing (fuzzing) to many-core compilers, in the context of OpenCL.  The aim of this work is to help vendors to improve the quality of their compilers by discovering bugs quickly.  Following up on successful prior works on sequential compiler testing, we have designed two techniques for generating random OpenCL kernels for purposes of compiler testing. The first approach builds on the Csmith project from the University of Utah (PLDI'11).  
Here, we generate random OpenCL kernels that are guaranteed to be free from undefined behaviour and to behave deterministically.  For such a kernel, differing results between two OpenCL implementations indicates that one of the implementations has compiled the kernel erroneously.  
The second approach builds on the "equivalence modulo inputs" idea from researchers at UC Davis (PLDI'14).  Here we start with an OpenCL kernel and generate mutations from the kernel such that, for a given input, each mutant is guaranteed by construction to compute the same result as the original kernel.  In this case, observable differences between mutants for the given input indicate compiler bugs.

I will report on a large testing campaign with respect to 19 OpenCL (device, compiler) configurations.  We found bugs in every configuration that we tested, including in compilers from AMD, Nvidia, Intel and Altera.  Many of the bugs we reported have now been fixed by the associated vendors.  In the talk I will show some examples of the bugs the technique has uncovered.

This is joint work with Christopher Lidbury, Andrei Lascu and Nathan Chong, and is due to appear at PLDI'15.

Bio: Alastair Donaldson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, where he leads the Multicore Programming Group and is Coordinator of the FP7 project CARP: Correct and Efficient Accelerator Programming.  He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers in formal verification and multicore programming, and leads the GPUVerify project on automatic verification of GPU kernels, which is a collaboration with Microsoft Research.  Before joining Imperial, Alastair was a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Research Engineer at Codeplay Software Ltd.  He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow.

Speaker: Gethin Norman

In this talk I will outline automated techniques for the verification and control of probabilistic real-time systems that are only partially observable. To formally model such systems, we define an extension of probabilistic timed automata in which local states are partially visible to an observer or controller. Quantitative properties of interest, relate to the probability of an event’s occurrence or the expected value of some reward measure. I will propose techniques to either verify that such a property holds or to synthesise a controller for the model which makes it true. The approach is based on an integer discretisation of the model’s dense-time behaviour and a grid-based abstraction of the uncountable belief space induced by partial observability. The latter is necessarily approximate since the underlying problem is undecidable, however both lower and upper bounds on numerical results can be generated.

Speaker: Corina Sas (Lancaster University)

A central tenet of HCI is that technology should be user-centric, with designs being based around social science findings about users. Nevertheless a key challenge in interaction design is translating empirical findings into actionable ideas that inform design. Despite various design methods aiming to bridge this gap, such implications for informing design are still seen as problematic. However there has been little exploration into what practitioners understand by implications for design, the functions of such implications and the principles behind their creation. We report on interviews with twelve expert HCI design researchers probing: the roles and types of implications, their intended beneficiaries, and the process of generating and evaluating them. We synthesize different types of implications into a framework to guide the generation of implications. Our findings identify a broader range of implications than those described in ethnographical studies, capturing technologically implementable knowledge that generalizes to different settings. We conclude with suggestions about how we might reliably generate more actionable implications.

Dr. Sas is a Senior Lecturer in HCI, School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University. Her research interests include human-computer interaction, interaction design, user experience, designing tools and interactive systems to support high level skill acquisition and training such as creative and reflective thinking in design, autobiographical reasoning, emotional processing and spatial cognition. Her work explores and integrates wearable bio sensors, lifelogging and memory technologies, and virtual reality.

Speaker: Matthew Edgar

Conventional cameras rely upon a pixelated sensor to provide spatial resolution. An alternative approach replaces the sensor with a pixelated transmission mask encoded with a series of binary patterns. Combining knowledge of the series of patterns and the associated filtered intensities, measured by single-pixel detectors, allows an image to be deduced through data inversion. At Glasgow we have been extending the concept of a `single-pixel camera' to provide continuous real-time video in excess of 10 Hz, at non-visible wavelengths, using efficient computer algorithms. We have so far demonstrated some applications for our camera such as imaging through smoke, through tinted screens, and detecting gas leaks, whilst performing sub-Nyquist sampling. We are currently investigating the most effective image processing strategies and basis scanning procedures for increasing the image resolution and frame rates for single-pixel video systems.

Speaker: Dr Chris Brown

Modern multicore systems offer huge computing potential. Exploiting large parallel systems is still a very challenging task, however, especially as many software developers still use overly-sequential programming models. In this talk, I will present a radical and novel approach to introducing and tuning parallelism for heterogeneous shared-memory systems (comprising a mixture of CPUs and GPUs), that combines algorithmic skeletons, machine-learning, and refactoring tool support. Specifically, I will show how to use skeletons to model the parallelism, machine learning to predict the optimal configuration and mapping and refactoring to introduce the parallelism into the application. Finally, I will demonstrate our tools on a number of applications, showing that we can easily obtain comparable results to hand-tuned optimised versions.

Speaker: Patrick Prosser

There is a form of sailing with skippers sailing one-vs-one in a round-robin, known as Match Racing. The early stages of the Americas Cup are done as round-robins. Recently, we have been performing research on how to improve the schedules and to make racing fairer. In this talk I will describe the problem and present the 13 rules described in the ISAF World Sailing Umpire’s Manual for constructing a legal schedule.  A constraint model is then presented. We show that some of the published schedules are in fact illegal, violate ISAF rules. There are also some “missing” schedules, some that we believe are provably impossible given the rules. This is a presentation of “work in progress”.

Speaker: Randy Shoup

eBay and Google operate some of the largest Internet sites on the planet. At large scale, small problems become magnified, and new sets of challenging problems arise.  This talk will share several "war stories" of problems encountered at scale at each company.  It will also offer some learnings about what has worked well -- and what has not -- in building and maintaining an innovative engineering culture, a flexible and powerful technology stack, and efficient development processes. It will conclude with some suggestions about how other organizations can apply those learnings themselves.

Bio: Randy Shoup has worked as a senior technology leader and executive in Silicon Valley at companies ranging from small startups, to mid-sized places, to eBay and Google. In his consulting practice, he applies this experience to scaling the technology infrastructures and engineering organizations of his client companies. He served as CTO of KIXEYE, a 500-person maker of real-time strategy games for web and mobile devices. Prior to KIXEYE, he was Director of Engineering in Google's cloud computing group, leading several teams building Google App Engine, the world's largest Platform as a Service. Previously, he spent 6 1/2 years as Chief Engineer and Distinguished Architect at eBay, building several generations of eBay's real-time search infrastructure. Randy is a frequent keynote speaker and consultant in areas from scalability and cloud computing, to analytics and data science, to engineering culture and DevOps. He is particularly interested in the nexus of people, culture, and technology.

http://www.randyshoup.com/

Speaker: Mattias Rost

Mattias Rost will lead a two hour, hands-on tutorial on Apache Cordova (http://cordova.apache.org/). Apache Cordova is a platform for building native mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Everyone welcome. Bring a laptop!

Speaker: Dr Christophe Dubach

Computing systems have become increasingly complex with the emergence of heterogeneous hardware combining multicore CPUs and GPUs. These parallel systems exhibit tremendous computational power at the cost of increased programming effort. This results in a tension between achieving performance and code portability / ease of programming.

In this talk I will present a novel approach that offers high-level programming, code portability and high-performance. It is based on algorithmic pattern composition coupled with a powerful, yet simple, set of rewrite rules. This enables systematic transformation and optimization of a high-level program into a low-level hardware specific representation which leads to high performance code. I will show how a subset of the OpenCL programming model can be mapped to low-level patterns and how to automatically generate high performance OpenCL code on par with highly tuned implementations for multicore CPUs and GPUs.

A technical report describing this work can be found on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.02389

Bio: Christophe Dubach received his Ph.D in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh in 2009 and holds a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from EPFL (Switzerland). He is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture at the University of Edinburgh (UK). In 2010 he spent one year as a visiting researcher at the IBM Watson Research Center (USA) working on the LiquidMetal project. His current research interests includes high-level programming models for heterogeneous systems, co-design of both computer architecture and optimising compiler technology, adaptive microprocessor, and the application of machine learning in these areas.

Speaker: Daniel Reijsbergen

We present recent work on the development of stochastic performance models of a public transportation network using real-world data. The data is provided to us by the Lothian Buses company, which operates an extensive bus network in Edinburgh. In particular, we use datasets of GPS measurements with about 30-40 seconds between subsequent observations. Some quantities of interest that can be analysed using this data are the times needed to complete specific route segments, and the 'headway', the distance (in terms of journey completion)
between subsequent buses. Both can be modelled using established formalisms, namely Markov chains and time series respectively. We briefly discuss several applications, including a 'what-if' scenario involving the introduction of trams to the Edinburgh city centre, and the evaluation of the punctuality of frequent services in terms of criteria set by the Scottish government.

Speaker: Mahmoud El-Haj
In this presentation I will show the work we’ve done in our Corporate Financial Information Environment (CFIE) project.

In this presentation I will show the work we’ve done in our Corporate Financial Information Environment (CFIE) project.  The Project, funded by ESRC and ICAEW, seeks to analyse UK financial narratives, their association with financial statement information, and their informativeness for investors using Computational Linguistics, heuristic Information Extraction (IE) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).  We automatically collected and analysed a number of 14,000 UK annual reports covering a period between 2002 and 2014 for the UK largest firms listed on the London Stock Exchange. We developed software for this purpose which is available online for general use by academics.  The talk includes a demo on the software that we developed and used in our analysis: Wmatrix-import and Wmatrix.  Wmatrix-import is a web-based tool to automatically detect and parse the structure of UK annual reports; the tool provides sectioning, word frequency and readability metrics.  The output from Wmatrix-import goes as input for further NLP and corpus linguistic analysis by Wmatrix - a web based corpus annotation and retrieval tool which currently supports the analysis of small to medium sized English corpora.

Links:

Wmatrix-import
https://cfie.lancaster.ac.uk:8443/

Wmatrix
http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/

CFIE Project
http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/cfie/

Speaker: Dr Paul Thomas
Many techniques in information retrieval produce counts from a sample

Many techniques in information retrieval produce counts from a sample, and it is common to analyse these counts as proportions of the whole—term frequencies are a familiar example.  Proportions carry only relative information and are not free to vary independently of one another: for the proportion of one term to increase, one or more others must decrease.  These constraints are hallmarks of compositional data.  While there has long been discussion in other fields of how such data should be analysed, to our knowledge, Compositional Data Analysis (CoDA) has not been considered in IR. In this work we explore compositional data in IR through the lens of distance measures, and demonstrate that common measures, naïve to compositions, have some undesirable properties which can be avoided with composition-aware measures.  As a practical example, these measures are shown to improve clustering.

Speaker: Ciaran McCreesh

In the subgraph isomorphism problem, we are given a pattern graph P, and a target graph T, and we wish to find "a copy of P inside T". I will introduce three new practical improvements to the simple algorithms presented by Patrick last year.

Firstly, I will discuss supplemental graphs. The key idea is that a subgraph isomorphism i from P to T is also a subgraph isomorphism F(i) from F(P) to F(T), for certain transformations F. This lets us generate redundant constraints: we can search for a mapping which is simultaneously a subgraph isomorphism between several carefully selected pairs of graphs.

Secondly, I will introduce an intermediate level of inference for an all-different constraint. Traditionally a matching-based approach is used, but this scales poorly to large target graphs and generally does not provide much additional filtering. We use a weaker counting-based approach, which is much faster and which usually gives the same amount of filtering.

Thirdly, I will revisit conflict-directed backjumping. I will show that there is no need to maintain conflict sets when working with cloned domains. I will also explain how the counting all-different algorithm can produce more fine-grained information on a conflict, allowing longer backjumps.

Speaker: Dr. Paul Thomas
This work explores the link between users and models by analysing the assumptions and implications of a number of effectiveness metrics, and exploring how these relate to observable user behaviours

Retrieval system effectiveness can be measured in two quite different ways: by monitoring the behaviour of users and gathering data about the ease and accuracy with which they accomplish certain specified information-seeking tasks; or by using numeric effectiveness metrics to score system runs in reference to a set of relevance judgements.  In the second approach, the effectiveness metric is chosen in the belief that it predicts ease or accuracy.

