Computing Science and Maths Seminars, 2017/2018
Seminars will take place in Room 4B96, Cottrell Building, University of Stirling. Normally, from 15.00 to 16.00 on Friday afternoons during semester time, unless otherwise stated. For instructions on how to get to the University, please look at the following routes.
Spring 2018
| Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
|---|---|---|
| Friday 26th January |
Prof. Muffy Calder OBE FRSE FREng | Temporal analytics of software usage styles in the wild How do users actually interact with software? If we can answer that, then perhaps we can (re)-design better systems. But users are heterogeneous: they adopt different usage styles and each individual user may move between different styles, from one interaction session to another, or even during an interaction session. We require new temporal analytics: techniques to model and analyse temporal data sets of logged interactions with the purpose of discovering, interpreting, and communicating meaningful patterns of usage. This talk outlines a new temporal analytics, based on admixture Markov models and probabilistic temporal logic, and applies it to a software system that has been used by tens of thousands of users worldwide. This is formal analysis in the wild! The talk is aimed at a general computer science audience. |
Friday 2nd February |
No Seminar | Other departmental events. | Friday 9th February |
Dr. Alice Miller | Probabilistic model checking for UAV controller generation I will describe how the PRISM model checker was used to generate controllers for an Unmanned Ariel Vehicle (UAV), specifically to determine search strategies for a UAV trying to find objects within a grid, for a range of scenarios. Parameters and probabilities for our models were informed by simulation models developed in the School of Engineering's Micro Air Systems Technologies (MAST) Laboratory. Our generated controllers can now be used within the simulation models (and ultimately in UAV software). This is joint work with colleagues from the Schools of Computing Science (Gethin Norman, Ruth Hoffmann and Ruben Giaquinta) and the School of Engineering (Murray Ireland). |
Friday 16th February |
No Seminar | Other departmental events. | Friday 23rd February |
No Seminar | Reading week. | Friday 2 March |
Dr. Misha Feigin | TBD | Friday 9 March |
TBD | Slot available. | 16 March | Dr. Scott Denholm | Never Mind the Bullocks: Dairy research from the Integrative Animal Sciences Health and welfare of animals are important issues, especially in the case of farmed animals in intensive production systems such as the modern high-yielding dairy cow. Genetic selection for increased milk yield in cows has been highly successful; however, we have since realised selection for production alone has also resulted in unforeseen negative effects on health, longevity, and production. Furthermore, as dairy herds are tending to increase in size (without proportional increases in staff), managing animals and reducing disease risk whilst maintaining production has become a delicate balance of breeding and management. This is an area where predictive methods can prove advantageous and invaluable because they can help us to identify markers and record phenotypic traits to allow us to better monitor animals and therefore make the most-informed breeding and management decisions. In this talk I'll aim to highlight some of the research being carried out by the Integrative Animal Sciences team at SRUC which seeks to aid in improving dairy cow health, fertility and welfare. |
Friday 23 March |
Dr. Wen-shin Lee | Sparse regular sampling schemes for exponential analysis The exponential function is a fundamental building block in nonlinear models that are vital in describing physical and biological phenomena. Hence it is not surprising that many of today's technological bottlenecks can be translated into challenges in exponential analysis. A substantial amount of effort in the field of signal processing is essentially dedicated to the analysis of exponential functions whose exponents are complex. The problem of uncovering high-resolution frequency information of a signal can sometimes be ill-posed. Meanwhile, sampling a signal uniformly below the Shannon-Nyquist rate leads to aliasing, an unwanted effect causing different signals to become indistinguishable. We develop a parametric method to retrieve fine-scale information from coarse-scale measurements. We exploit, rather than avoid, aliasing to regularise the problem and increase the frequency resolution. Our technique offers new possibilities to tackle some difficulties encountered in applications that include radar, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), and direction of arrival (DOA) in antenna design. |
| Previous Seminar Series |
|---|
| 2016: Spring Autumn |
| 2015: Spring Autumn |
| 2014: Spring Autumn |
| 2013: Spring Autumn |
| 2012: Spring Autumn |
| 2011: Spring Autumn |
| 2010: Spring Autumn |
Top image: Illustrated example of running the Epsilon-constraint algorithm in order to maximise two objectives: find an optimal solution for objective 1; restrict the solution space according to the solution's value for objective 2 and look for an optimum solution of objective 1 in that space; repeat the previous step until there are no more solutions to be found. Any dominated solutions need to be filtered out of the set of solutions.
Courtesy of Dr. Nadarajen Veerapen. Related to a recent publication:
N. Veerapen, G. Ochoa, M. Harman and E. K. Burke. An Integer Linear Programming approach to the single and bi-objective Next Release Problem. Information and Software Technology, Volume 65, September 2015, Pages 1-13, ISSN 0950-5849. DOI:10.1016/j.infsof.2015.03.008