School of CS newsletter

The kitchens have been left in a parlous state, especially the kitchen in the common room in the Kilburn building, but also the ones on the second floor of the Kilburn Building and the one in the IT Building. Cleaning the kitchens is not part of house services duties and we are now paying from the School budget to have them cleaned one hour per week. Please be mindful the kitchens are a shared facility and use the cleaning materials provided to clean up after yourself – don’t just leave this for someone else to do. If the kitchen facilities continue to be abused then we will have to limit access to see if this resolves the problem.

Robert

A warm welcome to Jake Latham who joined the School on 20th June as Postgraduate Admissions Assistant, replacing Shazia Dar who left in April. Jake joins us from the Whitworth Art Gallery. He can be contacted at jake.latham@manchester.ac.uk

Event: 18 Jul 2017

http://www.datascience.manchester.ac.uk/about/what-we-do/advanced-data-analytics-seminars/

Leading researchers present their recent advances in Machine Learning and Computational Statistics. Advanced Data Analytics Seminars take place at The Kanaris Lecture Theatre (Manchester Museum) between 14:00 - 15:00 on the given date (unless otherwise stated). This will be followed by a tea, coffee & refreshments served in the foyer.  

Congratulations to Amanieu d'Antras who has received a Distinguished Paper Award in PLDI 2017 for the paper:

Low Overhead Dynamic Binary Translation on ARM
Amanieu d'Antras, Cosmin Gorgovan, Jim Garside, Mikel Lujan

https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files/56078084/pldi_16.pdf or https://doi.org/10.1145/3062341.3062371

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new article in the Journal of Bioinformatics, which proposes a new semi-supervised method that is able to automatically assist systematic reviewers in identifying citations that are most relevant to an underlying research question.

Kontonatsios, G., Brockmeier, A. J., Przybyła, P., McNaught, J., Mu, T., Goulermas, J. Y and Ananiadou, S. (2017). A semi-supervised approach using label propagation to support citation screening. Journal of Biomedical Informatics

Abstract:

Citation screening, an integral process within systematic reviews that identifies citations relevant to the underlying research question, is a time-consuming and resource-intensive task. During the screening task, analysts manually assign a label to each citation, to designate whether a citation is eligible for inclusion in the review. Recently, several studies have explored the use of active learning in text classification to reduce the human workload involved in the screening task. However, existing approaches require a significant amount of manually labelled citations for the text classification to achieve a robust performance. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised method that identifies relevant citations as early as possible in the screening process by exploiting the pairwise similarities between labelled and unlabelled citations to improve the classification performance without additional manual labelling effort. Our approach is based on the hypothesis that similar citations share the same label (e.g., if one citation should be included, then other similar citations should be included also). To calculate the similarity between labelled and unlabelled citations we investigate two different feature spaces, namely a bag-of-words and a spectral embedding based on the bag-of-words. The semi-supervised method propagates the classification codes of manually labelled citations to neighbouring unlabelled citations in the feature space. The automatically labelled citations are combined with the manually labelled citations to form an augmented training set. For evaluation purposes, we apply our method to reviews from clinical and public health. The results show that our semi-supervised method with label propagation achieves statistically significant improvements over two state-of-the-art active learning approaches across both clinical and public health reviews.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1532046417301454

Thanks to academic sponsorship from Simon Harper and support from the Head of School, Stephen Rhodes and I will be fitting out meeting room 2.33 with audio and video conferencing equipment. We will let all know when it is ready for use. There will be no need to book it separately, just booking the room will give you full access to the service.

Early tests of the equipment with Skype group video conferencing calls were successful. Please let me know what other conferencing applications you would like installing (e.g. Zoom).

We do need some assistance from Estates and so we can't predict exactly when this new facility will become available.