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School of CS newsletter
Published: Tuesday, 25 June 2019Weekly newsletter for the School of CS
[ top ]News from Head of School
[ top ]Events
Atlas Lecture 4/07/2019 Kilburn L.T 1.4 14:00
Atlas Lecture 4/07/2019 Kilburn L.T 1.4 14:00
Speaker: Nicolas Matentzoglu
Host: Ulrike Sattler
The Unified Phenotype Ontology (uPheno) framework for standardised representation of phenotypes across domains
The Monarch Initiative is an international consortium to integrate, align, and re-distribute cross-species gene, genotype, variant, disease, and phenotype data and is best known for its flagship projects, the Human Phenotype Ontology, the Unified Phenotype Ontology (uPheno) and the disease variant prioritisation tool Exomiser. The uPheno project in particular aims to unify the annotation of phenotypes across domains in a manner analogous to the unification of gene function annotation by the Gene Ontology. uPheno 2.0 builds on earlier efforts with a new strategy that directly leverages the work of the phenotype ontology development community and incorporates phenotypes from a much wider range of domains. We have organised a collaborative community effort, including representatives of all major model organism databases, to document and align formal design patterns for representing phenotypes and further develop reference ontologies, such as PATO, which are used in these patterns. A common development infrastructure makes it easy to use these design patterns to generate both domain-specific ontologies and a domain-independent layer that subsumes them.
The resulting community-curated ontology for the representation and integration of phenotypes across domains serves two general purposes:
Providing a community-developed framework for ontology editors to bootstrap, maintain and extend their phenotype ontologies in a scalable and standardised manner.
Facilitating the retrieval and comparative analysis of domain-specific phenotypes through a deep layer of domain-independent phenotypes.
Here we present the general uPheno 2.0 framework, in particular how we leverage OWL, definition-oriented development, reasoning, semantic similarity and pattern-based development to integrate phenotypes across domains.
Biography:
Nico finished his PhD on OWL reasoning and modularity in 2015 in the school of computer science, supervised by Bijan Parsia and Uli Sattler. Since then, he has completed two postdocs with Bijan and Robert Stevens, in areas involving clinical information systems, ontology-based question generation and ontology engineering methodologies. In January 2018, he joined the Samples, Phenotypes and Ontologies team (SPOT) at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), charged with coordinating an international effort to reconcile phenotype ontologies to enable cross-domain inference. His current and favourite projects are developing resilient ontology engineering systems, evangelizing the use of OWL in knowledge-based systems, the Parsia Design Triangle (Q30) and inter-disciplinary collaborative ontology engineering.
Karon Mee
Atlas Lecture 05/07/2019 Kilburn L.T 1.4 14:00
Atlas Lecture Friday 5th July 2019 in Kilburn L.T 1.4 at 2pm
Speaker: Professor Rajkumar Buyya
Host: Rizos Sakellariou
New Frontiers in Cloud and Edge/Fog Computing for Big Data & Internet-of-Things Applications
Prof. Rajkumar Buyya
Director, Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Lab, The University of Melbourne, Australia
CEO, Manjrasoft Pvt Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
ABSTRACT
Computing is being transformed to a model consisting of services that are commoditised and delivered in a manner similar to utilities such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. Several computing paradigms have promised to deliver this utility computing vision. Cloud computing paradigm has turned this vision of "computing utilities" into a reality. It offers infrastructure, platform, and software (application) as services, which are made available as subscription-based services in a pay-as-you-go model to consumers. Cloud application platforms need to offer (1) APIs and tools for rapid creation of elastic applications and (2) a runtime system for deployment of applications on geographically distributed computing infrastructure in a seamless manner.
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm enables seamless integration of cyber-and-physical worlds and opening up opportunities for creating new class of applications for domains such as smart cities. The emerging Fog computing paradigm is extends Cloud computing model to edge resources for latency sensitive IoT applications. This presentation will cover (a) 21st century vision of computing and identifies various IT paradigms promising to deliver the vision of computing utilities; (b) innovative architecture for creating elastic Clouds integrating edge resources and managed Clouds, (c) Aneka, a Cloud Application Platform, for rapid development of Cloud/Big Data applications and their deployment on private/public Clouds with resource provisioning driven by SLAs, (d) a novel FogBus software framework with Blockchain-based data-integrity management for facilitating end-to-end IoT-Fog(Edge)-Cloud integration for execution of sensitive IoT applications, (e) experimental results on deploying Cloud and Big Data/Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications in engineering, and health care, satellite image processing, and smart cities on elastic Clouds; and (f) directions for delivering our 21st century vision along with pathways for future research in Cloud and Fog computing.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Rajkumar Buyya is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Director of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also serving as the founding CEO of Manjrasoft, a spin-off company of the University, commercializing its innovations in Cloud Computing. He has authored over 650 publications and seven text books including "Mastering Cloud Computing" published by McGraw Hill, China Machine Press, and Morgan Kaufmann for Indian, Chinese and international markets respectively.
