School of Computing Science

GWiCS January Talk: Fail Again, Fail Better: Celebrating Failure as a Wellbeing Intervention for Researchers

Group: Glasgow Women in Computing Science (GWiCS)
Speaker: Ursula Hurley and Davina Whitnall, University of Salford
Date: 27 January, 2022
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Location: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/94060910296?pwd=UXFzanZOZVI1QjdiT1R2azhQM0h6UT09

Abstract:

Failure is part of being human; we learn more through failure than through success. We are psychologically and biologically wired to remember the negative, this instinct helps us to protect ourselves against future disasters and keep us safely away from harm. Failure is often a considered a negative but looking at it differently can open unexpected routes to success. Albert Einstein said, “failure really is just success in progress.” However, the pressures of the research environment can make it difficult to take this view. Paradigms of educational histories teach us that failure can have disastrous consequences for future success (Jackson 2003). What can we do about this? Salford University’s Doctoral School has developed a “Flipping Failure” initiative, in which experiences of failure are re-framed as opportunities for personal development and pathways to success.

In this series of case studies, we explore applications of failure as a collective problem-solving framework to help researchers:
• Manage the isolation and remoteness
• Reflect and re-purpose, making the most of what they have already developed
• Increase resilience and capacity to cope with change and uncertainty

Drawing on creative practices, we present the experience of failure as something to be embraced and explored rather than avoided, drawing on research from creative and entrepreneurial contexts (Naray-Davey & Hurley, 2014; Babineaux and Krumboltz 2013, Hall 2007). In this workshop, we demonstrate some of the approaches used, including:
• Visualisation
• Creating, thinking and connecting through shared experiences
• Storytelling - characterisation and script writing
• Goal setting and action planning using lessons from the past

The outcomes from the session will be:
• A group discussion about how to apply this approach in different contexts/situations.
• The provision of a flipping failure plan and schedule
• The opportunity to get involved (e.g. by joining our schedule of failure events and our the sharing of our toolkits).
• The invitation to collaborate further on a HEI UK Failure Code of Practice, which will include access to a Failure blog.

Speaker Bios:

Davina Whitnall: My role is Researcher Development Coordinator at Salford. My past roles include being a researcher developer at The University of Manchester, working as an independent trainer consultant and as a National Training Officer for The Co-operative Group. My research interests are in pedagogy, developing confidence, leadership and supporting researcher-led activities. I've written two books 'ER Stories - Enabling Researchers Stories' and 'Ketchup - The confidence developing condiment.' I enjoy designing and delivering training and I'm a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Personal development is important to me and I'm working towards Senior Fellowship Status as part of my professional development. I enjoy working closely with the PGR and researcher community at Salford and if you would like to get in touch my email address is: D.C.Whitnall@salford.ac.uk Ursula Hurley: I have just completed a secondment to set up Salford's new Doctoral School, working with our research community to enhance visibility, training and impact. I have now returned to the "day job", teaching and researching in English and Creative Writing. Before embarking upon an academic career, I worked in the creative industries, and in the public and voluntary sectors in various writing-related roles. My practice-based PhD somehow fitted into the mix, taking me 7 years part-time! My research interests are in creative process, innovative pedagogy, and experimental writing practices. I am Principal Investigator for the AHRC funded project, 'In the Making', exploring disability and 3D printing. Most recently I secured AHRC funding for a series of training events to support researchers in writing critically about creative practices. Further details of my publications are available here: https://usir.salford.ac.uk/view/authors/2577.html I enjoy cross-disciplinary and inter-sectoral collaborations - if you would like to get in touch, my email address is: U.K.Hurley@salford.ac.uk

GWiCS January Talk: Fail Again, Fail Better: Celebrating Failure as a Wellbeing Intervention for Researchers

Group: Glasgow Women in Computing Science (GWiCS)
Speaker: Ursula Hurley and Davina Whitnall, University of Salford
Date: 27 January, 2022
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Location: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/94060910296?pwd=UXFzanZOZVI1QjdiT1R2azhQM0h6UT09

Abstract:

Failure is part of being human; we learn more through failure than through success. We are psychologically and biologically wired to remember the negative, this instinct helps us to protect ourselves against future disasters and keep us safely away from harm. Failure is often a considered a negative but looking at it differently can open unexpected routes to success. Albert Einstein said, “failure really is just success in progress.” However, the pressures of the research environment can make it difficult to take this view. Paradigms of educational histories teach us that failure can have disastrous consequences for future success (Jackson 2003). What can we do about this? Salford University’s Doctoral School has developed a “Flipping Failure” initiative, in which experiences of failure are re-framed as opportunities for personal development and pathways to success.

