Department of Computer Science and Information Systems

Research Seminars

The department hosts a programme of research seminars by invited speakers and departmental staff. The seminars are open to all. The following seminars will be taking place at the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems (DCSIS), Birkbeck College, or London Knowledge Lab (LKL), Birkbeck College and Institute of Education.

If you are interested in presenting a seminar please contact

• External seminars
• Seminars from previous years

Academic Year 2014/15

Abstracts

A Calculus for Topological Quantum Computation

Dr. Alessandra Di Pierro, Department of Computer Science, University of Verona.

Room 151, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 21st of January 2014, from 16:00 to 17:00

Recent developments in theoretical physics have highlighted interesting topological features of some particular two-dimensional entities called anyons. The idea of using these features to realise robust quantum computation has introduced the study of the new paradigm of Topological Quantum Computation (TQC). The mathematics and physics of anyons is currently subject to intense investigations in all areas related to the study of quantum computation from both the foundational and the implementation viewpoint. In this talk I will take a computer science viewpoint of TQC by presenting a formal calculus whose syntax and reduction relation are able to capture the essential computational mechanism of the anyons manipulation in TQC.

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Is Immersion in E-learning possible?

LKL Seminar - Dr. Alexandra Cristea, Department Of Computer Science, Warwick University.

Room 151, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 17th of December 2014, from 13:00 to 14:00

In e-learning, immersion is a concept based on the psychological concept of flow: learners 'are so engaged in learning, that time and fatigue disappear'. We mostly know this experience from online and offline games. The challenge is to create e-learning offers that can lead to a similar intense involvement. This seems to be an impossible challenge for educational software, and thus represents almost a holy grail for online education. This is especially relevant now, with the rising of MOOCs, such as Corsera in the US and FutureLearn in Europe, backed up strongly, in a top-down fashion, by current politicians, but which suffer greatly from extremely high dropout rates. This talk will explore e-learning methods and tools which attempt to address this ultimate goal, and especially look at recent, state of the art research products.

Bio: Dr. Cristea is Associate Professor (Reader) and Head of the Intelligent and Adaptive Systems research group at Warwick University. Her research includes user modelling, personalisation, semantic & social web, authoring (over 200 papers, over 2600 citations on Google Scholar). She is ranked within first 50 researchers in Computer Education by Microsoft Academic. She has led various projects - EU Minerva projects ALS (06-09), ADAPT ('02-'05); Warwick-funded project APLIC (11-12) and been a partner in BLOGFOREVER ('11-'13), GRAPPLE ('08-'11), PROLEARN ('07), (BBC-featured) Assistance Technologies ('13-'15) . She has been organizer of workshops, co-organizer, panelist and program committee member of various conferences in her research field (including, for example, UMAP, ED-MEDIA, Hypertext, Adaptive Hypermedia, ICCE, ICAI). She has given invited talks in various countries She acted as UNESCO expert (Ministry of Education and Educational institutes), as well as EU expert for FP6, FP7, eContentPlus. She is a BCS fellow, and an IEEE and IEEE CS member.

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Succinctness in Knowledge Representation

Dr. Simone Bova, Institute of Information Systems, Vienna University of Technology.

Room 151, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 10th of December 2014, from 16:00 to 17:00

The aim of knowledge compilation is to succinctly represent propositional knowledge bases in a format that allows for answering a number of queries in polynomial time. Choosing a representation language generally involves a trade-off between succinctness and the range of queries that can be efficiently answered. For instance, conjunctive normal form formulas (CNFs) are more succinct than prime implicate formulas, but the latter representation enjoys clause entailment checks in polynomial time whereas CNFs in general do not (unless P=NP). In seminal work, motivated by the need to balance the competing requirements of succinctness and tractability, Darwiche and Marquis systematically investigate a hierarchy of representation languages that strike this balance in different ways. However, the current knowledge on how such languages relate to each other in terms of succinctness is still partial. For certain pairs of languages the succinctness relation is unknown, or only conditionally known (some classes of Boolean functions have a superpolynomial increase in the size of their representations in translating from one language to the other, unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses). In this talk, we summarize the current knowledge on the succinctness relation, discuss recent results improving it, and pose questions for future research.

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How do we know that our system is correct?

Dr. Hana Chokler, Department of Informatics, Kings College London.