This work explores that link, by analysing the assumptions and implications of a number of effectiveness metrics, and exploring how these relate to observable user behaviours.  Data recorded as part of a user study included user self-assessment of search task difficulty; gaze position; and click activity.  Our results show that user behaviour is influenced by a blend of many factors, including the extent to which relevant documents are encountered, the stage of the search process, and task difficulty.  These insights can be used to guide development of batch effectiveness metrics.

Speaker: Mattias Rost

Large scale trials of mobile apps can generate a lot of log data. Logs contain information about the use of the apps. Existing support for analysing such log data include mobile logging frameworks such as Flurry and Mixpanel, and more general visualisation tools such as Tableau and Spotfire. While these tools are great for giving a first glimpse at the content of the data and producing generic descriptive statistics, they are not great for drilling down into the details of the app at hand. In our own work we end up writing custom interactive visualisation tools for the application at hand, to get a deeper understanding of the use of the particular app. Therefore we have developed a new type of tool that supports the practice of writing custom data analysis and visualisation. We call it Blocks. In this talk I will talk describe what Blocks is, how Blocks encourages code writing, and how it supports the craft of log data analysis.

Mattias Rost is a researcher in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. He is currently working on the EPSRC funded Populations Programme.

Speaker: Dr John O'Donnell

Algorithms expressed using a small collection of combinators, including map, fold, scan, and sweep, can be implemented efficiently on circuits, FPGAs, and GPGPUs. Equational reasoning is effective for deriving such algorithms and proving them correct. I will describe its use in recent and current work on a family of algorithms related to functional arrays.

Speaker: Florian Block (Harvard University)

More than 40% of Americans still reject the theory of evolution. This talk focuses on the DeepTree exhibit, a multi-user multi-touch interactive visualization of the Tree of Life. The DeepTree has been developed to facilitate collaborative visual learning of evolutionary concepts. The talk will outline an iterative process in which a multi-disciplinary team of computer scientists, learning scientists, biologists, and museum curators worked together throughout design, development, and evaluation. The outcome of this process is a fractal-based tree layout that reduces visual complexity while being able to capture all life on earth; a custom rendering and navigation engine that prioritizes visual appeal and smooth fly-through; a multi-user interface that encourages collaborative exploration while offering guided discovery. The talk will present initial evaluation outcomes illustrating that the large dataset encouraged free exploration, triggers emotional responses, and visitor self-selected multi-level engagement and learning.

Bio: Florian earned his PhD in 2010 at Lancaster University, UK (thesis titled “Reimagining Graphical User Interface Ecologies”). Florian’s work at SDR Lab has focused on using multi-touch technology and information visualization to facilitate discovery and learning in museums. He has worked on designing user interfaces for crowd interaction, developed the DeepTree exhibit, an interactive visualization of the tree of life (tolweb.org), as well as introduced methodological tools to quantify engagement of fluid group configurations around multi-touch tabletops in museums. Ultimately, Florian is interested in how interactive technology can provide unique new opportunities for learning, to understand which aspects of interactivity and collaboration contributes to learning, and how to use large datasets to engage the general public in scientific discovery and learning.

Speaker: Raj Sark
Based on the famous TechMeetup format, we will have 2 talks on mobile tech

Based on the famous TechMeetup format, we will have 2 talks on mobile tech, networking and some beer and pizza. We will provide vegan and gluten-free pizzas too!.

Speakers will be Raj Sark from Lupo, and Euan Freeman, from School of Computing Science Glasgow.

Find more information about the speakers and get the FREE tickets here:

www.ivmobile.eventbrite.com

Event schedule:

6.00pm - registration
6.15pm - pizza & drinks
6.45pm - talks & discussions
7.30pm - networking
9.00pm - close

Speaker: Alceste Scalas

I will illustrate a semantic approach to the foundations of session types, by revisiting them in the abstract setting of labelled transition systems. The crucial insight is a simulation relation  which generalises the usual syntax-directed notions of typing and subtyping, and encompasses both synchronous and asynchronous binary session types. This allows to extend the session types theory to some common programming patterns which are not typically considered in the session types literature.

Speaker: Emma Nicol and Mark Dunlop (Strathclyde)

As part of an EPSRC project on Text Entry for Older Adults we have ran several workshops. A theme of support "write then review" style of entry has emerged from these workshops. In this talk we will present the lessons from our workshops along with our experimental keyboard that supports review mode through highlighting various elements of the text you have entered. Android demo available for download during talk.

Speaker: David R. White

IncPy is a memoisation tool designed to speed-up scientific script debugging in Python. I am interested in IncPy due to its relevant to the AnyScale project. In this talk, I’ll describe how IncPy fits into the AnyScale vision, and then discuss how IncPy works based on my experience  porting and polishing the code.

Speaker: Dr Wim Vanderbauwhede

This talk covers the work I did over the summer at Kyoto University in Japan. It involved porting a Large Eddy Simulator to OpenCL and creating the Glasgow Model Coupling Framework (GMCF), a novel model coupling framework, aimed at creating systems of communicating simulators. I will discuss the porting approach and performance of the OpenCL LES and explain the rationale and architecture of GMCF, and discuss our current work on it.

Speaker: Muffy Calder

This will be a practice talk for a public lecture (to a scientific audience) I will be giving in Cork to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Boole’s birth.  (Boole was a Professor at UC Cork).  I will give the polished lecture here in the School later this year, this will be an informal practice where I will look for feedback from FATA.

Speaker:

 A (hopefully) short meeting to plan the talks for the rest of the year.

Speaker: Nikos Ntarmos

 Rank (i.e., top-k) join queries play a key role in modern analytics
tasks. However, despite their importance and unlike centralized
settings, they have been completely overlooked in cloud NoSQL settings.
This talk will discuss our results in this area, as presented in the
VLDB 2014 conference. Baseline solutions are offered using SQL-like
tools (Hive, Pig) based on MapReduce jobs. We then provide a number of
solutions based on specialized indices. The first such solution uses
simple inverted indices accessed with MapReduce jobs. The second
solution adapts and extends a popular centralized rank-join algorithm.
We further contribute a novel statistical structure comprising
histograms and Bloom filters, which forms the basis for our third
solution. We also provide MapReduce algorithms to build these indices,
algorithms to allow for concurrent online index updates, and query
processing algorithms utilizing them. Last, we discuss the results of an
extensive experimental evaluation, reporting on three metrics: query
execution time, network bandwidth consumption, and dollar-cost for query
execution.

Speaker: Dr Mark Batty

For performance, modern CPUs (and GPUs) admit relaxed behaviour: violations of sequential consistency. To enable efficient implementation above relaxed hardware without fencing simple memory accesses, programming languages like C11 and C++11/14 also admit relaxed behaviour, introducing substantial complexity to the programming model. My work provides a formal semantics for C11 and C++11/14 concurrency that was developed in close communication with the ISO committees that define the languages. The precise formal model has been used for several positive results: to identify and fix problems in the ISO specification, for proofs of the soundness of compilation mappings, in the development of formal reasoning principles, and in the proofs of basic tenets of the design. At the same time, the formal model allows us to criticise the design, and pinpoint its flaws.

In this talk I will review some of the positive results built on the formal C++11 memory model, including the proof of one of the key design goals of the language: that simple data-race-free programs are provided with sequentially consistent semantics (DRF-SC). I will then show that the C++11 memory model is fatally flawed when applied to C-like languages. I will discuss what might be done about this open problem, and I will talk about the extension of formal relaxed memory models to cover GPU computing.

Speaker: Vasco Vasconcelos

We present a type-based approach to the verification of the communication structure of parallel programs. We model parallel imperative programs where a fixed number of processes, each equipped with its local memory, communicates via a rich diversity of primitives, including point-to-point messages, broadcast, reduce, and array scatter and gather. The theory includes a decidable dependent type system incorporating abstractions for the various communication operators, a form of primitive recursion, and collective choice. We further introduce a core programming language for imperative, message-passing, parallel programming, and show that the language enjoys progress. Joint work with Francisco Martins, Eduardo R.B. Marques, Hugo A. López, César Santos and Nobuko Yoshida.

Speaker: Gareth J. F. Jones
Spoken content retrieval (SCR) has been the focus of various research initiatives for more then 20 years.

Spoken content retrieval (SCR) has been the focus of various research initiatives for more then 20 years. Early research focused on retrieval of clear defined spoken documents principally from the broadcast news domain. The main focus of this work was spoken document retrieval (SDR) task at TREC-6-9. The end of which saw SDR declared a largely solved problem. However, this was soon found to be a premature conclusion relating to controlled recordings of professional news content and overlooking many of the potential challenges of searching more complex spoken content. Subsequent research has focused on more challenging tasks such as search of interview recordings and semi-professional internet content.  This talk will begin by reviewing early work in SDR, explaining its successes and limitations, it will then move to outline work exploring SCR for more challenging tasks, such as identifying relevant elements in long spoken recordings such as meetings and presentations, provide a detailed analysis of the characteristics of retrieval behaviour of spoken content elements when indexed using manual and automatic transcripts, and conclude with a summary of the challenges of delivering effective SCR for complex spoken content and initial attempts to address these challenges. 

Speaker: Rob Irving

Speaker: Gordon Baxter

Why is it that designers continue to be irritated when users struggle to make their apparently intuitive systems work? I will explain how we believe that this perception is related to the fundamental attribution error concept from social psychology. The problem of understanding users is hard, though, because there is so much to learn and understand. I will go on to talk about the ABCS framework, a concept we developed to help organise and understand the information we know about users, and using examples will illustrate how it can affect system design.

Gordon Baxter is a co-author of the book Foundations For Designing User Centred Systems

Speaker: Jeremy Singer

The traditional ENDS Christmas Quiz, presented by Dr Jeremy Singer, and followed by the ENDS Christmas meal.

Speaker: Dr Josef Svenningsson

We present two different representations for functional parallel arrays, Pull- and Push arrays. Functions written using these representations can easily be fused, which means that there is no performance penalty in writing in a high-level compositional style. We show how to use these representations in conjunction and how allows for a very expressive programming style for writing efficient array programs.

Speaker: Roland Perera

Speaker: Angus McCann

Speaker: Eve Hoggan

This talk will detail an exploratory study of remote interpersonal communication using our ForcePhone prototype. This research focuses on the types of information that can be expressed between two people using the haptic modality, and the impact of different feedback designs. Based on the results of this study and my current work, I will briefly discuss the potential of deformable interfaces and multimodal interaction techniques to enrich communication for users with impairments. Then I will finish with an introduction to neurophysiological measurements of such interfaces.

Bio
Eve Hoggan is a Research Fellow at the Aalto Science Institute and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT in Finland, where she is vice-leader of the Ubiquitous Interaction research group. Her current research focuses on the creation of novel interaction techniques, interpersonal communication and non-visual multimodal feedback. The aim of her research is to use multimodal interaction and varying form factors to create more natural and effortless methods of interaction between humans and technology regardless of any situational or physical impairment. More information can be found at www.evehoggan.com

Speaker: Phil Trinder

Symbolic computations are challenging to parallelise as they have
complex data and control structures, and both dynamic and highly
irregular parallelism.  The SymGridPar framework has been developed to
address these challenges on small-scale parallel architectures.
However, as the number of cores in compute clusters continues to grow
exponentially, and as the communication topology is becoming
increasingly complex, an improved parallel symbolic computation
framework is required: SymGridPar2.

In this talk, I'll explain how two main aspects of the design of
SymGridPar2, fault tolerance and locality control, interact with
dynamic scheduling of parallelism.  Fault tolerance is achieved by
tracking the location of tasks as they are scheduled across the
network, and by replicating tasks that were affected by node failure.
Locality control exposes an abstraction of the communication topology
so programs can control how close together tasks shall be placed by
the dynamic scheduler.

Speaker: Ciaran McCreesh

Russian Doll Search is a general algorithmic technique for solving hard optimisation problems, which looks a bit like Branch and Bound combined with Dynamic Programming. I'll give an overview of how it works, and what it's been used for, and will then speculate about how we might parallelise it.

