This Week’s EventsAll Upcoming EventsPast EventsWebapp

This Week’s Events

AI Research Theme: SICSA AI All-Hands

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 17 June, 2021
Time: 13:00 - 16:15
Location:TBA

This meeting aims to bring together AI researchers from universities across Scotland to share our current work. There is already a strong AI research community among the Scottish universities. The goal of this meeting will be to share with each other our current research group activities with a view to foster potential collaborations. We will have a brief talk from each institution giving a high-level view of their current AI-related research and where they might connect with others. We will also have an opportunity to learn about and discuss Scotland's new AI Strategy. We know it's been a much busier year than normal so we are hoping to keep the workshop short but effective. Programme (small adjustments might happen during the day): 13.00 - 13.15: Welcome (SICSA AI Theme co-leads and SICSA exec) 13.15 - 14.00: Keynote - Steph Wright (Datalab & Scotland’s AI Strategy) (chair: Georgios Leontidis) 14.00 - 14.15: Break 14.15 - 15.30: Presentations (chair: Alice Toniolo) 15.30 - 16.00: (networking, group conversations, panel discussion, something else?) (chair: Sandy) 16.00 - 16.15: Wrap-up (SICSA AI Theme co-leads) Steph Wright - Director of Health & Wellbeing Engagement at Datalab and AI Strategy Development Lead Steph is a data science enthusiast with specific experience of the healthcare domain. She has been extensively involved in developing and building collaborations across organisations as well as experience in project and programme management. Steph has a diverse background ranging from astrophysics to genomics in academia and film & TV to dance in the arts and the third sector. Recently Steph led on Data Lab’s efforts in support of the Scottish Government in developing Scotland’s AI Strategy. Going forward, she is working with Gillian Docherty, CEO of the Data Lab and the newly announced Scottish AI Alliance to deliver the strategy’s vision for Scotland. Steph will introduce Scotland’s AI strategy which was launched earlier this year. Event Organisers: Dimitra Gkatzia (Edinburgh Napier University, AI theme co-lead Sandy Brownlee (University of Stirling, AI theme co-lead) Georgios Leontidis (University of Aberdeen) Alice Toniolo (St Andrews University) Simon Wells (Edinburgh Napier University) You can register in Eventbrite.

Upcoming events

AI Research Theme: SICSA AI All-Hands

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 17 June, 2021
Time: 13:00 - 16:15
Location: TBA

This meeting aims to bring together AI researchers from universities across Scotland to share our current work. There is already a strong AI research community among the Scottish universities. The goal of this meeting will be to share with each other our current research group activities with a view to foster potential collaborations. We will have a brief talk from each institution giving a high-level view of their current AI-related research and where they might connect with others. We will also have an opportunity to learn about and discuss Scotland's new AI Strategy. We know it's been a much busier year than normal so we are hoping to keep the workshop short but effective. Programme (small adjustments might happen during the day): 13.00 - 13.15: Welcome (SICSA AI Theme co-leads and SICSA exec) 13.15 - 14.00: Keynote - Steph Wright (Datalab & Scotland’s AI Strategy) (chair: Georgios Leontidis) 14.00 - 14.15: Break 14.15 - 15.30: Presentations (chair: Alice Toniolo) 15.30 - 16.00: (networking, group conversations, panel discussion, something else?) (chair: Sandy) 16.00 - 16.15: Wrap-up (SICSA AI Theme co-leads) Steph Wright - Director of Health & Wellbeing Engagement at Datalab and AI Strategy Development Lead Steph is a data science enthusiast with specific experience of the healthcare domain. She has been extensively involved in developing and building collaborations across organisations as well as experience in project and programme management. Steph has a diverse background ranging from astrophysics to genomics in academia and film & TV to dance in the arts and the third sector. Recently Steph led on Data Lab’s efforts in support of the Scottish Government in developing Scotland’s AI Strategy. Going forward, she is working with Gillian Docherty, CEO of the Data Lab and the newly announced Scottish AI Alliance to deliver the strategy’s vision for Scotland. Steph will introduce Scotland’s AI strategy which was launched earlier this year. Event Organisers: Dimitra Gkatzia (Edinburgh Napier University, AI theme co-lead Sandy Brownlee (University of Stirling, AI theme co-lead) Georgios Leontidis (University of Aberdeen) Alice Toniolo (St Andrews University) Simon Wells (Edinburgh Napier University) You can register in Eventbrite.

