Thursday 2 Feb, 1:15, Room EM 3.03
Alzahrani, Mohammed: Model Checking Data-Sensitive and Time-Sensitive Web Applications
Modeling of web-based applications is fundamental to capture and understand their behaviour. As a verification technique, model checking can assist in finding design flaws and simplifying the design of a web application, as a result the quality and the security of web application can be improved. We use the model checker SPIN to simulate and verify essential security and navigation properties of web-based data-sensitive and time-sensitive application. We integrate discrete time in Promela (SPIN's input language) model to allow us represent realistic web applications properties and track sequence of actions in a secure model and in the present of a malicious behaviour. We discuss a comparison between the tools SPIN and UPPAAL in modelling and verfiying web applications
Suttie, Neil: Serious Games:Maintaining Engagement in Learning Through Game-play
Serious Games and intelligent pedagogical systems offer the potential for providing effective and engaging learning experiences tailored to the need of the individual student. They can present a promising means of enhancing problem solving, analytical thinking, decision making and other skills not easily learned in the class room setting.
Essential for the advancement of Serious Games is careful balancing of educational and ludic content. However, there is little understanding of how educational outcomes relate to game-play and concern that greater engagement in gameplay elements may even prove diversionary to the learning process. Therefore, It is necessary to develop a clear understanding of the relationship between game-play, player engagement and how these relate to relevant educational strategies. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges, possible solutions and work conducted thus far in linking learning and serious games through their implemented mechanics.
Methven, Tom: Does Stereopsis Affect Gloss Perception?
Over the past 20 years, there have been many studies looking at how highlight disparity affects an observer's perception of glossiness. Most of these studies have used relatively smooth surfaces, and simple lighting models, meaning their results might not account for all the
complex interactions of lighting and stereopsis with real surfaces. In this talk, I present the results of a pilot experiment designed to look into this problem. These results seem to imply that the relationship between gloss perception, highlight disparity and roughness is more complex than previously reported. In addition, I talk about future work designed to solve problems encountered with the pilot experiment.
Orzechowski, Pawel: Touch-screen Textile Simulators.
Consumers like to touch and deform fabrics that they are about to buy, but currently available devices do not provide the touch and feel modality. iShoogle is a textile simulator for iPad that uses movements natural in handling clothes (crunching, pulling, pinching, etc.) to interact with on-screen movies of fabrics being deformed (crunched, pulled, pinched etc.). Experiments were carried out to determine if the added interactivity afforded by iShoogle could help to describe textile qualities and thus aid in the creation of next generation digital swatches.
Monday 30 January 2012
Thursday 26 January 2012
New Room for Psst! (and changing almost every other week)
Thursday 1.15-3.15
EM 3.03 for 26/1, 2/2, 9/2, 16/2, 23/2
EM 3.06 for 1/3, 8/3, 15/3, 22/3, 29/3
EM 3.03 for 26/1, 2/2, 9/2, 16/2, 23/2
EM 3.06 for 1/3, 8/3, 15/3, 22/3, 29/3
Monday 23 January 2012
Psst! 26 Jan: Macvean, Andrew@Adaptive exergames; Totoo, Prabhat@Haskel and n-body problems; Weallans, Allan@Distributed drama management
Thursday 26 Jan, 1:15, Room G45 or G46 [notice will be displayed on the door]
Macvean, Andrew: Designing Adaptive Exergames for Adolescent Children: Lessons Learned from A Preliminary Study
With evermore children in the Western world adopting a sedentary lifestyle, there is an increased emphasis towards physical activity interventions. Thanks to progressions in ubiquitous technologies, exergames, games that facilitate and encourage exercise, have emerged as a potential means to motivate children to exercise in a context they find both familiar and enjoyable. While early research has shown the potential of the genre, few games have been designed specifically with children in mind, accommodating their unique demands. In our work, we aim to close this gap by investigating how children react to, and make use of an exergame designed specifically with them in mind. The aim is to understand how different demographics of children (gender, gaming background, exercise background, etc) react to a location-aware exergame, in order to in the future build more accurate adaptive exergames, suitable for the specific requirements of children users. In this talk we present the first step towards this, the results of a preliminary study on our location-aware exergame - iFitQuest. Our results show early insight into how different users react to our game, and provide lessons on how to approach the design task.