Speaker:

Grand Challenges Session
This session will have several purposes:

- to encourage everyone to think about how to do the most significant
research

- to develop a shared understanding of the most important problems and
directions for computing science research

- to stimulate interaction between the research groups: perhaps someone
in another group has expertise relevant to your grand challenge, if only
they knew what your problem was

Speakers:

Wim Vanderbauwhede: exploiting manycore architectures

John Rooksby: Effective Mobile Health

Paul Siebert:TBC

Simon Rogers: Challenges in computational biology

Speaker: Dr David Topping

Uncertainties associated with impacts of aerosol particles on climate are larger than those of any other atmospheric components. In addition, fine particulate material is widely acknowledged as one of the most important pollutant impacting on air quality and human health. Comprised of both inorganic and organic material, inorganic material is restricted to a few well-understood compounds. However, organic material can comprise many thousands, as yet largely unidentified, compounds with a vast range of properties. Owing to this complexity and diversity of atmospheric aerosol components, quantification of the properties that determine their highly uncertain climatic and human health impacts requires the development of novel technological applications. Encompassing multiple disciplines, this includes developments in the field of physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering and computing.

Regional coupled chemistry-climate models attempt to carry our 'best knowledge' of how aerosols form and evolve on a UK and EU wide scale. Unfortunately, the process of embedding our 'best knowledge' is far from ideal. Chemical complexity comes at a premium and the associated impacts remain unknown. Mitigating this problem requires solutions from the fields of mathematics and computing. In this talk I will cover research carried out at the University of Manchester in this area along with developments from external collaborators.

Speaker: Massimo Bartoletti

Distributed applications can be constructed by composing services which interact by exchanging messages according to some global communication pattern, called choreography. Under the assumption that each service adheres to its role in the choreography, the overall application is
communication-correct.

However, in wild scenarios like the Web or cloud environments, services may be deployed by different participants, which may be mutually distrusting (and possibly malicious). In these cases, one can not assume (nor enforce) that services always adhere to their roles.

Many formal techniques focus on verifying the adherence between services and choreographic roles, under the assumption that no participant is malicious; in this case, strong communication-correctness results can be obtained, e.g. that the application is deadlock-free. However, in wild
scenarios such techniques can not be applied.

In this talk we present a paradigm for designing distributed applications in wild scenarios. Services use contracts to advertise their intended communication behaviour, and interact via sessions once a contractual agreement has been found. In this setting, the goal of a designer is to realise honest services, which respect their contracts in all execution contexts (also in those where other participants are malicious).

A key issue is that the honesty property is undecidable in general. In this talk we discuss verification techniques for honesty, targeted at agents specified in the contract-oriented calculus CO2. In particular, we show how to safely over-approximate the honesty property by a model-checking technique which abstracts from the contexts a service may be engaged with.

Speaker: Mattias Rost

Large scale trials of mobile apps can generate a lot of log data. Logs contain information about the use of the apps. Existing support for analysing such log data include mobile logging frameworks such as Flurry and Mixpanel, and more general visualisation tools such as Tableau and Spotfire. While these tools are great for giving a first glimpse at the content of the data and producing generic descriptive statistics, they are not great for drilling down into the details of the app at hand. In our own work we end up writing custom interactive visualisation tools for the application at hand, to get a deeper understanding of the use of the particular app. Therefore we have developed a new type of tool that supports the practice of writing custom data analysis and visualisation. We call it Blocks. In this talk I will talk describe what Blocks is, how Blocks encourages code writing, and how it supports the craft of log data analysis.

Mattias Rost is a researcher in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. He is currently working on the EPSRC funded Populations Programme. He was awarded his PhD by the University of Stockholm in 2013. 

Speaker: Dr David Duke

Codes for computational science and downstream analysis (visualization and/or statistical modelling) have historically been dominated by imperative thinking. While this situation is evolving, e.g. through adoption of functional ideas in toolkits for high-performance visualization, we are still a long way from seeing a functional language such as Haskell used routinely in live application, certainly for those involving peta-scale data and above.

This talk describes recent work on multifield data analysis that has led to new questions in nuclear physics, and the expanding role of Haskell in this research programme.  Following an introduction to visualization and topological analysis, I will describe the recent analysis of data from HPC simulation of nuclear fission undertaken by US collaborators that has led to new insight into the process of fission.  The talk will cover ongoing work using parallel functional programming on both shared and distributed memory architecture, and conclude with questions about the utility and future of functional programming in large-scale computational science.

Speaker: Michele Sevegnani

We report on work with our HCI friends, Tom Rodden and Steve Benford, on modelling and analysis for Benford’s Savannah mixed reality “game”.  We show how our novel bigraphical model of four perspectives of the system (computational, technical, human and physical), gives us new ways to analyse relationships between the perspectives and prove formally that there are cognitive dissonances in the system, as exemplified by user-trials.
No bigraph algebra required, we do everything with graphical forms (ie pictures)!
Formal modellers,  HCI experts, computer scientists, all welcome!

Speaker: Alexandros Labrinidis

ABSTRACT:

For the past few years, our group has been working on problems related to Big Data through several projects. After briefly discussing these projects, the rest of this talk will present DILoS, which focuses on load management for ``Big Streaming Data.'' 

Today, the ubiquity of sensing devices as well as of mobile and web applications continuously generates a huge amount of data in the form of streams, which need to be continuously processed and analyzed, to meet the near-real-time requirements of monitoring applications. Such processing happens inside Data stream management systems (DSMSs), which efficiently support continuous queries (CQs). CQs inherently have different levels of criticality and hence different levels of expected quality of service (QoS) and quality of data (QoD). In order to provide different quality guarantees, i.e., service level agreements (SLAs), to different client stream applications, we developed DILoS, a novel framework that exploits the synergy between scheduling and load shedding in DSMS. In overload situations, DILoS enforces worst-case response times for all CQs while providing prioritized QoD, i.e., minimize data loss for query classes according to their priorities.  We further propose ALoMa, a new adaptive load manager scheme that enables the realization of the DILoS framework. ALoMa is a general, practical DSMS load shedder that outperforms the state-of-the-art in deciding when the DSMS is overloaded and how much load needs to be shed. We implemented DILoS in our real DSMS prototype system (AQSIOS) and evaluated its performance for a variety of real and synthetic workloads. Our experiments show that our framework (1) allows the scheduler and load shedder to consistently honor CQs' priorities and (2) maximizes the utilization of the system processing capacity to reduce load shedding.

DILoS was developed in collaboration with Thao N.Pham (as part of her PhD thesis) and Panos K. Chrysanthis. This work has been funded in part by two NSF Awards and a gift from EMC/Greenplum.

Speaker: Marilyn Lennon

During the summer of 2014, we (a small team of researchers at Glasgow University) designed, developed and deployed a smartphone app based game for the commonwealth games in Glasgow. The aim of our game overall was to try to get people to engage with Glasgow, find out more about the commonwealth games, and above all to get people to walk more through 'gamification'. In reality though - we had no time or money for a well designed research study and proper exploration of gamification and engagement and in fact a huge amount of our efforts were focused instead on testing in app advertising models, understanding business models for 'wellness' apps, dealing with research and enterprise and considering routes for commercialisation of our underlying platform and game. Come along and hear what we learned (good and bad) about deploying a health and wellness app in the 'real world'.

Dr Marilyn Lennon is a senior lecturer in Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde.

Speaker: Mr J. Magnus Morton

In this talk we'll discuss the Python language - and scripting languages in general - and its suitability for parallel programming. I'll present my 5th year project that is parallelising compiler for Python.

Speaker: Patrick Prosser

In the subgraph isomorphism problem (SIP), we are given two graphs, G and H where G is a the pattern graph and H the target. The problem is then to determine if there is a subgraph of H (the target graph) that is isomorphic to G (the pattern graph). Generally, the problem is NP-hard. I will present some simple SIP algorithms, all using BitSet encodings, and progressively modify a base algorithm to give more sophisticated algorithms that better exploit problem structure.

Speaker: Jing Wang

Graph database could model a large range of scenarios, which makes the related research widely concerned. Among various research topics, graph querying is the one we are focused on. This talk would cover basic issues of query processing in graph database, especially the subgraph query. Also, our ongoing research on better performance of subgraph query processing would be included.

Speaker: Prof Greg Michaelson

Since Turing established the equivalence of Turing machines and the lambda calculus in 1936/7, proof of the Turing computability of Curry’s combinatory calculus seems to have rested indirectly on its equivalence to the lambda calculus rather than direct construction. In this seminar, a Turing machine that reduces combinator expressions is presented. The TM is over 1000 quintuplets long and further illustrates the utter unsuitability for software engineering of Turing’s elegant and succinct model of computability.

Speaker: Ian Mackie

We take a fresh look at an old problem of representing natural numbers in the lambda-calculus.  Our interest is in finding representations where we can compute efficiently (and where possible, in constant time) the following functions: successor, predecessor, addition, subtraction and test for zero. Surprisingly, we find a solution in the linear lambda-calculus, where copying and erasing are not permitted.

Speaker: Dr Mike Just
Recent research on the effectiveness of performing implicit authentication on smart phones, where sensor data is used to authenticate a user based upon their behaviour.

I will overview our group's recent research on the effectiveness of performing implicit authentication on smart phones, where sensor data is used to authenticate a user based upon their behaviour. In addition to results related to usability, security, and resource consumption, I will discuss some practical deployment issues related to training duration, and behaviour stability.

Bio:
Mike is a Senior Lecturer and the Associate Director of the Interactive and Trustworthy technologies group at GCU. He has published on many areas of computer security and cryptography, and is particularly interested in building usable security solutions. In 2003 he designed the Government of Canada's online account recovery solution, used by more than 6 million citizens and businesses. He recently lead a two-year EU project investigating the use of mobile phone sensors for authentication, that will be the subject of this presentation. Mike obtained his PhD from Carleton University (Canada), and in addition to his academic work, he spent 10 years in both the private and public sectors. You can find more information, including publications, at http://www.justmikejust.co.uk/

Speaker: Dr Jeremy Singer

I will give a lightning tour of new features in Java 8, focusing particularly on lambda expressions and streams. This will be an interactive session, so please come along and contradict me if you know more about lambdas than me.

Speaker: Dr Patrick Maier

At the tail end of the HPC-GAP project I spent some months trying to parallelise a computer algebra problem with the aim to scale up to supercomputers.

In this talk I'll gently introduce the problem, namely finding invariant bilinear forms in the representation theory of Hecke algebras.  I'll present a schematic overview of the sequential algorithm (originally written in the computer algebra system GAP) and discuss how to parallelise it (using the SymGridPar2 framework). I'll present some performance results, including runtime and (estimated) speedup figures on up to 1024 cores, and an analysis why this problem is difficult to parallelise. There is a paper with details: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-09873-9_35

I am not an expert on the algebraic side of this case study; apologies in advance for all the half-truths I'll be telling. (The real purpose of this talk is to help me remember the little algebra I've learned during the project.)

Speaker: Baharak Rastegari

I will present our result from last year (presented in EC 2014) on designing truthful mechanisms for the House Allocation (HA) problem. HA is the problem of allocating a set of objects among a set of agents, where each agent has ordinal preferences (possibly involving ties) over a subset of the objects. We focus on truthful mechanisms without monetary transfers for finding large Pareto optimal matchings.  

Speaker: Hani Aljahdali
Development of Graphical Authentication Schemes

This talk will present guidelines about developing and using recognition-based graphical passwords properly in terms of usability and security. Those guidelines are based on in depth-interviews with 23 graphical password users from my previous studies. The guidelines will show the aspects that need to be considered for future work in the field of recognition-based graphical passwords.  

Speaker: YouTube Video - Anita Sarkeesian

In this session we will view and discuss a video from the Feminist Frequency website (http://www.feministfrequency.com). The video is outlined as follows: "In this episode we examine the Ms. Male Character trope and briefly discuss a related pattern called the Smurfette Principle. We’ve defined the Ms. Male Character Trope as: The female version of an already established or default male character. Ms. Male Characters are defined primarily by their relationship to their male counterparts via visual properties, narrative connection or occasionally through promotional materials."

