This weeks Psst! :Dimitra Gkatzia @ Natural Language Generation from Data, Deligiannis Pantazis @Algorithmic Skeletons-Towards a Heterogeneous Future

Thursday 1 Dec, 1:15PM, room: G45

Deligiannis Pantazis: Algorithmic Skeletons - Towards a Heterogeneous Future

Synapsis:
Algorithmic skeletons, introduced by M. Cole in his PhD Thesis (1989), are high-level abstractionsthat enable the programmer to achieve parallelisation without having to worry about the associated complexities (e.g., synchronisation, coordination). In this talk I will present common skeletons,explain the advantages of skeletal programming (i.e., structured parallelism) and why they will play a critical role as we are heading towards heterogeneous devices (e.g., clusters of multicores, clouds, GPUs). Finally, I will present what I am working on since I started the PhD this September.

Dimitra Gkatzia: Natural Language Generation from Data

A lot of effort has been made to make machines talk like humans. Spoken dialogue systems, machine translation systems, summarization systems, recommendations systems and many more have been developed and used in several domains, e.g. medicine, weather forecasts, football commentaries, museum artifacts descriptions and others. All the aforementioned systems incorporate a Natural Language Generation (NLG) component in order to produce human language. However, NLG systems require a lot of developmental time and they are domain-specific, therefore their reusability is almost unfeasible.

In this talk, I will discuss about human language generation from data. The goal of these systems is to present the large amounts of unstructured and complex data in an understandable way for humans; human language. I will refer to the architecture of an NLG system, its components, different techniques used and some related systems in literature.

This weeks Psst! : Michael Kriegel: Crowd-sourced Story Creation, Vallejo, Marta:Urban Growth: Effects on Urban Green Spaces and implications for pla

Thursday 17 Nov, 1:15PM, room: G45

Michael Kriegel: Crowd-sourced Story Creation

My PhD work is motivated by a vision of interactive storytelling, where a computer system can "spin" and improvise a story in real-time taking into account a user's input and by the observation that it is incredibly hard to realize such a system. Part of the problem is the vast amounts of knowledge representation involved in describing a story world in enough detail that a program can reason about it. In my PhD I am investigating how crowd-sourcing might help to address this by asking 1) How can we extract coherent knowledge about the story world from many individual example stories and 2) what kind of infrastructure supports the crowd-sourced collection of this material.


Vallejo, Marta:Urban Growth: Effects on Urban Green Spaces and implications for planning and policy


Abstract:
The total amount of urban surface throughout the world represents only a 1-2%. However the resources needed to fulfill the necessities of the residents of these areas require the transformation of the 20% of the terrestrial surface above all in agricultural landscapes. The analysis of land use change spatial patterns is a crucial factor in order to understand ecological and social dynamics.

A key element in the study of urban evolution patterns is the peri-urban landscapes. A peri-urban landscape is a transition zone where coexists different land types as agricultural, forestry with urban residences, industry, transportation and leisure areas. In long term peri-urban areas are transformed rapidly in build-up zones and consequently new peri-urban areas are generated around these new built areas from former rural ones. This process should be controlled by nature conservation plans and green belt legislations due to the fact that speed in land-cover change is associated with rapid shifts in biodiversity.

The application of a range of different planning processes and regulatory policies to protect these landscapes can lead us to keep track of evolution of multiple hypothetical scenarios. The analysis of the plausible implications of each of them can give support to experts and politicians to understand the driving forces of the system and elaborate guidelines to mitigate possible negative effects in biota and human beings.

Check out also: Maths and Statistic Seminars Blog

Maths seminars can be found here:
http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/research/maths/seminars.htm

Maths PhD seminars are on Fridays 3:15 PM

This weeks Psst! : Particle swarms categorizing documents, Dynamics of neural networks, and more

Thursday 10 Nov, 1:15PM, room: G45

Hamouda Khalifa H Chantar: Arabic Document Categorization using a combination of Binary Particle Swarm Optimization and K nearest neighbour.