Room 151, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 3rd of December 2014, from 16:30 to 17:30

A negative answer from the model-checking procedure is accompanied by a counterexample - a trace demonstrating what went wrong. On the other hand, when the answer from the model-checker is positive, usually no further information is given. The issue of "suspecting the positive answer" first arose in industry, where positive answers from model-checkers often concealed serious bugs in hardware designs. In this talk, I will discuss the different reasons why the positive answer from the model-checker requires further investigation and present algorithms for such investigation, called "sanity checks" for formal verification.

I will also (briefly) introduce the theory of causality and counterfactual reasoning and its applications to model-checking, mostly in the context of the subject of this talk, including some recent complexity results for structure-based causality.

I will define the main goal (in my opinion) of the sanity checks, explanations, and related algorithms, and will outline promising future directions.

The talk is based on many papers written by many people, and is not limited to my own research.

The talk is reasonably self-contained.

Short bio:

Dr. Hana Chockler is a Lecturer in the Department of Informatics, King's College London. Before joining King's College in 2013, Hana worked as a Research Staff Member at IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa, in the formal verification group. Her research interests include formal verification of hardware and software, sanity checks for model checking, automatic generation of specifications, explanation of counterexamples, connections between concepts in AI and formal verification, and integration of testing and formal methods, in particular, using combinatorial optimisation, to find bugs.

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Computer Science Research to Support the Residential Care of Older People with Dementia

LKL Seminar - Professor Neil Maiden, City University London.

Room 151, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 26th of November 2014, from 14:00 to 15:00

Caring for older people with dementia has become a strategic national challenge, yet it continues to be afforded low social status, and has high staff turnover and numbers of inexperienced carers. Increasing the quality of care given in such constraining environments has become a pressing issue, and digital technologies have capabilities to support the delivery of increased care quality at reasonable cost. However, there has been little computer science research dedicated to support delivery of this care. In particular, digital technologies can be applied to support person-centred care, a paradigm that seeks an individualised approach and recognises the uniqueness of each resident and understanding the world from the perspective of the person with dementia. This seminar will report recent research that has developed computerised support for two tasks to deliver person-centred care - creativity and reflective learning. It will report the development of new descriptive models of creative thinking and reflection in care that informed technology development, then describe three new software solutions to support creative thinking and reflection learning by carers for people with dementia: (i) technology-based serious games to train care staff in person-centred care techniques; (ii) digital life history apps that provide interactive support for reflective learning and creative thinking about daily resident care, and; (iii) a new mobile app to provide creative support for resolving challenging behaviours. Each app will be presented, and results from evaluations of each in different care settings will be summarised.

Bio: Neil Maiden is Professor of Systems Engineering at City University London. He is and has been a principal and co-investigator on numerous EPSRC- and EU-funded research projects with a total value of £30million. He has published over 160 peer-reviewed papers in academic journals, conferences and workshops proceedings. He was Program Chair for the 12th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering in Kyoto in 2004, and was Editor of the IEEE Software’s Requirements column from 2005 to 2013. Since 2010 he has been leading computing research dedicated to support the residential care of older people with dementia.

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Towards Anticipatory Mobile Computing: Challenges and Opportunities

Dr. Mirco Musolesi, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham.

Room 151, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 29th of October 2014, from 16:30 to 17:30

Mobile phones are increasingly equipped with sensors, such as accelerometers, GPS receivers, proximity sensors and cameras, which can be used to sense and interpret people behaviour in real-time. Novel user-centered sensing applications can be built by exploiting the availability of these technologies. Moreover, data extracted from the sensors can also be used to model and predict people behaviour and movement patterns, providing a very rich set of multi-dimensional data, which can be extremely useful, for instance, for marketing applications, real-time support for policy-makers and health interventions.

In this talk I will discuss the scenarios that are opened by the emergence of this new paradigm of mobile anticipatory computing and I will present our ongoing work in this area.

Bio:

Mirco Musolesi is a Reader in Networked Systems and Data Science at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. He received a PhD in Computer Science from University College London in 2007. Before joining Birmingham, he held research positions at Dartmouth College and Cambridge and a Lectureship at the University of St Andrews. His research interests lie at the interface of different areas, namely ubiquitous computing, large-scale data mining, and network science. More information about his research profile can be found at the following URL:http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~musolesm

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Genetic Improvement of Source Code

Dr. William B. Langdon, Department of Computer Science, University College London.