Speaker: Simon Jouet

As part of our ongoing research in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and the applications of central knowledge in Data Centres, we have designed an open framework for Network Function Virtualization (NFV). This talk will be about the current issue of middlebox deployment in large scale DC, how NFV tries to alleviates the cost and management problems and finally how GLANF unifies SDN and NFV to provide a infrastructure independent, elastic and transparent NFV framework.

Speaker: Dr J. Garrett Morris

Session types provide a static guarantee that concurrent programs respect communication protocols. Recently Caires, Pfenning, and Toninho, and Wadler, have developed a correspondence between the propositions of linear logic and session typed pi-calculus processes.

In this talk, I'll attempt to relate the cut-elimination semantics of this approach to a more typical operational semantics for session-typed concurrency in a functional language.  I'll present a minimal concurrent functional language, GV, with a type system based on Wadler's interpretation of session types. I'll give a small-step operational semantics for GV. I'll develop a suitable notion of deadlock for our functional setting, based on existing approaches for capturing deadlock in pi-calculus, and show that well-typed GV programs are deadlock-free, deterministic and terminating.  I'll also define two extensions of GV and show that they preserve deadlock freedom.

Speaker: David Manlove

In this talk I will give some background to kidney exchange in the UK context, and present some recent results from quarterly matching runs.  I will then give an overview of two new software applications for kidney exchange that emerged from summer MSc projects.  The first of these, due to Tommy Muggleton, is a tool for visualising input datasets and optimal solutions for kidney exchange problem instances.  The second, due to James Trimble, allows datasets to be generated that are a better reflection of the UK real data than a previous generator produced, and also permits characteristics of datasets to be analysed, and optimal solutions to be compared and contrasted with respect to different optimality criteria.

Speaker: Soumyadeb Chowdhury
Overview of user studies in graphical authentication.

This  talk will present a brief review of all the user studies (known to me) in the field of GASs that had explored the memorability of multiple graphical passwords . The review for each of the user studies will discuss the system used for the experiment, the experimental protocol and the results obtained from the experiment and our inferences (which are based upon the research published by the respective authors).

Papers:
Chiasson, S. et al., 2009. Multiple Password Interference in Text and Click-Based Graphical Passwords. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and Communications Security. New York, 2009. ACM.

http://hotsoft.carleton.ca/~estobert/papers/CCS2009_Interference 

Everitt, K.M., Bragin, T., Fogarty, J. & Kohno, T., 2009. A Comprehensive Study of Frequency, Interference, and Training of Multiple Graphical Passwords. In Proceedings of The 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems- CHI., 2009
https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~yoshi/papers/passwords/chi2009-graphicalpasswords.pdf

Moncur, W. & Leplatre, G., 2007. Pictures at the ATM: Exploring the Usability of Multiple Graphical Passwords. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI., 2007
http://www.soc.napier.ac.uk/~gregory/papers/chi2007.pdf

Chowdhury, S., Poet, R. & Mackenzie, L., 2014. Passhint: Memorable and Secure Authentication. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14)., 2014. ACM Press
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2557153

Speaker: Jeremy Singer
report on recent travels

I recently spent three weeks in Singapore, teaching introductory material (AF2, Linux3) to our new class of CS students. In this talk, I will give an honest (uncensored!) account of my experiences, both pedagogical and gustatory. There were highs and lows in both domains. Talk will be accompanied by lots of photos!

Speaker: Sheep Dalton

Public and situated display technologies are an increasingly common part of many urban spaces, including advertising displays on bus stops, interactive screens providing information to tourists or visitors to a shopping centre, and large screens in transport hubs showing travel information as well as news and advertising content. Situated display research has also been prominent in HCI, ranging from studies of community displays in cafes and village shops to large interactive games in public spaces and techniques to allow users to interact with different configurations of display and personal technologies.

Observational studies of situated displays have suggested that they are rarely looked at. Using a mobile eye tracker during a realistic shopping task in a shopping center, we show that people look at displays more than might be expected given observational studies but for very short times (1/3rd of second on average), and from quite far away. We characterize the patterns of eye-movements that precede looking at a display and discuss some of the design implications for the design of situated display technologies that are deployed in public space.

Speaker: Paul Harvey
Actor-based programming

Speaker: Brendan Owens

I will give a gentle introduction to mathematical knot theory, focusing on combinatorial aspects that may be of interest to computing scientists, and avoiding technical details.  Topics include knot diagrams and Reidemeister moves, knots and graphs, tabulation of knots, and some discussion of ways of encoding knots.  I will include a brief description of my ongoing search for alternating ribbon knots (joint with Frank Swenton).

Speaker: Rosanne English
HUSH Research Group Talk

Speaker: Dave Cheney
In this lecture he will talk about various aspects of Google's Go programming language.

Lecture about the Go Programming Language

Speaker: Dave Cheney, Canonical

Place:  Sir Alwyn Williams Building, Level 5

Date: Monday 13th October, 17.00

Dave Cheney (http://dave.cheney.net) works on the Juju project at Canonical (http://www.canonical.com) and has been a Go evangelist for several years.

In this lecture he will talk about various aspects of Google's Go programming language.

All welcome.

Speaker: Blesson Varghese
Seminar on cloud computing

This talk will cover at least five fundamental pitfalls, which can restrict academics from conducting cloud computing research at the infrastructure level, which is currently where the vast majority of academic research lies. Instead academics should be conducting higher risk research, in order to gain understanding and open up entirely new areas.

The case for embracing abstractions provided by clouds will be presented through five opportunities: user driven research, new programming models, PaaS environments, and improved tools to support elasticity and large-scale debugging. The objective of this paper is to foster discussion, and to define a roadmap forward, which will allow academia to make longer-term impacts to the cloud computing community.

Link to paper presented at HotCloud '14 

Speaker: Dr Vijay Nagarajan

With regard to hardware support for shared-memory concurrency, an inherent tradeoff between programmability and performance is presumed. For instance,  the most intuitive memory consistency model, sequential consistency (SC),  is presumed to be too expensive to support; likewise primitive synchronization operations like memory fences and atomic read-modify-writes (RMWs) (which are used as the building blocks of higher level synchronization constructs) are costly in current processors; finally, there are question marks about whether cache coherence will scale with increasing number of cores.

In this talk, I will argue that it is indeed possible to provide hardware support that enhances programmability without sacrificing performance. First, I will show how SC can be enforced efficiently using conflict ordering, a novel technique for achieving memory ordering. Second, I will show how RMWs can be implemented efficiently in x86 architectures. I will conclude the talk with a scalable approach to cache coherence called consistency-directed coherence.

Speaker: FATA members

Speaker: Aaron Smith
SICSA visiting speaker seminar

Datacenter workloads demand high computational capabilities, flexibility, power efficiency, and low cost. It is challenging to improve all of these factors simultaneously. To advance datacenter capabilities beyond what commodity server designs can provide, we have designed and built a composable, reconfigurable fabric at Microsoft to accelerate portions of large-scale software services. In this talk I will describe a medium-scale deployment of this fabric on a bed of 1,632 servers, and discuss its efficacy in accelerating the Bing web search engine along with future plans to improve the programmability of the fabric.

Bio:

Aaron Smith is a member of the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research. He is broadly interested in optimizing compilers, computer architecture and reconfigurable computing. Over the past 15 years he has led multiple industrial and research compiler projects at Metrowerks/Freescale Semiconductor, The University of Texas at Austin and Microsoft. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UT-Austin in 2009 and is currently serving as co-General Chair of CGO 2015.

Speaker: Leif Azzopardi

Understanding how people interact when searching is central to the study of Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR). Most of the prior work has either been conceptual, observational or empirical. While this has led to numerous insights and findings regarding the interaction between users and systems, the theory has lagged behind. In this talk, I will first provide an overview of the typically IIR process. Then I will introduce an economic model of search based on production theory. This initial model is then extended to incorporate other variables that affect the interaction between the user and the search engine. The refined model is more realistic, provides a better description of the IIR process and enables us to generate eight interaction-based hypotheses regarding search behavior. To validate the model, I will show how the observed search behaviors from an empirical study with thirty-six participants were consistent with the theory. This work, not only, describes a concise and compact representation of search behavior, but also provides a strong theoretical basis for future IIR research. The modeling techniques used are also more generally applicable to other situations involving Human Computer Interaction, and could be helpful in understand many other scenarios.

This talk is based on the paper, “Modeling Interaction with Economic Models of Search” which received an Honorable Mention at ACM SIGIR 2014, see: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2609574

Speaker: Dr Rob Stewart

The analysis of human activity from video sequences has witnessed a major growth in applications including surveillance, vehicle autonomy and intelligent domiciles. In many application domains, there is a strong need for intelligent video processing and more context-aware acquisition devices at source, to considerably reduce the amount of data to be transferred between sensors to perform real-time processing.

I will report ongoing work in the EPSRC Rathlin project between Heriot-Watt Edinburgh and Queens Belfasts Universities, where we are addressing such issues with FPGA-based processors for image processing. The focus of this talk will be on the programmability of FPGAs using dataflow programming languages. I will briefly explore existing dataflow architectures and languages, then describe our multicore CPU and FPGA optimisations for a person tracking case study, and conclude with ongoing work on program transformation for heterogeneous architectures involving FPGAs.

Speaker: Michel Beaudouin-Lafon
This talk will illustrate the principles and applications of instrumental interaction, in particular in the context of the WILD multi surface environment.

Speaker: Social Media Analytics Researchers and Student Start-Ups

Knowledge Exchange Event at the School of Computing Science

Social media provide a rich seam of data on people, newsworthy events, social and professional networks, customers, brands, and opinions which researchers and companies are beginning to unlock.

Businesses and public agencies are invited to join us at this free event to find out about the innovative techniques that researchers at Glasgow University's School of Computing Science are using to uncover new value from social media, and discover the commercial opportunities emerging from this space. 

• Discover how our researchers are detecting real world events within a few minutes of their occurrence from live witnesses - often before emergency services and news agencies pick them up. 
• Find out how social media can be combined with sensor technologies to navigate smart cities and find the venues, attractions and hotspots or peaceful retreats to suit their interests. 
• Learn how event organisation and business networking is being transformed by combining speaker and delegate social media data with a novel end-to-end event management platform. 
• Realise how to connect with your organisation's  dynamically through their social media presence, without having to recruit or follow them. 
• Understand the commercial opportunity that social media analysis presents your organisation. Take inspiration from young innovative start-up companies carving out their place in an emerging market place.

The detailed programme of the event can be found here.  

Speaker: Andreas Komninos

Promotion of walking is integral to improving public health for many sectors of the population. National governments and health authorities now widely recommend a total daily step target (typically 7,000- 10,000 steps/day). Meeting this target can provide considerable physical and mental health benefits and is seen as a key target for reducing national obesity levels, and improving public health. However, to optimise the health benefits, walking should be performed at a “moderate” intensity - often defined as 3 times resting metabolic rate, or 3 METs. While there are numerous mobile fitness applications that monitor distance walked, none directly target the pace, or cadence, of walkers.

BeatClearWalker is a fitness application for smartphones, designed to help users learn how to walk at a moderate pace (monitored via walking cadence, steps/min.) and encourage maintenance of that cadence. The application features a music player with linked pedometer. Based on the user’s target cadence, BeatClearWalker will apply real-time audio effects to the music if the target walking cadence is not being reached. This provides an immersive and intuitive application that can easily be integrated into everyday life as it allows users to walk while listening to their own music and encourages eyes-free interaction with the device.

This talk introduces the application, its design and evaluation. Results show that using our degraded music decreases the number of below-cadence steps and, furthermore, that the effect can persist when the degradation is stopped.