Totoo, Prabhat: Parallel Haskell implementations of the n-body problem
The n-body problem is a problem of predicting the motion of a system of N bodies that interact with each other gravitationally. N-body algorithms are used in several areas such as molecular dynamics, astrophysics.
Several methods exist to solve the problem including bruteforce body-to-body comparison and the more sophisticated Barnes-Hut algorithm. We look at multicore implementations of the problem for simulation consisting of huge input. The implementations cover the use of 3 different parallel programming models in Haskell: GpH, Par monad and Eden. The performance of these models are compared in terms of changes required to the sequential algorithms and runtime/speedup.
Weallans, Allan: DISTRIBUTED DRAMA MANAGEMENT: BEYOND DOUBLE APPRAISAL IN EMERGENT DRAMA
Emergent drama relies on the autonomous actions of AI character agents. While this has many advantages over a more directorial approach, it is not guaranteed to favour dramatically interesting actions or a "story-like" structure. Using affective impact as a surrogate for drama, Double Appraisal was a step towards encouraging dramatic events in autonomous agents. This talk will briefly outline the limitations of Double Appraisal as implemented, and discuss how Distributed Drama Management builds on the Double Appraisal work to help to produce more structured and dramatically interesting narrative experiences while retaining the autonomy of the agents and the benefits associated therewith.
Macvean, Andrew: Designing Adaptive Exergames for Adolescent Children: Lessons Learned from A Preliminary Study
With evermore children in the Western world adopting a sedentary lifestyle, there is an increased emphasis towards physical activity interventions. Thanks to progressions in ubiquitous technologies, exergames, games that facilitate and encourage exercise, have emerged as a potential means to motivate children to exercise in a context they find both familiar and enjoyable. While early research has shown the potential of the genre, few games have been designed specifically with children in mind, accommodating their unique demands. In our work, we aim to close this gap by investigating how children react to, and make use of an exergame designed specifically with them in mind. The aim is to understand how different demographics of children (gender, gaming background, exercise background, etc) react to a location-aware exergame, in order to in the future build more accurate adaptive exergames, suitable for the specific requirements of children users. In this talk we present the first step towards this, the results of a preliminary study on our location-aware exergame - iFitQuest. Our results show early insight into how different users react to our game, and provide lessons on how to approach the design task.
Totoo, Prabhat: Parallel Haskell implementations of the n-body problem
The n-body problem is a problem of predicting the motion of a system of N bodies that interact with each other gravitationally. N-body algorithms are used in several areas such as molecular dynamics, astrophysics.
Several methods exist to solve the problem including bruteforce body-to-body comparison and the more sophisticated Barnes-Hut algorithm. We look at multicore implementations of the problem for simulation consisting of huge input. The implementations cover the use of 3 different parallel programming models in Haskell: GpH, Par monad and Eden. The performance of these models are compared in terms of changes required to the sequential algorithms and runtime/speedup.
Weallans, Allan: DISTRIBUTED DRAMA MANAGEMENT: BEYOND DOUBLE APPRAISAL IN EMERGENT DRAMA
Emergent drama relies on the autonomous actions of AI character agents. While this has many advantages over a more directorial approach, it is not guaranteed to favour dramatically interesting actions or a "story-like" structure. Using affective impact as a surrogate for drama, Double Appraisal was a step towards encouraging dramatic events in autonomous agents. This talk will briefly outline the limitations of Double Appraisal as implemented, and discuss how Distributed Drama Management builds on the Double Appraisal work to help to produce more structured and dramatically interesting narrative experiences while retaining the autonomy of the agents and the benefits associated therewith.