Room 151, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 8th of October 2014, from 16:30 to 17:30

Genetic programming can optimise programs including evolving test benchmarks, search meta-heuristics, protocols, composing web services, improving hashing and memory allocation, redundant programming and even automatically fixing bugs. There are many ways to balance functionality with resource consumption (eg time, memory, energy). But a human programmer cannot try them all. Similarly the easy to write software may not give the best floating point accuracy or give the best trade off between performance and solution quality. Also the Pareto optimal tradeoff may be different on each hardware platform and it may be dynamic, e.g. as usage changes. Possibly GP could automatically suggest a different balance between multiple objectives for each new market. Recent results include substantial speed up by generating a new version of a program for a special case. Short CV: Dr. Langdon gained his PhD at UCL after a career in real-time industrial control software and consulting. After positions in universities and research institutes at home and abroad, he has returned to UCL where he is applying genetic programming to optimising software. He has written 3 books on genetic programming, including "A Field Guide to Genetic Programming", which can be downloaded for free. He also maintains the genetic programming bibliography.

Home: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/W.Langdon/ project:

http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/W.Langdon/gismo book:

http://www.gp-field-guide.org.uk/ GP-bib:

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~wbl/biblio/

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OLAPing Uncertain Multidimensional Data Streams

Dr Alfredo Cuzzocrea, ICAR-CNR and University of Calabria, Italy.

Room 745, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 1st of October 2014, from 16:00 to 17:00

Multidimensional data streams are playing a leading role in next-generation DSMS. This essentially because real-life data streams are inherently multidimensional, multi-level and multi-granular in nature, hence opening the door to a wide spectrum of applications ranging from environmental sensor networks to monitoring and tracking systems, and so forth. As a consequence, there is a need for innovative models and algorithms for representing and processing such streams. Moreover, supporting OLAP analysis and mining tasks is a “first-class” issue in the major context of knowledge discovery from streams, for which above-mentioned models and algorithms are baseline components. This issue becomes more problematic when uncertain and imprecise multidimensional data streams are considered. Inspired by these critical research challenges, in this talk we will present an overview of major research issues in this context and an innovative technique for supporting OLAP over uncertain multidimensional data streams.

Bio:

Bio: Alfredo Cuzzocrea is currently a Senior Researcher at the Institute of High Performance Computing and Networking of the Italian National Research Council, Italy, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Calabria, Italy. He is habilitated as Associate Professor in Computer Science Engineering by the Italian National Scientific Habilitation of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR). He also got the habilitation as Associate Professor in Computer Science by the Aalborg University, Denmark, and the habilitation as Associate Professor in Computer Science by the University of Rome Tre, Italy. He is Adjunct Professor at the University of Catanzaro “Magna Graecia”, Italy, Adjunct Professor at the University of Messina, Italy, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy. Previously, he was Adjunct Professor at the University of Naples “Parthenope”, Italy. He holds 35 Visiting Professor positions worldwide (Europe, USA, Asia, Australia). He serves as Springer Fellow Editor. He serves as Elsevier Ambassador. He holds several roles in international scientific societies, steering committees for international conferences, and international panels, some of them having directional responsibility. He served as Panel Leader and Moderator in international conferences. He served as Invited Speaker in several international conferences worldwide (Europe, USA, Asia). He is member of scientific boards of several PhD programs worldwide (Europe, Asia, Australia). He serves as Editor for the Springer series “Communications in Computer and Information Science”. He covers a large number of roles in international journals, such as Editor-In-Chief, Associate Editor, Special Issue Editor (including JCSS, IS, KAIS, FGCS, DKE, INS, BigData Research). He edited more than 30 international books and conference proceedings. He is member of editorial advisory boards of several international books. He covers a large number of roles in international conferences, such as General Chair, Program Chair, Workshop Chair, Local Chair, Liaison Chair and Publicity Chair (including CSE, ODBASE, DaWaK, DOLAP, ICA3PP, ICEIS, APWeb, SSTDM, IDEAS, IDEAL). He served as Session Chair in a large number of international conferences (including EDBT, CIKM, DaWaK, DOLAP, ADBIS). He serves as Review Board Member in a large number of international journals (including TODS, TKDE, TKDD, TSC, TIST, TSMC, THMS, JCSS, IS, KAIS, FGCS, DKE, INS). He serves as Review Board Member in a large number of international books. He serves as Program Committee Member in a very large number of international conferences (including VLDB, ICDE, EDBT, CIKM, IJCAI, KDD, ICDM, PKDD, SDM). His current research interests include multidimensional data modeling and querying, data stream modeling and querying, data warehousing and OLAP, OLAM, XML data management, Web information systems modeling and engineering, knowledge representation and management models and techniques, Grid and P2P computing, privacy and security of very large databases and OLAP data cubes, models and algorithms for managing uncertain and imprecise information and knowledge, models and algorithms for managing complex data on the Web, models and algorithms for high-performance distributed computing and architectures. He is author or co-author of more than 330 papers in international conferences (including EDBT, CIKM, SSDBM, MDM, DaWaK, DOLAP), international journals (including JCSS, IS, KAIS, DKE, INS) and international books (mostly edited by Springer). He is also involved in several national and international research projects, where he also covers responsibility roles.