Speaker: Alex Ng and Ioannis Politis
Ioannis and Alex will present their papers from Automotive UI and Mobile HCI

Speaker: Ioannis Politis
Title: Speech Tactons Improve Speech Warnings for Drivers

This paper describes two experiments evaluating a set of speech and tactile driver warnings. Six speech messages of three urgency levels were designed, along with their tactile equivalents, Speech Tactons. These new tactile warnings retained the rhythm of speech and used different levels of roughness and intensity to convey urgency. The perceived urgency, annoyance and alerting effectiveness of these warnings were evaluated. Results showed that bimodal (audio and tactile) warnings were rated as more urgent, more annoying and more effective compared to unimodal ones (audio or tactile). Perceived urgency and alerting effectiveness decreased along with the designed urgency, while perceived annoyance was lowest for warnings of medium designed urgency. In the tactile modality, ratings varied less as compared to the audio and audiotactile modalities. Roughness decreased and intensity increased ratings for Speech Tactons in all the measures used. Finally, Speech Tactons produced acceptable recognition accuracy when tested without their speech counterparts. These results demonstrate the utility of Speech Tactons as a new form of tactile alert while driving, especially when synchronized with speech.

Speaker: Alex Ng
Title: Comparing Evaluation Methods for Encumbrance and Walking on Interaction with Touchscreen Mobile Devices

In this talk, I will be presenting our accepted paper at this year’s MobileHCI. The paper compares two mobile evaluation methods, walking on a treadmill and walking on the ground, to evaluate the effects of encumbrance (holding objects during interaction with mobile devices) while the preferred walking speed (PWS) is controlled. We will discuss the advantages and limitations of each evaluation method when examining the impact of encumbrance.

Speaker: Gerardo Aragon-Camarasa, Daniel Callended & Paul Siebert

We  would like to introduce you to the robotic facilities we now have at the School to support research and teaching: In AY 2013-2014 we ran a small number of teaching projects on Dexterous Blue, that proved both challenging and enormously popular with those Level 3 and Level 4 students who were working on this platform. What made this an interesting prospect from a teaching perspective is that the Robot Operating System (ROS) , a freely available platform for robot control and applications development, already provides everything required to get a full-blooded robot project working. Despite the complexity of robot control and sensing, ROS allowed our Level 3 undergraduate team to integrate their software modules to produce an impressive demonstration of a robot recognising the presence of a face and then making a drawing using a felt-tip marker pen.
Therefore, ROS enables students to concentrate on making their bite-sized contribution within a much more complex operational system.

Building on our experience, the School has now procured a Baxter Research Robot from Rethink Robotics to support undergraduate and postgraduate projects, providing a second two-armed full-scale robot on which advanced projects can be supported. We shall overview Baxter, detailing it’s wide array of built-in sensors and control system. We will also give a tour of what it is like to develop for Baxter by discussing its SDK and the number of facilities it provides, as well as how it interfaces with the ROS middle-ware. From there, we will describe ROS and present a brief overview of its capabilities for teaching purposes. ROS provides the interface layer between hardware and software, and accordingly can be used for other robotic facilities, such as the big blue robot, named Dexterous Blue, housed on level 7 of the Boyd Orr building (and is used for research in clothing perception and manipulation).

A number of video and live demonstrations (yes, you can meet Baxter during and after the talk!!) will be shown involving both robots, emphasising the teaching potential for exploring topics in Computer Vision applications, parallel and distributed algorithms and systems, software engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning, information retrieval and big data. Live demos will include: endpoint position mimicry using a Kinect-like device, autonomous block stacking and organisation, face detection with tracking, joint position recording and playback, and arm puppeteering, among others. All of these designed and implemented in a two months summer internship by Daniel Callander!!

If you are interested in running robotics-based projects that both engage and challenge, come along to see what the School has to offer in two well supported two-armed robotics platforms.

Speaker: Professor Beth Simon

As computing educators, we often have little experience with and even less love for multiple-choice questions.  Expertise in our discipline is based on problem-solving, analysis of trade-offs, etc. – but not on memorization.  However, the efficacy of the Peer Instruction pedagogy is predicated on “good” multiple-choice questions (asking students to discuss how many pints they had at the pub last night would not be expected to support learning of binary search trees).  

What makes a good Peer Instruction question?  One that is hard, but not too hard.  One that draws students into discussion.  One students can LEARN from.  How does one write such a beast?  Unfortunately there’s little literature and no algorithm.  In this workshop, we’ll:

·      compare and contrast no-so-good and better PI questions used in university Computer Science courses
·      introduce a scaffolding to support development of “good” PI questions
·      share and discuss PI questions developed by my colleagues and available on http://peerinstruction4cs.org

If you are interested in the earlier Friday 12pm talk and this workshop, and would like lunch in between, please RSVP using the form below, so we can plan both lunch and materials targeting your courses: 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1XV2oeQuDKIVfhbY_YG5cWwt_8HCqGyrbuwzRU9a6yAE/viewform?usp=send_form

Speaker: Professor Beth Simon

What a course “is” and “does” can be viewed through the lens of instructional design. Any course should be based around the learning goals we have for students taking the course – what it is we want them to know and be able to do when they finish the course.  Describing how we go about supporting students in achieving those goals can be broken into two parts: a) the content/materials we choose to cover and b) the methods/pedagogical approaches we employ.  In this talk I review the results of three studies looking at the impact of method or pedagogical approach in computing courses.  Specifically, I’ll review our experience using the Peer Instruction method (aka “clickers”) in computer science courses at UC San Diego and discuss the following:

a) an observed 50% reduction in fail rate in four computing courses adopting Peer Instruction,

b) an in-situ comparison study showing Peer Instruction students to perform 6% better than students in a standard  “lecture” setting, and

c) a 30% increase in retention of majors after adopting a trio of best practices in our introductory programming course (Peer Instruction, Media Computation, and Pair Programming).

This session is followed by a workshop on designing peer instruction questions at 2pm - if you would like lunch in between, and so we can tailor aspects of the session to your discipline, please let us know before 9am Wednesday 3rd, using the following form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1XV2oeQuDKIVfhbY_YG5cWwt_8HCqGyrbuwzRU9a6yAE/viewform?usp=send_form

Speaker: Matteo Catena

Efficient access to the inverted index data structure is a key aspect for a search engine to achieve fast response times to users’ queries. While the performance of an information retrieval (IR) system can be enhanced through the compression of its posting lists, there is little recent work in the literature that thoroughly compares and analyses the performance of modern integer compression schemes across different types of posting information (document ids, frequencies, positions). In this talk, we show the benefit of compression for different types of posting information to the space- and time-efficiency of the search engine. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted on two large, widely used document corpora and large query sets; using different modern integer compression algorithms, integrated into a modern IR system, the Terrier IR platform. While reporting the compression scheme which results in the best query response times, the presented analysis will also show the impact of compression on frequency and position posting information in Web corpora that have large volumes of anchor text.

Speaker: Professor Beth Simon

Speaker: 1. Marc Burgauer 2. Matt Wynne & Seb Rose:
1. Marc Burgauer: "What's the worst that could happen?" 2. Matt Wynne & Seb Rose: Continuous Delivery

* Marc Burgauer: "What's the worst that could happen?" - How authentic  connection enables change and innovation

This talk presents the answers I have found about how we can remain  authentic in a blame culture; how we can build authentic trust and enable  safe-to-fail environments to strengthen our connections, as well as my own experience applying these practices.


* Matt Wynne & Seb Rose: Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery is the Next Big Thing™ in software development. But  what is it? Who’s doing it, and why? What are the pitfalls? Matt and Seb  will give you the theory and share their practical experience. You’ll  leave the talk with a clear understanding of what it means, and what it  takes, to practice continuous delivery.

Speaker: Beatrix Vad

Musical content can be described by a variety of features that are measured or inferred through the analysis of audio data. For a large music collection this establishes the possibility to retrieve information about its structure and underlying patterns. Dimensionality reduction techniques can be used to gain insight into such a high-dimensional dataset and to enable visualisation on two-dimensional screens. In this talk we investigate the usability of these techniques with respect to an interactive exploration interface for large music collections based on moods. A method employing Gaussian Processes to extend the visualisation with additional information about its composition is presented and evaluated

Speaker: Daniel Buschek

Speaker: Stephen Kell
ENDS visiting speaker

Huge amounts of widely-used code are written in C, C++ and other unsafe 
languages (meaning languages which do not enforce any type- or 
memory-safety invariants). Considerable existing work has added some 
kind of invariant checking to such languages (usually just to C), but 
with several caveats: sacrificing source- or binary-level compatibility, 
imposing high run-time overheads, and (almost always) checking spatial 
and/or temporal memory correctness but ignoring type-correctness.

To start, I'll describe libcrunch, a language-agnostic infrastructure 
for dynamically checking the type-correctness of unsafe code.  Using a 
novel disjoint metadata implementation and careful integration with 
existing toolchains (notably a C front-end), libcrunch allows fast 
dynamic type checking with full source- and binary-level compatibility 
and with generally low run-time overheads.

Towards the end of the talk I'll zoom out a little to place libcrunch 
alongside some other projects, as part of a wider agenda: closing the 
gap between "static" and dynamic language infrastructure, hence enabling 
greater degrees of cross-language composition, reasoning and tool 
support.

Speaker: Daniel Callander, Gerardo Aragon-Camarasa, Paul Siebert

Speaker: Carl Rasmussen

Inference in discrete-time non-linear dynamical systems is often done using the Extended Kalman Filtering and Smoothing (EKF) algorithm, which provides a Gaussian approximation to the posterior based on local linearisation of the dynamics. In challenging problems, when the non-linearities are significant and the signal to noise ratio is poor, the EKF performs poorly. In this talk we will discuss an alternative algorithm developed in the machine learning community which is based message passing in Factor Graphs and the Expectation Propagation (EP) approximation. We will show this method provides a consistent and accurate Gaussian approximation to the posterior enabling system identification using Expectation Maximisation (EM) even in cases when the EKF fails.

Speaker: Ryan Newton

Functional programming and stream-processing have shared history -- from early work on dataflow architectures, VAL, and SISAL, to Haskell's use of stream-based IO (before monads) or the modern-day resurgence of Haskell stream libraries (iteratees, pipes, conduit). These days, "streaming" can mean a lot of things; StreamIt, based on synchronous-dataflow, has totally ordered streams and will not duplicate stateful stream processors, whereas Apache Storm makes the opposite decisions. The first part of this talk will overview this broad landscape.

We argue that the degree of dynamism (e.g. in data-rates and stream topologies) is the major axis along which various stream technologies are differentiated. In the second part of this talk, we describe our past and ongoing work on navigating this spectrum, by developing technologies that leverage regularities where they occur, but tolerate dynamism. We have studied profile-driven program partitioning, and other compilation topics, and our current thrust for developing stream DSLs overlaps heavily with work on data-parallel DSLs (e.g. Accelerate).

Speaker:

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~natalia/spls/

The Scottish Programming Languages Seminar is a forum for discussion of all aspects of programming languages. We meet for an afternoon once every few months. The summer 2014 SPLS meeting will be held at the University of Glasgow. Meetings are open; if you wish to attend, please, register here .

Speaker: Professor Raymond Lister
Professor Lister discusses the double-lives that academics lead - noting how different research and teaching cultures are. Using examples drawn from Australasian projects, he shows how research practices need to, and can, be drawn into our learning and

Academics lead a double life. In our research lives we see ourselves as
part of a community that reaches beyond our own university. We read
literature, we attend conferences, we publish, and the cycle
repeats, with community members building upon each other's work. But in
our other life we rarely discuss teaching beyond our own university,
nor are we guided by theory or literature; instead we simply follow our
private instincts.  Whereas in research, we build upon the previous
research cycle, in teaching we reinvent the wheel.  As the American NSF recently
noted, "undergraduate computing education today often looks much as it
did several decades ago".  That is, while the information technology we teach
has changed dramatically over the decades, our pedagogy remains largely unchanged.

Academics in computing, or in any other discipline, can approach their
teaching as research into how novices become experts.  The Australian
and New Zealand BRACElet project is one model of how this can be done.
It was a multi-institutional action research study of how novice
programmers comprehend and write computer programs.  While BRACElet was a
research project, it remains close to educational practice, with much of
the data analyzed coming from exam papers completed by first year undergraduates
at the participating universities.  This talk will review the research
results from that project.

Speaker: Dr Hans-Wolfgang Loidl

The development of parallel hardware has  seen radical changes over the last two decades. These  changes have  made parallel programming  main-stream technology, with  the advent  of  multi-cores, and  now pose  new  challenges in  exploiting hierarchical, heterogeneous  hardware, in  the form  of clusters  of accelerated multi-cores.

