School of CS newsletter

The REF away day is on 10 april in the Dalton room at UMIC. There is a registration page here. Plese sign up using this Eventbrite page, which also contains details, including an agenda.

Welcome to Peter Lammich, who joined the FM Group on 1 March. He gained his computer science diploma at TU Dortmund (Germany), his PhD at WWU Muenster (Germany), and then worked as a post-doc in the group of Prof. Nipkow at TU Munich.

His main research interest is the design of efficient verified software by top-down refinement. For this he’s using the theorem prover Isabelle/HOL, for which he has developed the Isabelle Refinement Framework and the Isabelle Collection Framework.  These have been applied to verify functional correctness of model checkers, SAT-solvers, and various graph and automata algorithms.

Currently, he’s working on an LLVM backend for the Refinement Framework, to get more efficient programs than with the current Standard ML backend.  He’s also interested in verifying information flow security of web applications. We have verified non-interference properties for a prototype conference management system. Currently, he’s working to extend this to use (relational) databases.

His office is Kilburn 2.36

When you think of scientists and engineers, the image that often comes to mind is that of people in labs, factories and offices, poring over paperwork, mixing things in test tubes or peering into microscopes. And yet, in reality, science and engineering are among the most thrilling, diverse and rewarding careers on offer – allowing you to get back in touch with the uninhibited creativity of your inner child and really make a difference to the world around you.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at Intu Trafford Centre last weekend. There was the palaeontologist pretending to be a T-rex while inviting a young visitor to charge her with a triceratops horn; the pair of nuclear physicists coming up the stairs dressed as bananas (although not dressed in pyjamas); the computer scientist who had to listen to Gangnam Style over and over while a small robot danced. Every ScienceX volunteer went the distance to show there’s more to a life of science and engineering than lab coats.

Lucas Cordeiro coordinated a team from the School introducing its robots to the public at this ScienceX festival, one of the most important events about Science and Engineering in Manchester. A huge thankyou to Lucas and to his team of volunteers who demonstrated games (magical forest, sorting pancakes), micro-controller programming with Arduino, path planning with drones, and cognitive learning for robots. 

More Information

Flexible & Transparent Data Reuse

• Speaker:   Prof  Paul Groth  (University of Amsterdam)

• Host:   Carole Goble

• 3rd April 2019 at 14:00 in KB L.T 1.4

A central challenge in our modern information environment is how to use, integrate and repurpose data that stem from a multitude of diverse sources. Within data science, ~60-70% of the time is spent gathering, preparing, integrating, and munging data. In science, there is, for instance, the need to know which of the thousands of prior experimental records are reliable, applicable and can be reused for an experiment. In this talk, I discuss the goal of developing intelligent systems that work with people to combine and reuse data flexibly, reproducibly and transparently. I give examples from my work on flexible knowledge graph construction and taxonomy creation. I then discuss interoperable data provenance tracking to provide transparency for these sort of complex data workflows. I outline a future for using transparency to create more flexible, intelligently supported data integration and reuse environments.

Biography

Paul Groth is Professor of Algorithmic Data Science at the University of Amsterdam where he leads the Intelligent Data Engineering Lab (INDElab). His research focuses on intelligent systems for dealing with large amounts of diverse contextualized knowledge with a particular focus on web and science applications. Previously Paul led the design of a number of large scale data integration and knowledge graph construction efforts in the biomedical domain. Paul was co-chair of the W3C Provenance Working Group that created a standard for provenance interchange. He has also contributed to the emergence of community initiatives to build a better scholarly ecosystem including altmetrics and the FAIR data principles.

More info: http://pgroth.com

Article published in Nature - Angelo Cangelosi

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-019-0034-3?fbclid=IwAR3Or8TpyKhgkZxOITKcdxaDSQDGu4dAys5rTUBphGpNUTvoO5zxtqObTl8

All Nature Machine Intelligence articles are supposed to remain publicly available through 2019. For view-only link that should remain available after that below:

https://rdcu.be/bqpGa

Our fabulous technician Anne is asking for support raising money for the Alzheimer's Society. Her husband Bashir is undertaking the Manchester 10K this year for this invaluable cause. If you can donate or wish to sponsor him we have a sponsorship form in ACSO.

Applications to access the University's 10,000 Actions fund are now being accepted.

£10,000 funding has been established to support activities and initiatives that enhance environmental sustainability across the University and is available until Friday, 22 March 2019. The total fund value is £10,000, with up to £2,500 is available per activity.

This funding opportunity offers a great chance to support a Green Impact Project Plus. If you are in need of inspiration visit here for projects previously awarded with funding. 

For further information and to find out how to take part please visit: http://www.sustainability.manchester.ac.uk/get-involved/staff/10000actions/fund/ 

If you have any questions or would like to discuss some ideas please feel free to contact 10000 actions