In this series of case studies, we explore applications of failure as a collective problem-solving framework to help researchers:
• Manage the isolation and remoteness
• Reflect and re-purpose, making the most of what they have already developed
• Increase resilience and capacity to cope with change and uncertainty

Drawing on creative practices, we present the experience of failure as something to be embraced and explored rather than avoided, drawing on research from creative and entrepreneurial contexts (Naray-Davey & Hurley, 2014; Babineaux and Krumboltz 2013, Hall 2007). In this workshop, we demonstrate some of the approaches used, including:
• Visualisation
• Creating, thinking and connecting through shared experiences
• Storytelling - characterisation and script writing
• Goal setting and action planning using lessons from the past

The outcomes from the session will be:
• A group discussion about how to apply this approach in different contexts/situations.
• The provision of a flipping failure plan and schedule
• The opportunity to get involved (e.g. by joining our schedule of failure events and our the sharing of our toolkits).
• The invitation to collaborate further on a HEI UK Failure Code of Practice, which will include access to a Failure blog.

Speaker Bios:

Davina Whitnall: My role is Researcher Development Coordinator at Salford. My past roles include being a researcher developer at The University of Manchester, working as an independent trainer consultant and as a National Training Officer for The Co-operative Group. My research interests are in pedagogy, developing confidence, leadership and supporting researcher-led activities. I've written two books 'ER Stories - Enabling Researchers Stories' and 'Ketchup - The confidence developing condiment.' I enjoy designing and delivering training and I'm a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Personal development is important to me and I'm working towards Senior Fellowship Status as part of my professional development. I enjoy working closely with the PGR and researcher community at Salford and if you would like to get in touch my email address is: D.C.Whitnall@salford.ac.uk Ursula Hurley: I have just completed a secondment to set up Salford's new Doctoral School, working with our research community to enhance visibility, training and impact. I have now returned to the "day job", teaching and researching in English and Creative Writing. Before embarking upon an academic career, I worked in the creative industries, and in the public and voluntary sectors in various writing-related roles. My practice-based PhD somehow fitted into the mix, taking me 7 years part-time! My research interests are in creative process, innovative pedagogy, and experimental writing practices. I am Principal Investigator for the AHRC funded project, 'In the Making', exploring disability and 3D printing. Most recently I secured AHRC funding for a series of training events to support researchers in writing critically about creative practices. Further details of my publications are available here: https://usir.salford.ac.uk/view/authors/2577.html I enjoy cross-disciplinary and inter-sectoral collaborations - if you would like to get in touch, my email address is: U.K.Hurley@salford.ac.uk

Probing and infusing biomedical knowledge for pre-trained language models

Group: Information Retrieval (IR)
Speaker: Zaiqiao Meng, University of Glasgow
Date: 31 January, 2022
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: Zoom link will be provided after registration

Abstract

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have orchestrated incredible progress on myriads of few- or zero-shot language understanding tasks, by pre-training model parameters in a task-agnostic way and transferring knowledge to specific downstream tasks via finetuning. Leveraging factual knowledge from knowledge graphs (KGs) to augment PLMs is of paramount importance for knowledge-intensive tasks, such as question answering and fact checking. Especially in the biomedical domain where public training corpora are limited and noisy, trusted biomedical KGs are crucial for deriving accurate inferences. Zaiqiao will introduce one our proposed knowledge infusion approach, named Mixture-of-Partitions (MoP), which is to infuse factual knowledge based on partitioned KGs into PLMs, and automatically route useful knowledge from these adapters to downstream tasks. Knowledge probing is another crucial task for understanding the knowledge transfer mechanism behind the PLMs. Despite the growing progress of probing knowledge for PLMs in the general domain, specialised areas such as biomedical domain are vastly under-explored. Zaiqiao will also introduce a new biomedical knowledge probing benchmark, namely MedLAMA, and a novel probing approach, namely Contrastive Probe, for probing biomedical knowledge of PLMs.