In this talk I will examine design  principles in a range of high-level parallel programming  languages  aiming  to  tackle  these  challenges  and  match  their development with that of the underlying hardware.  As a concrete instance I will discuss abstractions explored  in the context of Glasgow  parallel Haskell (GpH) and I  will give  recent performance  results indicating how  a very  high level language  approach can  manage  to  adapt to  underlying  hardware. No  previous knowledge of Klingon will be required for this talk.

Speaker: Professor Andrew Howes
A utility maximization approach to understanding human interaction with technology

This lecture describes a theoretical framework for the behavioural sciences that holds high promise for theory-driven research and design in Human-Computer Interaction. The framework is designed to tackle the adaptive, ecological, and bounded nature of human behaviour. It is designed to help scientists and practitioners reason about why people choose to behave as they do and to explain which strategies people choose in response to utility, ecology, and cognitive information processing mechanisms. A key idea is that people choose strategies so as to maximise utility given constraints. The framework is illustrated with a number of examples including pointing, multitasking, skim- reading, online purchasing, Signal-Detection Theory and diagnosis, and the influence of reputation on purchasing decisions. Importantly, these examples span from perceptual/motor coordination, through cognition to social interaction. Finally, the lecture discusses the challenging idea that people seek to find optimal strategies and also discusses the implications for behavioral investigation in HCI.

Speaker: Sarah Birch
One-day workshop to take place on 23 June

http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/socialpolitical/events/bigdataworkshopjune2014/

For further information, contact Sarah Birch (sarah.birch@glasgow.ac.uk) or Philip Habel (philip.habel@glasgow.ac.uk)

Speaker: Dr Patrick Maier

The AJITPar (Adaptive Just-In-Time Parallelisation) project aims to achieve portable parallel performance by combining dynamic trace-based just-in-time compilation of a high-level parallel functional language with dynamic demand-driven scheduling of parallelism. This will involve estimating the granularity of parallel tasks by online profiling and static analysis, and (in later project stages) adapting granularity by online code transformations.

The starting point of AJITPar is lambdachine, a recently developed sequential Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler for Haskell. In this talk, I'll present our ideas for how to make lambdachine parallel. To this end, we design a low-level domain-specific language (DSL) for task-parallel computations. Specifically, this DSL should deal with task creation and scheduling, communication between and synchronisation of tasks, and serialisation of data (including tasks).

The design goals for this DSL are as follows:
* It should be expressive enough to enable building higher-level abstractions, like algorithmic skeletons.
* It should be flexible enough to express a range of benchmarks, from regular matrix bashing to highly irregular symbolic computations.
* It should support an equational theory of program transformations, to support online transformation in later stages of AJITPar.
* Most importantly, it should be easy to bolt on top of the single-threaded lambdachine runtime system.

[Apologies to those who have heard this talk 4 weeks ago at Heriot-Watt.  I'll say exactly the same, just 30% slower to make up for the longer slot.]

Speaker: Professor Simon Dobson

There is increasing interest in using complex networks to model phenomena, and especially in the construction of systems of networks that interact and respond to each other -- the so-called complex adaptive coupled networks. They seem to offer a level of abstraction that is appropriate for capturing the large-scale dynamics of real-world processes without becoming lost in the detail. This talk introduces such networks for a formal audience, describes some recent work in urban traffic modelling, and speculates on the combination of complex networks with sensor data to study environmental incidents such as flooding.

Speaker: John Bass, SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow

Abstract: How do we create a national, let alone international, linkage?
At the national level, projects rarely have the time and willingness to
pay attention to detail, and tend to create "broad brush" data. Small
local entities often take pride in making use of local knowledge to
create high-quality linkage. Is it possible to have a big picture that
still reflects the quality of linkage found in a local cancer registry?
It's easier than you might think!

Biography: After an early career in marine zoology combined with
computing, John Bass has been at the leading edge of health-related data
linkage in Australia since 1984. Early work on infant mortality in
Western Australia resulted in a linked dataset that became the
cornerstone of the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research. He then
implemented the Australian National Death Index in Canberra before
returning to Perth as the founding manager of the Western Australian
linked health data project — the first of its kind in the country. He
designed and implemented the technical system of this group, which is
widely recognised as the foremost data linkage unit in Australia. John
stepped aside from his position in 2000 but has continued a close
relationship with the project, designing and overseeing the
implementation of genealogical links and then spending several years
working with state and federal government to implement the first
large-scale linkage of national pharmaceutical and general practice
information. This involved the development of new best-practice privacy
protocols that are now widely adopted across Australia. He was a core
participant in developing a detailed plan for the implementation of a
second state-based data linkage unit involving New South Wales and the
Australian Capital Territory. In 2008 John moved to Tasmania, where he
spent four years planning and paving the way for the implementation of a
state-wide data linkage unit. He is now semi-retired, but still working
on new developments in data linkage technology.

Speaker: Tim Harris
ENDS seminar by an industrial research partner

Tim Harris is a researcher at Oracle Labs where his interests include parallel programming, operating systems, and architecture support for programming language runtime systems. His other recent work has focused on the implementation of software transactional memory for multi-core computers, and the design of programming language features based on it. He is a co-author of the Morgan Claypool textbook on Transactional Memory.

Tim has a BA and PhD in computer science from Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. He was on the faculty at the Computer Laboratory from 2000-2004 where he led the department’s research on concurrent data structures and contributed to the Xen virtual machine monitor project. He was at Microsoft Research from 2004, and then joined Oracle Labs in 2012.

Speaker: Prof Philip Wadler

Continuing a line of work by Abramsky (1994), by Bellin and Scott (1994), and by Caires and Pfenning (2010), among others, this paper presents CP, a calculus in which propositions of classical linear logic correspond to session types. Continuing a line of work by Honda (1993), by Honda, Kubo, and Vasconcelos (1998), and by Gay and Vasconcelos (2010), among others, this paper presents GV, a linear functional language with session types, and presents a translation from GV into CP. The translation formalises for the first time a connection between a standard presentation of session types and linear logic, and shows how a modification to the standard presentation yield a language free from deadlock, where deadlock freedom follows from the correspondence to linear logic.

ICFP, September 2012; Journal of Functional Programming, Best Papers of ICFP 2012.

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/linear-logic.html#propositions-as-sessions-jfp

Speaker: Baharak Rastegari

We study two-sided matching markets in which participants are initially endowed with partial preference orderings, lacking precise information about their true, strictly ordered list of preferences. We wish to reason about matchings that are stable with respect to agents' true preferences, and which are furthermore optimal for one given side of the market. We present three main results. First, one can decide in polynomial time whether there exists a  matching that is stable and optimal under all strict preference orders that refine the given partial orders, and can construct this matching in polynomial time if it does exist. We show, however, that deciding whether a given pair of agents are matched in all or no such optimal stable matchings is co-NP-complete, even under quite severe restrictions on preferences. Finally, we describe a polynomial-time algorithm that decides, given a matching that is stable under the partial preference orderings, whether that matching is stable and optimal for one side of the market under some refinement of the partial orders.

Speaker: Milad Shokouhi

PhD is a bit like cooking. Most people follow similar steps but the outcome could be very different. Each of us have our own special recipes, and eventually we all make a unique PhD cookbook. In this talk, I'll share my recipes. Bon Appétit!

Bio:
Milad Shokouhi is a Senior Applied Researcher working for Bing at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He is also an honorary lecturer in School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. Before joining Microsoft, he did his PhD on federated search at RMIT University in 2007. His other research interests include auto-completion, personalization, federated search and query reformulation. He has published more than 30 papers and has served on the program committee of most major IR conferences and journals.

Speaker: Dr Nick Craswell
Bing Ranking Techniques

Semantic ranking models score documents based on closeness in meaning to the query rather than by just matching keywords. To implement semantic ranking at Web-scale, we have designed and deployed a new multi-level ranking systems that combines the best of inverted index and forward index technologies. I will describe this infrastructure which is currently serving many millions of users and explore several types of semantic models: translation models, syntactic pattern matching and topical matching models. Our experiments demonstrate that these semantic ranking models significantly improve relevance over our existing baseline system. This is the repeat of a WWW2014 industry track talk.

Speaker: Dr John O'Donnell

TBA

Speaker: Dr Cordelia Hall and Dr John O'Donnell

John gave a talk on ESFAs last year. This is a fine-grain data-parallel algorithm suited to GPUs. We have a direct implementation written in CUDA but this is a large and low-level piece of code. This talk explores techniques used to optimise the code. We've also developed a much more readable language for GPU programming called AL, and have implemented ESFAs using it.

Speaker: Dr. Giordano Tamburrelli

Many modern user-intensive applications, such as Web applications, must satisfy the interaction requirements of thousands if not millions of users, which can be hardly fully understood at design time. Designing applications that meet user behaviors, by efficiently supporting the prevalent navigation patterns, and evolving with them requires new approaches that go beyond classic software engineering solutions.
In this talk we present a preliminary approach called BEAR that automates the acquisition of user-interaction requirements in an incremental and reflective way. More precisely, the approach builds upon inferring a set of probabilistic Markov models of the users’ navigational behaviors, dynamically extracted from the interaction history given in the form of a log file. BEAR builds on top of a well established formal tool, indeed it analyzes the inferred models to verify quantitative properties by means of probabilistic model checking. The talk discusses the capabilities of BEAR and illustrates the preliminary results obtained on a Web application currently in use.

Speaker: Quintin Cutts

Although I've worked in CS education research and schools outreach for over 15 years, it occurred to me that I've almost never given a talk on it in the School.  Given that CS in schools is a hot topic globally right now, and there's a lot happening in Scotland too, it's time to break the silence…

But, I wondered, of all that work, what should I tell them in just 30 mins?  I reflected on what makes academics tick (as far as I can tell!) and so what might be of interest… here's my top four:

1.  Interesting stuff
2.  Nice people from around the world
3.  Doing good
4.  Money (so we can do the above)

The talk will touch on all of these in relation to the work I've been doing in Scotland, the UK and the US.  Given that we're at such an interesting juncture in CS education nationally and internationally, there'll also be an invite to engage with as much or as little of it as you choose…

Speaker: Mr Wing Li

Our previous research has shown that that non-Java languages, such as Clojure and Scala, frequently box their primitive values within objects. These objects are typically short lived, requiring garbage collection later. Tagged pointers address this problem by encoding the primitive value directly in the bitstring of the pointer word itself, removing the need to allocate an object on the heap. However, checking each pointer reference for tags and type lookup can add to the overhead of this technique. This presentation is on my work implementing tagged pointers within the industry-standard HotSpot JVM interpreter. I describe some of the decisions made and their effects. I also describe the modifications made to the template based interpreter to support tagged pointers.

Speaker: Dr Wim Vanderbauwhede

In this talk, we take a look at how suitable FPGAs are for High-Performance Computing (HPC), and outline our proposed approach to achieving optimal performance-per-Watt.

Speaker: Dr Giordano Tamburrelli

Many modern user-intensive applications, such as Web applications, must satisfy the interaction requirements of thousands if not millions of users, which can be hardly fully understood at design time. Designing applications that meet user behaviors, by efficiently supporting the prevalent navigation patterns, and evolving with them requires new approaches that go beyond classic software engineering solutions.
In this talk we present a preliminary approach called BEAR that automates the acquisition of user-interaction requirements in an incremental and reflective way. More precisely, the approach builds upon inferring a set of probabilistic Markov models of the users’ navigational behaviors, dynamically extracted from the interaction history given in the form of a log file. BEAR builds on top of a well established formal tool, indeed it analyzes the inferred models to verify quantitative properties by means of probabilistic model checking. The talk discusses the capabilities of BEAR and illustrates the preliminary results obtained on a Web application currently in use.

Speaker: Prof Muffy Calder

Ideally in systems in which failures are monitored and sensed, an engineer would fix a failure immediately. But this might not be possible due to limited resources and/or physical distance to a device. So how does an engineer prioritise and make best use of their resources, while still ensuring the service is operating within acceptable levels of risk of failure?