Abstract—Document categorization is an important topic that is central to many applications that demand reasoning about and organisation of text documents, web pages, and so forth. Document classification is commonly achieved by choosing appropriate features (terms) and building a TFIDF document vector feature. In this process, feature selection is a key factor in determining the accuracy and effectiveness of resulting classifications. For a given classification task, the right choice of features means accurate classification with suitable levels of computational efficiency. Meanwhile, most document classification work is based on English language documents. In this work, we make three main contributions: (i) we demonstrate successful document classification in the context of Arabic documents (although previous work has demonstrated text classification in Arabic, the datasets used, and the experimental setup, have not been revealed); (ii) we offer our datasets to enable other researchers to compare directly with our results; (iii) we demonstrate a combination of Binary Particle Swarm Optimization and K nearest neighbour that performs well in selecting good sets of features for this task.

Gordon M Govan: Dynamics of neural networks with different motif distributions

In a network a 3-node motif is a group of three nodes linked together. The 3-node motif distribution indicates the percentages of 3-node motifs present in a network. We study the dynamics of Random Recurrent Neural Networks having two specific 3-node motif distributions. We find out that one of these motif distributions is more likely to have regular dynamics before any stimulus is applied and that few nodes need to be influenced in order to consistently have regular dynamics.

Majed Al-Saeed:TBA

This weeks Psst! : Rich Pictures solve information mess + P2P hosts an eCommerce shop.

Thursday 3 Nov, 1:15PM, room: G45

Tessa Berg: Art as a Form of Enquiry

Information systems drive us all bonkers! How many times are we left hanging on the phone, stuck waiting in queues, sent wrong information, billed incorrectly or told ‘the computer says.. no’. They affect all of us on a daily basis. Why then, in this amazing technical world we live in, do we keep failing to get systems right?
I will endeavour to unwrap this mystery in 10 minutes!! The rich picture will be introduced as an effective tool for knowledge elicitation. Come along and I will explain my research area, what I am doing, how I am doing it and most importantly why I believe it to be significant to systems.

Ahmad Hadinata Fauzi: Community Trust Stores for Peer-to-Peer e-Commerce Applications

E-commerce applications have evolved from web-based selling via the Internet to selling in a P2P manner. P2P can enhance e-commerce applications to create lower cost systems compared to conventional client-server systems. However, P2P e-commerce applications will only be acceptable to users if they can provide robust, secure and equitable services to the peers involved during commercial transactions. In this paper, we propose use of a P2P shared store for trust information to support community based e-commerce applications. Nowadays, it can be economical and cheap to implement either in the cloud or in a distributed manner over the platforms of participating peers. Usage of a cheap and secure community store for trust data provides an effective alternative to conventional trusted third party support services for e-commerce transactions.

Fraser Blackmun: An Ongoing/Temporary Perspective in Social Network Analysis

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a discipline that has explored people's networks of connections to one another for decades, using network-based measures and analytic techniques to identify and explain a social network's structure and properties. The modern rise of online social networking suggests a growing role for technology to mediate people's social connections. Looking ahead to the future, the concept of pervasive computing anticipates a world where technology is in a position to exploit real-world human interactions and bridge the physical/digital divide. New ways of thinking about social networks may be needed to help realise such a world, as well as to better understand the social world as it is now.

I am investigating a perspective in social network analysis that views any given social network as either 'Ongoing' or 'Temporary', which is the foundation of what I call the Ongoing/Temporary perspective. Mathematical models and assertion-based theories will be developed on Ongoing and Temporary networks that can work in harmony with traditional SNA methods to enrich analysis on any network. This perspective is intended to cast social networks in a new light, and to provide information about any given network's nature and likely future developments that would not necessarily be obvious using the SNA tools currently available.

Bamhdi, Alwi M: Mobile Ad Hoc Networks and Algorithms

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks have many applications, not least in 3rd world countries,disaster areas, and on the battlefield. There are many routing algorithms designed to effectively route packets through such networks. Our research is to investigate the effect of high density and high velocity on routing protocols by using NS2.