Wednesday 18 January 2012
19 January - Psst! cancelled
There might have been an error in the list of PhD students or those students have already finished their studies since I did not get any response from Amol Deshmukh, Neil Suttie, Prabhat Totoo who were supposed to present on the 19th.
Next Psst is on the next Thursday, the 26th Jan.
Next Psst is on the next Thursday, the 26th Jan.
Tuesday 10 January 2012
Psst! 12Jan: Rob Stewart @ Achieving fault tolerance in high performance computing& David Robb @Visual Co-design via Crowd-sourcing&Christoph Strassma
Thursday 12 Jan, 1:15PM-2PM, room: G45
Rob Stewart:
Achieving fault tolerance in high performance computing applications
The applicability of Moore's law, for single core CPUs at least, is all but retired for modern computing systems. There's no such thing as a free lunch, for software engineers riding the wave of increasing CPU clock speeds - so instead, paradigms and skeletons for encapsulating *parallel* evaluation is needed. My PhD focuses on distributed-shared memory architectures - that is, a large number of connected multicore machines, evaluating programs in parts, as parallel skeletons permit. As the number of utilized compute nodes increases, failures per unit remains constant. So there is no free lunch, either, for those software engineers who want to run long running complex programs, on large compute platforms, and expect to ever get a result they'd hope for - or indeed to get a result at all.
The contribution of my PhD is to borrow well defined fault tolerant behaviours and techniques from successful languages such as Erlang, and to build these into a shallow embedded language in Haskell. My ambition is to implement fault tolerance in a distributed parallel Haskell, exposing fault tolerant skeletons and supervision behaviours, to enable Haskell to run wild as a successful dependable language on high performance computing platforms.
David Robb
Crowds: Visual Co-design via Rich Crowd-sourcing
This project aims to connect designers to thousands of potential customers and :
- enable crowds to provide emotive feedback in a visual language
- give crowds a sense of ownership of the design process and provide enthusiastic target markets
- significantly reduce time-to-market and the risks of producing unwanted product
Problems to be investigated and overcome include capturing meaningful visual feedback via an Internet application,
and the distillation or summary of the visual feedback for the designer whilst preserving its meaning.
Christoph Strassmair
[tba]
Rob Stewart:
Achieving fault tolerance in high performance computing applications
The applicability of Moore's law, for single core CPUs at least, is all but retired for modern computing systems. There's no such thing as a free lunch, for software engineers riding the wave of increasing CPU clock speeds - so instead, paradigms and skeletons for encapsulating *parallel* evaluation is needed. My PhD focuses on distributed-shared memory architectures - that is, a large number of connected multicore machines, evaluating programs in parts, as parallel skeletons permit. As the number of utilized compute nodes increases, failures per unit remains constant. So there is no free lunch, either, for those software engineers who want to run long running complex programs, on large compute platforms, and expect to ever get a result they'd hope for - or indeed to get a result at all.
The contribution of my PhD is to borrow well defined fault tolerant behaviours and techniques from successful languages such as Erlang, and to build these into a shallow embedded language in Haskell. My ambition is to implement fault tolerance in a distributed parallel Haskell, exposing fault tolerant skeletons and supervision behaviours, to enable Haskell to run wild as a successful dependable language on high performance computing platforms.
David Robb
Crowds: Visual Co-design via Rich Crowd-sourcing
This project aims to connect designers to thousands of potential customers and :
- enable crowds to provide emotive feedback in a visual language
- give crowds a sense of ownership of the design process and provide enthusiastic target markets
- significantly reduce time-to-market and the risks of producing unwanted product
Problems to be investigated and overcome include capturing meaningful visual feedback via an Internet application,
and the distillation or summary of the visual feedback for the designer whilst preserving its meaning.
Christoph Strassmair
[tba]
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