We hypothesise predictive event-based modelling and reasoning with a stochastic temporal logic can inform decision making when failures occur. We show, with a real industrial case study (a safety critical comms system for NATS), that by relating the status of assets to service behaviour in a CTMC model, the risk of service failure now, and over various time frames, future failure rates, and interventions, can be quantified. We reason both in the context of how the system is designed to meet service requirements, and how it actually meets service requirements, when the models are calibrated with rates derived from historical, field data.

Speaker: Jamie Gallagher

The way we disseminate our research is changing. There are increasing drivers to publish in open access journals and to engage wider audiences with our research. The newly appointed public engagement officer and a representative from the library will discuss these quickly developing areas and how they relate to your research. They will demonstrate the way public engagement and open access can be used to create more impact with your work; show how you can include these in grant proposals and detail the help and assistant available from the University in these areas.

Speaker: Dr Christian Fensch

My work tackles an impending software crisis. Developments in hardware technology are set to render programmers unable to write efficient new applications, and to make existing applications run slower on new processors than on old ones. I propose a technique enabling programmers to generate applications that automatically adapt to future processors.

In my talk, I will briefly discuss the roots of the problem and the key insight to address it: computer programs exhibit recurring patterns. Detecting and exploiting these patterns is already a very hard problem. Once done, these patterns can be used to automate the process of transferring programs to future processors. In the remainder of this talk, I will present several activities that follow along this insight.

First, I will present Partans – an autotuning framework for stencil computation. In particular, I will discuss the performance impact of the PCIe interconnect in a seemingly homogeneous system. Second, I present results from a collaborative project with Samsung investigating how to design pattern based programming hierarchies. Finally, I will show some preliminary results on expressing commonly used benchmarks in a patternised way and conclude with an outlook onto my future research activities.

Speaker: Dr Alice Miller

Many of us in FATA are concerned with symmetry in combinatorial objects, specifically in the use of isomorphism checking to eliminate copies of the same object during their generation, or to prevent redundant work during combinatorial search (for example, during model checking). I have been using the graph isomorphism package, nauty, for years, and eventually decided that I should find out how it works!

The most efficient method used for graph isomorphism checking is that of using a certificate, or cononical labelling . A canonical labelling is a function C that maps any graph to a natural number in such a way that C(G1)=C(G2) if and only if G1 and G2 are isomorphic. In this talk I discuss canonical labelling of trees, and of graphs in general. For the latter, I describe the popular algorithm using equitable partitions used by the most successful graph isomorphism programs such as nauty. The talk will include explanatory examples and  pictures and no pseudocode!

Speaker: Filip Radlinski

Interleaving is an online evaluation technique for comparing the relative quality of information retrieval functions by combining their result lists and tracking clicks. A sequence of such algorithms have been proposed, each being shown to address problems in earlier algorithms. In this talk, I will formalize and generalize this process, while introducing a formal model: After identifying a set of desirable properties for interleaving, I will show that an interleaving algorithm can be obtained as the solution to an optimization problem within those constraints. This approach makes explicit the parameters of the algorithm, as well as assumptions about user behavior. Further, this approach leads to an unbiased and more efficient interleaving algorithm than any previous approach, as I will show a novel log-based analysis of user search behaviour.

Speaker: Mr Paul Harvey

Last year I spent the summer at the University of Aizu in Japan, working on porting a particle dispersion simulation from CUDA to OpenCL. This talk will discuss the results from this, including a number of comparisons on different hardware platforms between the two technologies, including the Xeon Phi.

Speaker: Alistair Edwards

The way people speak tells a lot about their origins – geographical and social, but when someone can only speak with the aid of an artificial voice (such as Stephen Hawking), conventional expectations are subverted. The ultimate aim of most speech synthesis research is more human-sounding voices, yet the most commonly used one, DecTalk, is quite robotic. Why is this - and is a human voice always appropriate?

This seminar will explore some of the limitations and possibilities of speech technology.

Speaker: Dr James Hensman

Gaussian Process (GP) models are widely applicable models of functions, and are used extensively in statistics and machine learning for regression, classification and as components of more complex models. Inference in a Gaussian process model usually costs O(n^3) operations, where n is the number of data. In the Big Data (tm) world, it would initially seem unlikely that GPs might contribute due to this computational requirement.

Parametric models have been successfully applied to Big Data (tm) using the Robbins-Monro gradient method, which allows data to be processed individually or in small batches. In this talk, I'll show how these ideas can be applied to Gaussian Processes. To do this, I'll form a variational bound on the marginal likelihood: we discuss the properties of this bound, including the conditions where we recover exact GP behaviour.

Our methods have allowed GP regression on hundreds of thousands of data, using a standard desktop machine. for more details, see http://auai.org/uai2013/prints/papers/244.pdf .

Speaker: Mr. Simon Jouet

Due to structural and design reasons such as uncertain resource demand, pour workload placement and long provisioning time scales modern data centres have been running as low as 10% utilisation. In order to increase utilisation the modern approach has been to allocate multiple tenants onto the same server through virtualisation techniques such as Xen, however, even with highly sophisticated placement and consolidation algorithms servers rarely runs above 50% utilisation.

In this talk, I will discuss about container-based virtualisation, a finer grain approach to multi-tenant isolation and the possible immediate benefits on server utilisation. Secondly I will briefly introduce Docker and how it can significantly change current DC management. Finally I will explain my idea on how containers can be used to improve server utilisation as well as network placement and isolation (slicing), storage and finally resiliency.

Speaker: Julie Williamson

Over the last five months, I have been leading a short knowledge exchange project with Pufferfish Ltd.   The project revolved around analyzing pedestrian traffic around the large spherical displays designed by Pufferfish Ltd.  During this talk, I will discuss my experiences in securing KE funds to support the project, using the university press office to engage with the media, and how I went about completing a variety of public engagement activities.

Speaker: Mr Evgenij Belikov

We present a profiling-based characterisation of 8 small and medium-sized semi-explicitly parallel functional applications from several domains with respect to thread granularity, communication, and memory management profile, which are highly relevant for dynamic and adaptive parallelism control. The results confirm that the parallel Haskell implementation copes well with large numbers of potential threads, quantify the impact of the communication rate on parallel performance, and identify memory management overhead as a major limiting factor to scalability on shared-memory machines. This characterisation helps to improve our understanding of the behaviour of parallel functional programs and discover program characteristics that can be exploited to optimise application performance by improving the effectiveness and efficiency of parallelism management.

Speaker: Horatiu Bota

Traditional search systems generally present a ranked list of documents as answers to user queries. In aggregated search systems, results from different and increasingly diverse verticals (image, video, news, etc.) are returned to users. For instance, many such search engines return to users both images and web documents as answers to the query ``flower''. Aggregated search has become a very popular paradigm. In this paper, we go one step further and study a different search paradigm: composite retrieval. Rather than returning and merging results from different verticals, as is the case with aggregated search, we propose to return to users a set of "bundles", where a bundle is composed of "cohesive'' results from several verticals. For example, for the query "London Olympic'', one bundle per sport could be returned, each containing results extracted from news, videos, images, or Wikipedia. Composite retrieval can promote exploratory search in a way that helps users understand the diversity of results available for a specific query and decide what to explore in more detail. 

We proposed and evaluated a variety of approaches to construct bundles that are relevant, cohesive and diverse. We also utilize both entitiy and term as a surrogate to represent items and demonstrate their effectiveness of bridging the "mismatch" gap among heterogeneous sources. Compared with three baselines (traditional "general web only'' ranking, federated search ranking and aggregated search),  our evaluation results demonstrate significant performance improvement for a highly heterogeneous web collection.

Speaker: John Hamer

For the past four years I have been teaching a course "Programmering för Nybörjare" ("Programming for Beginners") that introduces programming using three diverse programming languages: Python, Prolog and Erlang. I will describe how the course is organised, and what a novice student can reasonably be expected to achieve within the space of a week.

Speaker: Susanne Oehler and Paul Cockshott

This will cover what we have done to enable the Glasgow Pascal Compiler to target the Xeon Phi, what we have learned from doing this, and what open questions there are for the further development of the system. We are particularly interested in soliciting advice from others on what we should do next.

Speaker: Augustine Kwanashie
Profile-based optimal matchings in the Student/Project Allocation

In the Student/Project Allocation problem (SPA) we seek to assign students
to group or individual projects offered by lecturers. Students are required
to provide a list of projects they find acceptable in order of preference.
Each student can be assigned to at most one project and there are
constraints on the maximum number of students that can be assigned to each
project and lecturer.  A matching in this context is a set of
student-project pairs that satisfies these constraints.
We seek to find matchings that satisfy optimality criteria based on the
profile of a matching. This is a vector whose ith component indicates the
number of students obtaining their ith-choice project. Various profile-based
optimality criteria have been studied. For example, one matching M1 may be
preferred to another matching M2 if M1 has more students with first-choice
projects than M2.
In this talk we present an efficient algorithm for finding optimal matchings
to SPA problems based on various well known profile-based optimality
criteria. We model SPA as a network flow problem and describe a modified
augmenting path algorithm for finding a maximum flow which can then be
transformed to an optimal SPA matching. This approach allows for additional
constraints, such as project and lecturer lower quotas, to be handled
flexibly without modifying the original algorithm.

Speaker: Stewart Whiting and Horatiu Bota

=Recent and Robust Query Auto-Completion by Stewart Whiting=

Query auto-completion (QAC) is a common interactive feature that assists users in formulating queries by providing completion suggestions as they type. In order for QAC to minimise the user’s cognitive and physical effort, it must: (i) suggest the user’s intended query after minimal input keystrokes, and (ii) rank the user’s intended query highly in completion suggestions. QAC must be both robust and time-sensitive – that is, able to sufficiently rank both consistently and recently popular queries in completion suggestions. Addressing this trade-off, we propose several practical completion suggestion ranking approaches, including: (i) a sliding window of query popularity evidence from the past 2-28 days, (ii) the query popularity distribution in the last N queries observed with a given prefix, and (iii) short-range query popularity prediction based on recently observed trends. Through real-time simulation experiments, we extensively investigated the parameters necessary to maximise QAC effectiveness for three openly available query log datasets with prefixes of 2-5 characters: MSN and AOL (both English), and Sogou 2008 (Chinese). Results demonstrate consistent and language-independent improvements of up to 9.2% over a non-temporal QAC baseline for all query logs with prefix lengths of 2-3 characters. Hence, this work is an important step towards more effective QAC approaches.

=Composite retrieval of heterogeneous web search by Horatiu Bota=

Traditional search systems generally present a ranked list of documents as answers to user queries. In aggregated search systems, results from different and increasingly diverse verticals (image, video, news, etc.) are returned to users. For instance, many such search engines return to users both images and web documents as answers to the query ``flower''. Aggregated search has become a very popular paradigm. In this paper, we go one step further and study a different search paradigm: composite retrieval. Rather than returning and merging results from different verticals, as is the case with aggregated search, we propose to return to users a set of "bundles", where a bundle is composed of "cohesive'' results from several verticals. For example, for the query "London Olympic'', one bundle per sport could be returned, each containing results extracted from news, videos, images, or Wikipedia. Composite retrieval can promote exploratory search in a way that helps users understand the diversity of results available for a specific query and decide what to explore in more detail. 

We proposed and evaluated a variety of approaches to construct bundles that are relevant, cohesive and diverse. We also utilize both entitiy and term as a surrogate to represent items and demonstrate their effectiveness of bridging the "mismatch" gap among heterogeneous sources. Compared with three baselines (traditional "general web only'' ranking, federated search ranking and aggregated search),  our evaluation results demonstrate significant performance improvement for a highly heterogeneous web collection.

Speaker: Dr Vladimir Janjic

In this talk, we present a new programming methodology for introducing and tuning parallelism for heterogeneous shared-methodology systems (comprising a mixture of CPUs and GPUs), that combines algorithmic skeletons, Monte-Carlo Tree Search, and refactoring tool support. Using your approach, we demonstrate easily obtainable, significant and scalable speedups of up to 41 over the sequential code on a 24-core heterogeneous multiprocessor, and comparable to the best possible speedups that could be obtained.

Speaker: Marco Gaboardi
Verifying Differential Privacy by Program Logic

Differential Privacy is becoming a standard approach in data privacy: it offers ways to answer queries about sensitive information while providing strong, provable privacy guarantees, ensuring that the presence or absence of a single individual in the database has a negligible statistical effect on the query's result. Many specific queries have been shown to be differentially private, but manually checking that a given query is differentially private can be both tedious and rather subtle. Moreover, this process becomes unfeasible when large programs are considered.