Towards more practical complex question answering

Group: Information Retrieval (IR)
Speaker: Chen Zhao, University of Maryland
Date: 21 June, 2021
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/99150712088?pwd=RVJFVzh1MVFsUFlCcjRrZk54Z2xQQT09

Abstract: 

Question answering is one of the most important and challenging tasks for understanding human language. With the help of large scale benchmarks, state-of-the-art neural methods have made significant progress to even answer complex questions that require multiple evidence pieces. Nevertheless, training existing SOTA models requires several assumptions (e.g., intermediate evidence annotation,  corpus semi-structure) that limit the applicability to only academic testbeds. In this talk, I discuss several solutions to make current QA systems more practical. 

I first describe a state-of-the-art system for complex QA with an extra hop attention in its layers to aggregate different pieces of evidence following the structure. Then I introduce a dense retrieval approach that iteratively forms an evidence chain through beam search in dense representations, without using semi-structured information. Finally I describe a dense retrieval work that focuses on a weakly-supervised setting, by learning to find evidence from a large corpus, and relying only on distant supervision for model training. 

 

Bio:

Chen Zhao is a fifth-year phd candidate at university of Maryland, College Park, advised by Jordan Boyd-Graber and Hal Daume III. His research interests lie in question answering, including knowledge representation from large text corpora for complex QA, and semantic paring over tables.

Systems Seminar: Improving GHC Haskell NUMA Profiling

Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Phil Trinder, University of Glasgow
Date: 22 June, 2021
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Zoom meeting

Short Abstract:
Lots of pretty pictures of NUMA usage by GHC Haskell Programs.
 
Technical Abstract:
As the number of cores increases Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) is becoming increasingly prevalent in general purpose machines. Effectively exploiting NUMA can
significantly reduce memory access latency and thus runtime by 10-20%, and profiling provides information on how to optimise. Language-level NUMA profilers are rare, and mostly profile conventional languages executing on Virtual Machines. This talk reports work where we profile, and develop new NUMA profilers for, a functional language executing on a runtime system.
 
We start by using existing OS and language level tools to systematically profile 8 benchmarks from the GHC Haskell nofib suite on a typical NUMA server (8 regions, 64 cores). We propose a new metric: NUMA access rate that allows us to compare the load placed on the memory system by different programs, and use it to contrast the benchmarks. We demonstrate significant differences in NUMA usage between computational and data-intensive benchmarks, e.g. local memory access rates of 23% and 30% respectively. We show that small changes to coordination behaviour can significantly alter NUMA usage, and for the first time quantify
the effectiveness of the GHC 8.2 NUMA adaption.
 
We identify information not available from existing profilers and extend both the numaprof profiler, and the GHC runtime system to obtain three new NUMA profiles: OS thread allocation locality, GC count (per region and generation) and GC thread locality. The new profiles not only
provide a deeper understanding of program memory usage, they also suggest ways that GHC can be adapted to better exploit NUMA architectures.

SICSA Education: Graduate Apprenticeship Workshop

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 29 June, 2021
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Location: TBA

A lunchtime workshop to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with delivering computing-related GA programmes. Following on from our previous event in 2019, we invite colleagues from Scottish universities who are involved in delivering computing-related Graduate Apprenticeships to join us for lunch (with Uber Eats vouchers courtesy of SICSA!) and a discussion of challenges and opportunities associated with delivering these programmes. In particular, we'll consider the impact of changes to the funding model for Graduate Apprenticeships across Scotland. Guest speaker to be confirmed. You can sign up via Eventbrite.

HealthCare Seminar: TBC

Group: Computing Technologies for Healthcare
Speaker: Dr. Rajeev.Krishnadas, University of Glasgow / NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde
Date: 02 July, 2021
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMsdO6tpzksHN0ai5MzpOoM6UtEn3ISk3Qr

Biography

Dr Rajeev Krishnadas is a visiting consultant at the Priory Hospital Glasgow. He is also a consultant psychiatrist at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and an Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. He also sees adults with a wide range of mental health problems, like depression, psychosis, anxiety and bipolar disorder. His particular area of interest is diagnosis and treatment of adults with ADHD. 

Dr Krishnadas completed his basic medical training and psychiatric training from Bombay University, India. He then worked as a consultant psychiatrist in India before moving to the UK, bringing extensive experience in managing patients who speak Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi. He then completed his advanced training in general adult psychiatry along with a PhD in psychological medicine, from the University of Glasgow. 

Past events

To view past events, please click here

Events Webapp