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Publishing L2TAP Logs to Facilitate SPARQL Query-based Privacy Auditing

Professor Mariano Consens, Department of Information Engineering, MIE and CS, University of Toronto.

Room 745, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 21st of July 2014, from 15:00 to 16:00

This talk describes a framework for publishing logs to support privacy auditing tasks that involve multiple auditors, an increasingly common requirement in the context of social computing and big data driven science. Our proposal is based on two ontologies, L2TAP and SCIP, designed for deployment in a Linked Data environment. L2TAP provides provenance enabled logging of events. SCIP synthesizes contextual integrity concepts and enables (SPARQL) query-based solutions for two important privacy processes (compliance and obligation derivation). The approach facilitates accountability and transparency among participants.

Bio:

Mariano Consens research interests are in the areas of Data Management and the Web, with a focus on linked data, graph data, analytics for semistructured data, privacy, XML searching, and autonomic systems. He has over 60 publications, including journal publications selected from best conference papers and several patents. Mariano received his PhD and MSc degrees in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. Consens is a University of Toronto faculty member and a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Center for Advanced Studies in Toronto. In addition, he has been active in the software industry as a founder and CTO of a couple of software startups, as well as a Visiting Scientist at Yahoo! Research.

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Ontology-Based Data Access and Non-Uniform Constraint Satisfaction

Professor Frank Wolter, Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool.

Room 745, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 19th of March 2014, from 16:30 to 17:40

Ontology-based data access is concerned with querying incomplete data sources in the presence of domain-specific knowledge provided by an ontology. A central notion in this setting is that of an ontology-mediated query, which is a database query coupled with an ontology. In this talk, we discuss several classes of ontology-mediated queries, where the database queries are given as some form of conjunctive query and the ontologies are formulated in description logics or other relevant fragments of first-order logic, such as the guarded fragment and the unary-negation fragment.

We then establish intimate connections between ontology-mediated queries and constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) and their logical generalization, MMSNP formulas. These connections are exploited to obtain results regarding first-order and datalog-rewritability of ontology-mediated queries and P/NP dichotomies for ontology-mediated queries.

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What we talk about when we talk about graphs

Dr George Fletcher, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands.

Room 745, Birkbeck Main Building - Tuesday, 4th of March 2014, from 16:30 to 17:40

An old idea from the humanistic sciences has it that the language we use not only restricts the manner in which we view the world, but also, in a very real sense, shapes the world around us. Recently, my colleagues and I have been exploring the interesting ways in which this idea manifests itself in data management. In particular, we have been studying the expressive power of graph query languages with a focus on characterizing the ability of languages to restrict and shape concrete graph instances, purely in terms of the structure of the instances.

In this talk, I will start with a brief recap of the history of such structural characterizations of query languages. I will then introduce the theoretical framework we have been developing for reasoning over graph structured data, and discuss how we put the framework to work with the design of structural indexes for (RDF) graphs, to support efficient query evaluation over massive graphs. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of broader applications of the framework in data management and indications for further research.

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An introduction to quantum computing

Dr Ashley Montanaro, Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol.

Room 745, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 19th of February 2014, from 16:40 to 17:40

The model of quantum computation offers the prospect of using the principles of quantum mechanics to obtain dramatically faster algorithms for certain problems than are possible for any standard computer based only on the laws of classical physics. In this talk, I will give an introduction to the field and some of its principal results, as well as more recent work. In particular, I will discuss how ideas from quantum complexity theory can be used to prove hardness of many computational problems, some of which are apparently unconnected to quantum mechanics. This demonstrates that concepts from quantum computing can be useful even if large-scale quantum computers are never built.

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Hunter, Cauchy Rabbit, and Optimal Kakeya Sets

Dr Ron Peretz, Mathematics department, London School of Economics (LSE).

Room 160, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 22nd of January 2014, from 16:30 to 17:30

A Cauchy random walk will take us from a Hunter-Rabbit search game on the circle to the famous Kakeya problem and back.

Joint work with Y. Babichenko, Y. Peres, P. Sousi and P. Winkler.======= >>>>>>> .r4153

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