In this talk I will introduce the basics of differential privacy and some of the fundamental mechanisms for building differentially private programs. Additionally, I will present a verification approach based on Hoare Logic useful to certify a broad range of probabilistic programs as differentially private.

Speaker: Rami Alkhawaldeh

In recent decades, retrieval systems deployed over peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks have been investigated as an alternative to centralised search engines. Although modern search engines provide efficient document retrieval, there are several drawbacks, including: a single point of failure, maintenance costs, privacy risks, information monopolies from search engines companies, and difficulty retrieving hidden documents in the web (i.e. the deep web). P2P information retrieval (P2PIR) systems promise an alternative distributed system to the traditional centralised search engine architecture. Users and creators of web content in such networks have full control over what information they wish to share as well as how they share it.

Researchers have been tackling several challenges to build effective P2PIR systems: (i) collection (peer) representation during indexing, (ii) peer selection during search to route queries to relevant peers and (iii) final peer result merging. Semi-structured P2P networks (i.e, a partially decentralised unstructured overlay network) offer an intermediate design that minimizes the weakness of both centralised and completely decentralised overlay networks and combines the advantages of those two topologies. So, an evaluation framework for this kind of network is necessary to compare the performance of different P2P approaches and to be a guide for developing new and more powerful approaches. In this work, we study the performance of three cluster-based semi-structured P2PIR models and explain the effectiveness of several important design considerations and parameters on retrieval performance, as well as the robustness of these types of network.

4pm @ Level 4

Speaker: Patrick Prosser

Last semester 29 of my CP(M) students submitted program code for their 1^st assessed exercise. As part of the feedback, I delivered a presentation to the class where I anonymised code and showed every student everyone’s code. We then had an open discussion.  I want to replay this presentation to you, our academics and researchers.

I will start by presenting the assessed exercise (Sudoku). I will then give a model answer (implemented by myself). You can then critique my code. I will then present snippets from all student submissions. This will give you an idea of what our students think is acceptable code and it will give you feedback on how well we do with respect to teaching our students to program.

Speaker: Simon Gay
Verification of Concurrent Quantum Protocols by Equivalence Checking

We present a tool which uses a concurrent language for describing quantum systems, and performs verification by checking equivalence between specification and implementation. In general, simulation of quantum systems using current computing technology is infeasible. We restrict ourselves to the stabilizer formalism, in which there are efficient simulation algorithms.

In particular, we consider concurrent quantum protocols that behave functionally in the sense of computing a deterministic input-output relation for all interleavings of the concurrent system.
Crucially, these input-output relations can be abstracted by superoperators, enabling us to take advantage of linearity.  This allows us to analyse the behaviour of protocols with arbitrary input, by simulating their operation on a finite basis set consisting of stabilizer states.

Despite the limitations of the stabilizer formalism and also the range of protocols that can be analysed using this approach, we have applied our equivalence checking tool to specify and verify interesting and practical quantum protocols from teleportation to secret sharing.

Joint work with Ebrahim Ardeshir-Larijani and Rajagopal Nagarajan.

Speaker: Mike Codish
Backbones for equality

Mike is visiting the school between 24th and 26th February, 2014. His research interests include the development and application of formal techniques to aid in the compilation and implementation of sequential and concurrent logic programs and to analyse, optimise and reason about such programs.  In this talk Mike will give a general introduction to his work. Specifically, he will describe his structured approach to solving finite domain constraint problems through an encoding to SAT, and the BEE tool (Ben-Gurion Equi-propogation Encoder). He will introduce the notion of the backbone of a CNF formula, and describe his recent work, in which backbones are generalized to capture equations between literals.

Speaker: Manos Tsagkias

We describe the algorithms behind Streamwatchr, a real-time system for analyzing the music listening behavior of people around the world. Streamwatchr collects music-related tweets, extracts artists and songs, and visualises the results in two ways: (i)~currently trending songs and artists, and (ii)~newly discovered songs.

Speaker: Ashkan Tousimojarad

The Glasgow Parallel Reduction Machine (GPRM) is a novel task-based parallel framework targeting shared-memory many-core systems. Our approach is to provide a task composition language with default parallel evaluation, implemented using a restricted subset of C++ which is familiar and easy to use for the end users.

In this talk, I will shortly describe the structure of the GPRM. Micro-benchmarks used to identify bottlenecks in other approaches, specifically OpenMP, will be shown. Then I will present a solution we have used in our framework to increase the scalability of an LU Factorisation algorithm for Sparse Matrices. 

Speaker: Dr Murray Cole

As well as offering a simple API, pattern (or skeleton) based parallel programming models define implementation templates which can be tuned automatically. We will review the motivations for such an approach, and present four case-studies of its application.

Speaker: Patrick Prosser
Sudoku as an Assessed Exercise in Constraint Programming: an analysis of student programming ability

In the Constraint Programming course (Masters) the first exercise is to code up a solver for the Sudoku puzzle, investigating the effect of using 2 subtly different models and checking that problem instances do indeed have unique solutions. I will present snippets of java code from the 29 students who submitted work. Much of this presentation will be entertaining, but the underlying message is rather serious.

Speaker: Dr Jeremy Singer

This is a roadmap talk about general compiler optimisations. I will start by giving a brief overview of how compiler optimisations can be classified, discussing ahead-of-time optimisation, feedback-directed optimisation and runtime optimisation. I will discuss how information sharing enables more effective optimisation. I will argue that this trend is taking us to a Big Brother optimisation utopia.

Speaker: Ciaran McCreesh
An Exact Branch and Bound Algorithm with Symmetry Breaking for the Maximum Balanced Induced Biclique Problem

Garey and Johnson's Hard Problem GT24 is to determine whether a given graph contains a balanced induced biclique of a particular size. We already have some good algorithms for the maximum clique problem---we adapt these, to introduce the first branch and bound algorithm for the maximum balanced induced biclique problem.

But why care about balanced induced bicliques? We are not aware of any applications (although other biclique variants do show up in data mining). Instead, we are interested because the problem has some nice properties from an algorithmic perspective: solutions are reasonably well-behaved, and it has the simplest possible non-trivial symmetry. We show how the the symmetry can be removed, using only two small lines of code. But how much easier does this make the problem? How do symmetries interact with branch and bound? What about parallel branch and bound? And what's going on with random graphs?

Speaker: Prof James P.G. Sterbenz

Resilience and survivability of the Future Internet is increasingly important to preserve critical services, particularly against attackers with knowledge of the structure and vulnerabilities of the network, as well as against large scale disasters that affect a large area.  A brief motivation and introduction will be given to the ResiliNets architecture, strategy, design principles, and analysis methodology.  This presentation will then describe the graph-theoretic properties required for flow-robustness, and introduce our path diversity measures.  Two current research directions will then be described:  how to add links to existing graphs under cost constraints to increase flow robustness, and geographic diversity as a basis for multipath geodiverse end-to-end transport (ResTP) and routing (GeoDivRP).

Speaker: Joe Davidson

In this talk I will attempt to examine the relationship between the size of a program written in a particular language and the expressiveness of the semantics of that language. We compare across the program/memory boundary using Random Access Stored Program (RASP)  machines as a Von Neumann model, and the classic Turing Machine as our Harvard architecture. But will also iterate on our RASP machine to see how minor semantic changes affect our program sizes within a single memory model.

In addition, I explain how semantics are not as suitable as we’d like for these comparisons and use this to motivate how I have grounded our models using Field Programmable Gate Arrays. I’ll will present the current results from both the program+semantics analysis and grounding into FPGAs.

Speaker: Dr Alexander Konovalov

I will give an overview of the project "HPC-GAP: High Performance Computational Algebra and Discrete Mathematics" aimed at parallelising the GAP system (http://www.gap-system.org) to support both shared and distributed memory programming models. In particular, I will describe the memory model used by the multithreaded version of the GAP system, corresponding GAP language extensions, and challenges that we are meeting while making the GAP code thread-safe.

Speaker: Dr Hayley Hung

One of the fundamental questions of computer science is about understanding how machines can best serve people. In this talk, I will focus on answering the question of how automated systems can achieve this by being aware of people as social beings. So much of our lives revolve around face-to-face communication. It affects our relationships with others, the influence they have over us, and how this can ultimately transform into decisions that affect a single person or many more people. However, we understand relatively little about how to automate the perception of social behaviour and recent research findings only touch the tip of the iceberg.

In this talk, I will describe some of the research I have carried out to address this gap by presenting my work on devising models to automatically interpret face-to-face human social behaviour using cameras, microphones, and wearable sensors. This will include addressing problems such as automatically estimating who is dominating the conversation? Are these two people attracted to each other? I will highlight the challenges facing this fascinating research problem and open research questions that remain.

Bio: Hayley Hung is an Assistant Professor and Delft Technology Fellow in the Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics group at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. Before that she held a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship at the Intelligent Systems Lab at the University of Amsterdam, working on devising models to estimate various aspects of human behaviour in large social gatherings. Between 2007-2010, she was a post-doctoral researcher at Idiap Research Institute in Switzerland, working on methods to automatically estimate human interactive behaviour in meetings such as dominance, cohesion and deception. She obtained her PhD in Computer Vision from Queen Mary University of London, UK in 2007 and her first degree from Imperial College, UK in Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

Speaker: Ágnes Cseh
Stability in networks

The well-known notion of stable matchings can be extended in several interesting ways, one of them operates with network flows. The stable flow problem lies on the border of Mathematics, Economics and Computer Science. We are given a directed network, where the vertices symbolize vendors, while the edges stand for the possible deals between them. We talk about stability if there is no pair of vendors who mutually want to change the current flow of goods. In this talk, we shorty summarize the results currently known about the problem. Besides showing algorithms to find such flows, we also sketch problems related to max flows, flows over time, restricted edges, multicommodity flows and uncoordinated markets.

Speaker: Dr Thortsen Zander

In the last 3 decades the interaction mean of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) has been investigated extensively. While most research aimed at the design of supportive systems for severely disabled persons, the last decade showed a trend towards applications for the general population. For users without disabilities a specific type of BCIs, that of passive Brain-Computer Interfaces (pBCIs), has shown high potential of improving Human-Machine and Human-Computer Interaction. In this seminar I will discuss the categorization of BCI research, in which we introduced the idea of pBCIs in 2008 and potential areas of application. Specifically, I will present several studies providing evidence that pBCIs can have a significant effect on the usability and efficiency of given systems. I will show that the users situational interpretation, intention and strategy can be detected by pBCIs. This information can be used for adapting the technical system automatically during interaction and enhance the performance of the Human-Machine System. From the perspective of pBCIs a new type of interaction, which is based on implicit control, emerges. Implicit Interaction aims at controlling a computer system by behavioral or psychophysiological aspects of user state, independently of any intentionally communicated commands. This introduces a new type of Human-Computer Interaction, which in contrast to most forms of interaction implemented nowadays, does not require the user to explicitly communicate with the machine. Users can focus on understanding the current state of the system and developing strategies for optimally reaching the goal of the given interaction. Based on information extracted by a pBCI and the given context the system can adapt automatically to the current strategies of the user. In a first study, a proof of principle is given, by implementing an Implicit Interaction to guide simple cursor movements in a 2D grid to a target. The results of this study clearly indicate the high potential of Implicit Interaction and introduce a new bandwidth of applications for passive Brain-Computer Interfaces.

Speaker: Yvonne Rogers

We are increasingly living in our digital bubbles. Even when physically together – as families and friends in our living rooms, outdoors and public places - we have our eyes glued to our own phones, tablets and laptops. The new generation of ‘all about me’ health and fitness gadgets, wallpapered in gamification, is making it worse. Do we really need smart shoes that tell us when we are being lazy and glasses that tell us what we can and cannot eat? Is this what we want from technology – ever more forms of digital narcissism, virtual nagging and data addiction? In contrast, I argue for a radical rethink of our relationship with future digital technologies. One that inspires us, through shared devices, tools and data, to be more creative, playful and thoughtful of each other and our surrounding environments.