Dr. Buyya is one of the highly cited authors in computer science and software engineering worldwide (h-index=127, g-index=275, 82,600+ citations). "A Scientometric Analysis of Cloud Computing Literature" by German scientists ranked Dr. Buyya as the World's Top-Cited (#1) Author and the World's Most-Productive (#1) Author in Cloud Computing. He is named in the recent Clarivate Analytics’ (formerly Thomson Reuters) Highly Cited Researchers and ?World's Most Influential Scientific Minds? for three consecutive years since 2016. Dr. Buyya is recognized as Scopus Researcher of the Year 2017 with Excellence in Innovative Research Award by Elsevier and recently received "Lifetime Achievement Awards" from two Indian universities for his outstanding contributions to Cloud computing and distributed systems.
Software technologies for Grid, Cloud, and Fog computing developed under Dr.Buyya's leadership have gained rapid acceptance and are in use at several academic institutions and commercial enterprises in 40 countries around the world. Dr. Buyya has led the establishment and development of key community activities, including serving as foundation Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing and five IEEE/ACM conferences. These contributions and international research leadership of Dr. Buyya are recognized through the award of "2009 IEEE Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing" from the IEEE Computer Society TCSC. Manjrasoft's Aneka Cloud technology developed under his leadership has received "Frost & Sullivan New Product Innovation Award". He served as founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He is currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of Software: Practice and Experience, a long standing journal in the field established ~50 years ago. For further information on Dr.Buyya, please visit his cyberhome:
[ top ]PSS News
Goodbye HoSA, hello Deputy School Ops Manager
Thursday 28 June is sadly my last day here as your HoSA. I have learnt so much here with you over the last year and am truly grateful for how welcoming everyone has been. I hope some of you will be able to join me for a brief 'farewell' gathering at 3.30pm in the PGR common room this Thursday afternoon.
Continuing daily operations:
As you are aware, the HoSA role is not being replaced, but its duties are being split across several roles. The core day to day operations (such as HR/staffing, authorised signatures, budgeting oversight, monitoring of compliance activities, etc) will be overseen by Michelle Fox, our Deputy School Operations Manager. Michelle will work in tandem with the new School Operations Manager for Engineering (Rachael Ashworth) and Head of School Operations for Engineering (Sarah Mulholland).
Michelle has previously worked across the University in various Teaching & Learning roles and prior to working at the University, managed various projects involving lots of operational management. Michelle will become Lynn Howarth's new line manager in lieu of myself (ACSO still report into Lynn as they do currently) and will be based in my current office (2.7) from the start of July.
Wider responsibilities:
The wider aspects of the current HoSA role will be managed by a set of colleagues based across the Department and School of Engineering. Members of the PS Management team that previously were line managed by myself, are still based here in the Department but have a change of line management responsibility to either the School or Faculty. The following colleagues are your first point of contact for related matters and will escalate any issues as may be needed:
- Admissions: Becki Harrington (Admissions and Intake Team Lead for the School of Engineering)
- Teaching and Learning: Hannah Cousins (T&L Manager)
- Research Support: Melanie Macrae (Research Support Manager)
- H&S, building and environment: Tony McDonald (H&S and Environment Manager)
- IT and technical: Chris Page (Technical Operations Manager)
New task leads - full reference:
A complete set of the main aspects of the current HoSA role and who will be the lead contact for these activities going forwards, is detailed in the matrix available on StaffNet.
Please do drop me a line over the coming days if anything is unclear.
Best wishes,
Kim.Kim Graakjaer
New shared R&A Manager - welcome Helen Harper
I am delighted to confirm that Helen Harper from the School of Maths, will be joining us from Monday 15 July as our Recruitment and Admissions Manager for the next 18 months. This is a 50% shared role between ourselves and the School of Maths.
With the introduction of the new Admissions and Intake Team Lead role at the new School level, this shared R&A Manager model is also coming into practice across other Departments, supported by the Admissions and Intake Team Lead for Engineering. (For the School of Engineering, this is Becki Harrington).
Helen’s core focus when with us will be to manage and support our R&A team and oversee our strategic activities (number planning, tuition fee setting, etc) in conjunction with Becki. Helen will be the key contact for senior academic admissions colleagues.
I’m sure you will all join me in welcoming Helen, who brings many years of experience and I’m sure will settle in well with our team.
Ruth Maddocks
