Computing Science and Maths Seminars, 2019/2020
Seminars will take place in Room 4B96, Cottrell Building, University of Stirling. Unless otherwise stated, from 15.00 to 16.00 on Friday afternoons during semester time, followed by discussions and snacks in 4B94. For instructions on how to get to the University, please look here.
Spring 2020
| Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
|---|---|---|
| Friday 17th January |
Prof Carron Shankland | Writing workshop for Lovelace 2020 submissions The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium is a free, one day conference for women undergraduates and taught masters students and is being held in Stirling in April. All women students of computing and related subjects are invited to enter one of the poster contests. Abstracts are due by 31st January 2020. Need help on how to write an abstract? Come to our workshop! There will be a second writing workshop on Wednesday 22nd January 11-12 in 4B96. |
| Friday 24th January |
Dr Marc Roper, Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde | Using Machine Learning to Classify Test Outcomes 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 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. |
| Friday 31st January |
Dr Joao Mota, Signal and Image Processing Laboratory, Heriot-Watt University | Multi-Modal Data Processing: An Approach via Sparsity Making sense of modern datasets, in which data is often multi-modal and heterogeneous, is a challenging task that is becoming increasingly important for both academia and industry. In this work, we look at sparsity-based approaches to process multi-modal and heterogeneous data. We start with the problem of integrating prior knowledge into sparse reconstruction schemes. Prior information here means a signal similar to the signal to be reconstructed, for example, in medical imaging, a prior scan of the same patient. Our theory provides a minimal number of measurements required to reconstruct the original signal as a function of the quality of the prior information. We then describe an approach to separate the x-rays of the paintings in the door panels of the Ghent Altarpiece, a 15th century art work by Van Eyck which was recently restored. Our method uses the visual images to aid the separation process and outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods, such as morphological component analysis. Finally, we describe a single-image super-resolution method that combines deep convolutional networks with a sparsity-based approach and explore how such a framework can be extended to processing arbitrary, but correlated, heterogeneous data such as images and sound, or text and location. Speaker Bio: Joao F. C. Mota received the M.Sc. degree and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, in 2008 and 2013, respectively. He also received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, US, in 2013. From 2013 to 2016, he was Senior Research Associate at University College London, London, UK. In 2017, he became Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK., where he is also affiliated with the Institute of Sensors, Signals, and Systems. His current research interests include theoretical and practical aspects of high-dimensional data processing, multi-modal processing, inverse problems, optimization theory, machine learning, data science, and distributed information processing and control. He was the recipient of the 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award for the paper "Distributed Basis Pursuit", published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. |
| Friday 7th February |
Prof Andrew Wallace, Heriot-Watt University | TBA |
| Friday 14th February |
Dr Lilia Georgieva, Department of Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University | TBA |
| Friday 21st February |
None | Reading week |
| Friday 28th February |
Available slot | |
| Friday 6th March |
Available slot | |
| Friday 13th March |
Available slot | |
| Friday 20th March |
Available slot | |
| Friday 27th March |
Available slot | |
| Friday 17th January |
Available slot | |
| Friday 3rd April |
Available slot | |
| Friday 10th April |
Available slot | |
| Friday 17th April |
Available slot | |
| Friday 24th April |
Available slot | |
| Friday 1st May |
Available slot |
Previous Seminar Series
1996:
Autumn
Top image: Evolution of sounds by crowd-sourcing, from Brownlee, A. E. I., Kim, S-J., Wan, S-H., Chan, S. & Lawson, J. A. Crowd-Sourcing the Sounds of Places with a Web-Based Evolutionary Algorithm. Companion Proc. of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation COnference 2019, Prague, Czech Republic, pp 131-132. DOI:10.1145/3319619.3322028