As ussual, the Google Calendar with all the Psst! dates is here:
http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=0tt13opsuigequfebur4e4dkac%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Europe/London

The beginning of Psst! seminars 2011-2012!

Dear CS Academics and PhD students
It is that time of the year when we start running our weekly Psst! seminars (PhD Students Short Talks).

Last year we had good (and constantly increasing) attendance. Seminars are usually fun and informative to attend, but remember that IT IS COMPULSORY TO ALL PHD STUDENTS TO GIVE ONE SUCH TALK EVERY YEAR.

FORMAT: as last year every speaker will have 15 minutes (including questions time), projector and laptop with ms PowerPoint will be provided. Seminars will happen in one of the lecture theatres. I will also bring tea and biscuits.

DATES: Below you can find the first version of the calendar (very likely to be changed). The most recent calendar is in the gDoc here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ano1xpvvLIiKdGpqbVlYbGlHaWtMOUU0b1UyX0Y0LWc&hl=en_US

WEEKDAY: last year we met on Thursdays 1:15PM, and if there will be no objections, we will continue meeting on Thursdays.

ORDER: as last year the 2nd year students will present first followed by everyone else. If you cannot present on a given date, please let me know as soon as you can.



++NOTICE TO ANYONE WHO WILL BE RUNNING STUDIES ANY TIME SOON:

++WE'VE BUILT A DIGITAL NOTICEBOARD TO ADVERTISE OUR STUDIES (bit.ly/noticeboard):
- over last few weeks we've build a digital noticeboard to advertise experiments to participants
- right now researchers can add studies, and students can sign up to email notifications.
- system is in beta testing, but we are planning to advertise it to students next week.

-if you are running a study, or about to run a study - please post it in the system
bit.ly/noticeboard



Pawel Orzechowski
CS PhD rep
bit.ly/noticeboard
bit.ly/pawelswebspace

Psst!5 Hamouda Chantar + Take a small part in organising seminars!

REWARDING JOB OPPORTUNITY (as I am leaving for few months)

this is a last seminar organised by me, at least for some time, as I am leaving for 2.5 months. I hope that seminars will continue uninterrupted, and that people of MACS will take some of my responsibilities in their own hands.
- There is a need for someone to take over sending emails
- and for someone to show up every time with a laptop and make sure that there is no chaos.

I am not sure if this could be maybe classified as lab helping, or other for an additional reward, but I guess you could try.

if you would be up for it, let me know soon

TODAY'S SPEAKER:

Hamouda Chantar - Document categorization

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Abstract—Document categorization is an important
topic that is central to many applications that demand
reasoning about and organisation of text documents,
web pages, and so forth. Document classification is
commonly achieved by choosing appropriate features
(terms) and building a TFIDF document vector feature.
In this process, feature selection is a key factor in
determining the accuracy and effectiveness of resulting
classifications. For a given classification task, the right
choice of features means accurate classification with
suitable levels of computational efficiency. Meanwhile,
most document classification work is based on English
language documents. In this work (paper) we make three main
contributions: (i) we demonstrate successful document
classification in the context of Arabic documents
(although previous work has demonstrated text
classification in Arabic, the datasets used, and the
experimental setup, have not been revealed); (ii) we
offer our datasets to enable other researchers to
compare directly with our results; (iii) we demonstrate
a combination of Binary Particle Swarm Optimization
and K nearest neighbour that performs well in selecting
good sets of features for this task.

Psst!4 - Thursday 31st April, 1:15 G.44

Govan, Gordon : Constructing Metabolic Networks from Mass Spectrometry Analysis

Metabolic networks are often constructed through a long process that involves inspecting the genetic material of the cell being analysed to find genes which correspond to metabolites.

Mass spectrometry analysis quickly separates and measures the masses of the chemicals within a cell. From this data we can construct a network and then we try to validate this model using graph analysis techniques.