Affective Intelligence and Robotics for Well-being

Group: Computing Technologies for Healthcare
Speaker: Prof. Hatice Gunes, Department of Computer Science, University of Cambridge
Date: 02 February, 2022
Time: 14:00 - 15:30
Location: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0od-msqTotHdMlo7hMP2WxCs8jkbNj6J00

This is a special session organised on behalf of the Computing Technologies for Healthcare Theme and the Athena Swan. The session includes:

• Research talk and Q/A (60 minutes)
• Discussion on career progression and fellowships (30 minutes) 

Registration is required: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0od-msqTotHdMlo7hMP2WxCs8jkbNj6J00 

Short summary of research talk: Designing artificially intelligent interfaces and robots with socio-emotional skills is a challenging task. Progress in industry and developments in academia provide us a positive outlook, however, the artificial emotional intelligence of the current technology is still limited. In this talk, I will present some of our research explorations in this area with applications to well-being, specifically in virtual reality, in work-like settings, and with/for robotic mental well-being coaching.

Biography: Hatice Gunes is a Professor of Affective Intelligence and Robotics (AFAR) and the Head of the AFAR Lab at the University of Cambridge's Department of Computer Science and Technology. Her expertise is in the areas of affective computing and social signal processing cross-fertilising research in multimodal interaction, computer vision, signal processing, machine learning and social robotics. She has published over 125 papers in these areas (h-index=35, citations > 6,300),  with  most  recent  works  on lifelong learning for facial expression recognition, fairness and affective  robotics;  and  longitudinal  HRI  for  wellbeing.  Some of her research highlights  include  RSJ/KROS  Distinguished  Interdisciplinary Research Award Finalist at IEEE RO-MAN’21, Distinguished PC  Award  at  IJCAI’21,  Best  Paper  Award  Finalist  at  IEEE RO-MAN’20, Finalist for the 2018 Frontiers Spotlight Award, Outstanding  Paper  Award  at  IEEE  FG’11,  and  Best  Demo Award at IEEE ACII’09. Prof Gunes is the former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC), and was the General Co-Chair of ACII’19, and the Program Co-Chair of ACM/IEEE HRI’20 and IEEE FG’17. She was a member of the Human-Robot Interaction Steering Committee (2018-2021) and was the Chair of the Steering Board of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (2017-2019). In 2019 she was awarded the prestigious EPSRC Fellowship as a personal grant (2019-2024) to investigate adaptive robotic emotional intelligence for well-being, and was named a Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute– UK’s national centre for data science and artificial intelligence (2019-2021). Prof Gunes is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of the AAAC.

TBA

Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Paul Keir, University of The West of Scotland
Date: 15 February, 2022
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Sir Alwyn Williams Building, 422 Seminar Room

TBA

Healthcare Seminar: TBC

Group: Computing Technologies for Healthcare
Speaker: Dr. Karim Lekadir, University of Barcelona
Date: 16 February, 2022
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJctcuivqTgjGNDzJCbOXXwcNsCB0yg73egy

Biography: 

Dr. Karim Lekadir is a Ramon y Cajal Researcher and Director of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Lab at the Universitat de Barcelona (BCN-AIM). He holds a PhD from Imperial College London (UK) and was previously a visiting scholar at Stanford University (USA). His current research focuses on the development of data science and machine learning approaches for the analysis of large-scale biomedical data, including imaging, clinical, lifestyle, and mobile data. The software he developed during his PhD for cardiac functional quantification has been CE marked and commercialised by CMRtools, and is now used in more than 250 clinical centres worldwide. He is the Coordinator of the following Horizon 2020 projects: euCanSHare (2018-2022), developing a big data platform for cardiovascular research; EarlyCause (2019-2023), which investigates multi-morbidity using experimental and data science approaches; and EuCanImage (2020-2024), which is building a federated artificial intelligence environment for cancer imaging. He is also work package leader in the longITools H2020 project  (2019-2024), developing a mobile app for cardio-metabolic risk prediction based on exposome data. In addition, Karim is General Chair for the MICCAI 2024 Conference (Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assited Intervention) which for the first time will take place in Africa – in Marrakesh, Morocco. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