Ritter, Christopher: Autonomous emotional agents

(TBA)
- building autonomous emotional agents (based on the FATIMA agent architecture)utilising traditional planning and emotional appraisal for better dialogues; including turn taking and more complex conversation models allowing for modelling simple opinion making/defence processes
- examine the utilisation of such agents in the Serious Games Approach (Socio-Critical/-Educational Games)

i am looking forward to seeing you all there,
as ussual tea, coffee and bisquits will be served
Pawel Orzechowski
MACS CS PhD rep

Event: Monday March 28th , 1:15, room 3.06 Psst! 3 PhD students' short talks 3: Marta Vallejo, Robert Stewart

Marta Vallejo: Computational approaches to Uncertainty in Scenario-based models of Climate Change Impacts

My PhD will try to fill the gap between local and global modelling approach by scaling up part of the current ecological models to a global perspective. From this global point of departure, the main focus of the project is the study of how policies, regulations and guidelines can modify the behaviour of the stakeholders involved in the use of landscape and subsequently infering the effects in the physical dynamics of the land cover.


Robert Stewart: Fault Tolerant Symbolic Computation in Exascale Distributed Systems

The past decade has seen distributed computing move into the realms of exascale, heterogeneous networked computer systems. This evolutionary progression has redefined the problems faced for parallel execution on dependable computational systems.

My PhD research is focused on adding fault tolerance at the software level, to satisfy the dependable requirements on such platforms. The ambition is that the outcomes of my PhD will contribute to the HPC-GAP project (High Performance Computational Algebra and Discrete Mathematics), providing a set of fault tolerant mechanisms to overcome hardware failure, byzantine failures, and unreliable heterogeneous topologies. There are a number of target platforms available for developing these mechanisms, including the HECToR cluster in Edinburgh: "The UK National Supercomputing Service", that will ultimately scale up to a million processor cores.

Event: Thursday March 10rd , 1:15, room G.44, Psst! 2 PhD students' short talks 2: Michael Kriegel, Andrew MacVeen, Allan Weallans

Michael Kriegel: Learning From Stories

The goal of computer scientists working on Interactive Storytelling is to create computer programs that can improvise stories in real time taking into account input from the audience. While many algorithms have been suggested and systems were designed, almost none of them has managed to convincingly improvise stories in practise. This can be in large parts attributed to the difficulty of capturing the knowledge about the story world that these algorithms need to perform. In this talk I am going to give an overview of my PhD work in which I am trying to solve this knowledge acquisition problem by automatically extracting a large portion of the required knowledge from a set of example stories set within the story world.

Andrew MacVeen: Task-Involved Versus Ego-Involved: Motivating Children to Exercise In a Pervasive Exergame

This talk presents current work on a pervasive health and fitness game (exergame), designed to motivate children to reach their recommended daily exercise goals and facilitate long term behavioural change. I discuss briefly the current work in the area of pervasive exergames and highlight a common theme in the approach they take. Through my study of the relevant psychology literature, I identify a potential problem in this approach - the goal context that the majority of systems adopt. I hypothesize that a 'Task-Involved' rather than an 'Ego- Involved' system would be more suitable at addressing the problem of sedentary childhood behaviour.

Allan Weallans: Distributed Drama Management: Dramatic Intelligence in Emergent Narrative

Abstract: Emergent Narrative is a character-based approach to interactive digital storytelling with the aim of diminishing the effect of the Narrative Paradox - the inversely proportional relationship between authorial control of the story and user freedom within the story. However, Emergent Narrative in its current state is highly simulative: characters will select courses of action that are believable within the context of the story and the character's own personality, but they are not guaranteed to select dramatically interesting actions, much less sequences of dramatically interesting actions occurring in a recognisable dramatic structure. Our work, DISTRIBUTED DRAMA MANAGEMENT, intends to build on existing Emergent Narrative work by incorporating "dramatic intelligence" into our character agents by monitoring the story's dramatic needs and giving agents the ability to co-ordinate and re-prioritise their characters' goals for dramatic purposes. In this way, we can retain the character believability and action contextualisation that are the strengths of Emergent Narrative while allowing the characters to be steered towards fulfilling given narrative concerns such as dramatic tension, structure and theme.

March 3rd,1:15, G.44: Psst! PhD students' short talks 1: Thomas Methven & Pawel Orzechowski

Psst! 1 will happen on March 3rd, 1:15, G.44

Thomas Methven: Does 3D Affect Gloss Perception?

When we look at a real surface, we see two types of disparity which
help us define what we're looking at. Both eyes get slightly different
views on the geometry, helping us see it in 3D. In addition, both eyes
see a slightly different pattern of gloss. How important are these two
types of disparity to the realism of the surface and how can we
manipulate them? In this talk, I will briefly cover my current PhD
work on this topic.

Pawel Orzechowski : Interactive mobile presentation of textiles.

While buying textile products using a handheld device, buyers face the perceptual gap between qualities they can perceive via the interface and those sensed when handling the real product. In this research I investigate the textile qualities naive shoppers look for and the gestures they use to handle fabrics. Finally, I use movement patterns to prototype mobile touch-screen interactive-video interfaces and communicate the desired qualities better.

Format of presentations: 10-15 minutes

About a week in advance I will require a title and abstract (one short paragraph) to distribute it to everyone.

- 10-15 minutes presentation
- You should talk about your own work, or some interesting branch of science that you might consider exploring
- Projector and laptop will be provided

Remember that the presentation should be accessible to people outside of your research area.

thank you
Pawel

kick off

Dear MACS CS students and staff

CALENDAR AND DATES

I am excited to begin this years PhD seminars, all the necessary details are on the website below (including calendar and instructions on how to subscribe to the calendar with gmail, iCal etc)

http://macscsphdseminars.blogspot.com/

MOVING DATES

I am also including first few weeks worth of dates. This Year we will begin with 2nd year students as they usually already have some presentations ready and it will be easier for them to go first. leter on we will have 1st years, who might get inspired by first group of presenters. Finally 3rd and onward years will be announced at a later date.

If you desire to change a date for whatever reason, just et me know.

TITLES AND ABSTRACTS

I will be emailing (and bothering if neccessery) people to give me title and abstracts of everybody's talk. Thanks to that we can encourage interested people to come.

I am looking forward to seeing you there,

PhD students rep, MACS CS
Pawel Ozeh Orzechowski

Preparations

To all Computer Science PhD students (CC: Computer Science Academics)

This email explains how we will approach weekly short talks of PhD students this year.

WHAT THIS IS ABOUT:
As most of you know every year each PhD student is expected to give a short 15 minute presentation about our research.

It is crucial that we know how to describe to a mixed audience (of people both from your are and not) what you are doing.
This is why this year we will start those PhD seminars around mid-February and we will be having 3 speakers on each Thursday afternoon.

Tea, coffee, and biscuits, will be provided.

This is a mandatory part of the training in research CS gives its PhD students and your participation is a requirement.

WHAT COULD BE IN YOUR PRESENTATION:
Most of us have some presentations laying around from a conference we've been to, or some progress review meeting. You can simply change that presentation to suit 15 minute format. If you not have any presentations at all, then probably you should make one, and this is a perfect opportunity for you.

Your supervisor will support you in doing this if you are not sure what to put into it.

WHAT WILL BE DIFFERENT THIS YEAR:
this year I will invite people who teach presenting to attend those seminars and give us some constructive useful feedback. These seminars will be also advertised on the Learning Zone (ex-crash area) Screens, so undergrads will be invited to attend.

SUGGESTIONS?
If you have any suggestions on how these seminars should be run, please let me know.
Maybe you would prefer the presentations to be grouped by topic? Or rather not?
Please have a think about what you will be presenting and if you have any date preferences.

Email with suggested dates will be distributed shortly.

Pawel Orzechowski
CS PhD rep