TBA

Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Antonio Barbalace, University of Edinburgh
Date: 01 March, 2022
Time: 10:00 - 11:00
Location: Zoom

NOTE : Time change 10:00 - 11:00

TBA

FATA Seminar : TBD

Group: Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA)
Speaker: Dr Jack Williams, Microsoft Research
Date: 08 March, 2022
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Location: Contact organizers for Zoom coordinates

SICSA Theory, Modelling and Computation Research Theme: Scottish Programming Languages Seminar

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 09 March, 2022
Time: 12:00 - 17:00
Location: Informatics Forum, The University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB, United Kingdom

The Scottish Programming Languages Seminar (SPLS) is an informal meeting for the discussion of any aspect of programming languages. SPLS is being planned as a hybrid meeting to be held at the Informatics Forum, The University of Edinburgh on Wednesday 9th March 2022. Information and updates about the March 2022 edition of SPLS will be communicated via the SPLS Mailing List. Programme (tentative schedule) 12:00 - 13:00 Lunch 13:00 - 14:00 Session 1 14:00 - 14:30 Coffee break 14:30 - 15:30 Session 2 15:30 - 16:00 Coffee break 16:00 - 17:00 Session 3 Confirmed speakers James McKinna (Heriot-Watt University) Jeremy Singer (University of Glasgow) Conor McBride (University of Strathclyde)/Sam Lindley (The University of Edinburgh)/Simon Gay (University of Glasgow) Bastian Köpcke (Universität Münster) Xueying Qin (The University of Edinburgh) Rob Wright (The University of Edinburgh) Registration The only prerequisite for attending this meeting is that you register in advance using the Doodle form. The main purpose of the registration is to inform us about the number of participants such that we know how many to cater for. Registration is especially important for those who wish to attend the in-person component (supposing we will be allowed to have such a component) as only those who signed up in advance will be allowed to participate in-person on the day — this will be strictly enforced! Organisers The organisers of this meeting are Daniel Hillerström and Frank Emrich, please contact them directly with any questions regarding this meeting.  

Healthcare Seminar & AthenaSwan Session: TBC

Group: Computing Technologies for Healthcare
Speaker: Dr. Stamatia Giannarou, Imperial College London
Date: 16 March, 2022
Time: 15:00 - 16:30
Location: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwsduqhrDwiHtdMKCADLEHgdNagRGveehZr

Biography: Stamatia (Matina) Giannarou received the MEng degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Democritus University of Thrace, Greece in 2003, the MSc degree in communications and signal processing and the Ph.D. degree in object recognition from the department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, UK in 2004 and 2008, respectively. Currently she is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College London, UK. Her main research interests include visual recognition and surgical vision.

RIS Event: Breaking Barriers in STEM - Down the Rabbit Hole

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 29 April, 2022
Time: 12:00 - 15:30
Location: South Hall Complex, Pollock Halls, University of Edinburgh, 18 Holyrood Park Rd, Edinburgh, EH16 5AR, United Kingdom

After the success of our Breaking Barriers in STEM: Through the Looking Glass event in 2020, SULSA, alongside Research Pools ScotCHEM, SICSA, and SINAPSE created working groups to address the following EDI issues: • Mental Health and Wellbeing • Decolonising STEM • Expanding Our Reach (International Support) • The Leaky Pipeline On behalf of these groups, we would like to invite you to Breaking Barriers in STEM: Down the Rabbit Hole, an EDI knowledge-exchange event at Pollock Halls, Edinburgh on April 29th 2022. The event will begin at 12:00 pm with a networking lunch followed by talks from organisations working to resolve issues in each thematic area (1:30-3:30 pm). The networking lunch will be held in an exhibition space and so we would invite your EDI committee to host a stall during this time to provide information on EDI activities happening on your campus. We want this event to bring those passionate about EDI together to share ideas and experiences in tackling some of the barriers and how collectively, we can make STEM a place where everyone is welcome. If you have any questions or wish to discuss further please get in touch with Alison Hughes, Project Coordinator at Research Institute of Infection Immunity & Inflammation.

Cyber Physical Systems & Cyber Security Research Themes: SICSA Event at IEEE DSC 2022

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 22 June, 2022
Time: 09:00 - 17:00
Location: Edinburgh Napier University, Craiglockhart Campus, 219 Colinton Road, Edinburgh , EH14 1DJ, United Kingdom

In parallel with IEEE DSC 2022, we are running an event organised by Dr Naghmeh Moradpoor and sponsored by SICSA to support women in cyber given that the lack of women in cybersecurity is something that the UK government, the industry and university are keen to address. Therefore, it aims to inspire women into cybersecurity roles by bringing together the cyber women from across the UK in the form of a poster and a paper competition. Having the best paper and best poster competition held in parallel with the above conference, will assist women in cybersecurity to understand the demands for cybersecurity/digital forensics in different organisations. This event not only connects women in cybersecurity to leading industrial experts but also provides for greater collaboration amongst Scottish universities and leading industries. We hope that the delegates will engage with industrial contacts for future partnerships and research-based industrial collaborations. Prizes The event will select total of x8 winners (x4 winners for the best papers and x4 winners for the best posters) as follows: Prizes for x4 winners (total: £230), best posters: First place: X1 £100 Amazon voucher; X1 Certificate from the event Second place: X1 £50 Amazon voucher; X1 Certificate from the event Third place: X1 £30 Amazon voucher; X1 Certificate from the event Outstanding woman in cyber (poster category): X1 £50 Amazon voucher; X1 Certificate from the event Prizes for x4 winners (total: £230), best papers: First place: X1 £100 Amazon voucher; X1 Certificate from the event Second place: X1 £50 Amazon voucher; X1 Certificate from the event Third place: X1 £30 Amazon voucher; X1 Certificate from the event Outstanding woman in cyber (paper category): X1 £50 Amazon voucher; X1 Certificate from the event Please note that both males and females can enter the above competitions for best papers and best posters, competing for first place, second place, and third place. Only females are allowed in the Outstanding Woman in Cyber (paper & poster) categories. Contact Dr Naghmeh Moradpoor, Edinburgh Napier University  

SICSA Conference Sponsorship: Euro - Par Conference 2022

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 22 August, 2022
Time: 01:00 - 01:00
Location: University of Glasgow, University Avenue, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, United Kingdom

SICSA is a proud sponsor of the 28th International European Conference On Parallel and Distributed Computing. Euro-Par is the prime European conference covering all aspects of parallel and distributed processing, ranging from theory to practice, from small to the largest parallel and distributed systems and infrastructures, from fundamental computational problems to full-fledged applications, from architecture, compiler, language and interface design and implementation, to tools, support infrastructures, and application performance aspects. Euro-Par’s unique organization into topics provides an excellent forum for focused technical discussion, as well as interaction with a large, broad and diverse audience. A week of scientific events including workshops, posters, and tutorials. Covering all topics related to parallel and distributed computing: Compilers, Tools and Environments Performance and Power Modelling, Prediction and Evaluation Scheduling and Load Balancing Data Management, Analytics and Machine Learning Cluster and Cloud Computing Theory and Algorithms for Parallel and Distributed Processing Parallel and Distributed Programming, Interfaces, and Languages Multicore and Manycore Parallelism Parallel Numerical Methods and Applications High-performance architectures and accelerators Parallelism in IoT/Edge Computing Proceedings in Springer LNCS series. In person and Online Euro-Par 2022 will be held as a hybrid event, in-person at the University of Glasgow, and online. The University campus is located in the West End of Glasgow and is easily reachable by air and by rail. Euro-Par 2022 is organised by the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, with support from Heriot-Watt University, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Stirling. Find out more about upcoming deadlines and the programme of sessions.