WAIS seminar: The Domain Name System: a magical mystery tour

Wednesday 12th March 2014 Speaker(s): Dr Tim Chown Organiser: Time: 12/03/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 File size: 642 Mb Abstract The WAIS seminar series is designed to be a blend of classic seminars, research discussions, debates and tutorials. The Domain Name System (DNS) is a critical part of the Internet infrastructure. In this talk we begin by explaining the basic model of operation of the DNS, including how domain names are delegated and how a DNS resolver performs a DNS lookup. We then take a tour of DNS-related topics, including caching, poisoning, governance, the increasing misuse of the DNS in DDoS attacks, and the expansion of the DNS namespace to new top level domains and internationalised domain names. We also present the latest work in the IETF on DNS privacy. The talk will be pitched such that no detailed technical knowledge is required. We hope that attendees will gain some familiarity with how the DNS works, some key issues surrounding DNS operation, and how the DNS might touch on various areas of research within WAIS.

WAIS Seminar:Let's SoFWIReD!

Title: Let’s SoFWIReD! Time: Wed, 21 May 2014 11:00-11:50 Location: Building 32, Room 3077 Speaker: Dr Sepi Chakaveh Abstract The information age as we know it has its roots in several enabling technologies – most of all the World Wide Web – for the provision of truly global connectivity. The emergence of a Web of Big Data in terms of the publication and analysis of Open Data provides new insights about the impact of the Web in our society. The second most important technology in this regard has been the emergence of streaming processes based on new and innovative compression methods such as MP3 so that audio and video content becomes accessible to everyone on the Web. The SoFWIReD team is developing comprehensive, interoperable platforms for data and knowledge driven processing of Open Data and will investigate aspects of collective intelligence. Insights generated in the project will form the basis for supporting companies through consulting, organisational development, and software solutions so that they can master the collective intelligence transition. The seminar will present how the project addresses the research topics of web observatory, dynamic media objects, crowd-sourced open data and Internet services. At the end of a talk a number of demos will be shown in the context of SoFWIReD’s Dynamic Media Object.

WAIS Seminar:Secure Multi-Party Computation for the Masses

Speaker(s): Prof. David Evans Organiser: Dr Tim Chown Time: 22/05/2014 10:45-11:45 Location: B53/4025 Abstract Secure multi-party computation enables two (or more) participants to reliably compute a function that depends on both of their inputs, without revealing those inputs to the other party or needing to trust any other party. It could enable two people who meet at a conference to learn who they known in common without revealing any of their other contacts, or allow a pharmaceutical company to determine the correct dosage of a medication based on a patient’s genome without compromising the privacy of the patient. A general solution to this problem has been known since Yao's pioneering work in the 1980s, but only recently has it become conceivable to use this approach in practice. Over the past few years, my research group has worked towards making secure computation practical for real applications. In this talk, I'll provide a brief introduction to secure computation protocols, describe the techniques we have developed to design scalable and efficient protocols, and share some recent results on improving efficiency and how secure computing applications are developed.

WAIS Seminar:Modelling the Web: Examples of modelling language, network evolution and physical-social systems

Speaker(s): Prof. Steffen Staab Organiser: Dr Tim Chown Time: 23/05/2014 10:30-11:30 Location: B53/4025 Abstract The Web is constructed based on our experiences in a multitude of modalities: text, networks, images, physical locations are some examples. Understanding the Web requires from us that we can model these modalities as they appear on the Web. In this talk I will show some examples of how we model text, hyperlink networks and physical-social systems in order to improve our understanding and our use of the Web.

WAIS Seminar:Evaluating the Cognitive Side of Information Interaction

Abstract In this talk, I'll focus on the work we've been doing on evaluating the cognitive side of dealing with information resources and increasingly complex user interfaces. While we can build increasingly powerful user interfaces, they often come at the cost of simple design and ease of use. I'll describe two specific studies: 1) work on the ORCHID project focused on measuring mental workload during tasks using fNIRS (a blood-oxygen-based brain scanner), and 2) a evaluation metric for measuring how much people learn during tasks. Together these provide advances towards understanding the cognitive side of information interaction, in working towards building better tools for users.

WAIS Seminar:LinkedTV: Building the Future of Television

Abstract Broadcast video can be augmented with links to information related to the topics in the video and to other related entities. Viewers are sufficiently digitally literate that they can carry out their own searches during or after a broadcast. We investigate what types of information viewers would actually like to see while being engaged in watching a news broadcast. On the base of this we have designed user interfaces for passive and active uses of a second screen to accompany a news broadcast. A next step is to understand the specific types of information users would like to consult and investigate whether these can be automatically generated.

WAIS seminar: Alan Walks Wales: Data and Challenges

Abstract This seminar is a research discussion around a very interesting problem, which may be a good basis for a WAISfest theme. A little over a year ago Professor Alan Dix came to tell us of his plans for a magnificent adventure:to walk all of the way round Wales - 1000 miles 'Alan Walks Wales'. The walk was a personal journey, but also a technological and community one, exploring the needs of the walker and the people along the way. Whilst walking he recorded his thoughts in an audio diary, took lots of photos, wrote a blog and collected data from the tech instruments he was wearing. As a result Alan has extensive quantitative data (bio-sensing and location) and qualitative data (text, images and some audio). There are challenges in analysing individual kinds of data, including merging similar data streams, entity identification, time-series and textual data mining, dealing with provenance, ontologies for paths, and journeys. There are also challenges for author and third-party annotation, linking the data-sets and visualising the merged narrative or facets of it.

WAIS seminar:Mathematics for Web Science Part3-1

ABSTRACT In the first two seminars we looked at the evolution of Ontologies from the current OWL level towards more powerful/expressive models and the corresponding hierarchy of Logics that underpin every stage of this evolution. We examined this in the more general context of the general evolution of the Web as a mathematical (directed and weighed) graph and the archetypical “living network” In the third seminar we will analyze further some of the startling properties that the Web has as a graph/network and which it shares with an array of “real-life” networks as well as some key elements of the mathematics (probability, statistics and graph theory) that underpin all this. No mathematical prerequisites are assumed or required. We will outline some directions that current (2005-now) research is taking and conclude with some illustrations/examples from ongoing research and applications that show great promise.

WAIS seminar:Mathematics for Web Science Part 3-2

ABSTRACT In the first two seminars we looked at the evolution of Ontologies from the current OWL level towards more powerful/expressive models and the corresponding hierarchy of Logics that underpin every stage of this evolution. We examined this in the more general context of the general evolution of the Web as a mathematical (directed and weighed) graph and the archetypical “living network” In the third seminar we will analyze further some of the startling properties that the Web has as a graph/network and which it shares with an array of “real-life” networks as well as some key elements of the mathematics (probability, statistics and graph theory) that underpin all this. No mathematical prerequisites are assumed or required. We will outline some directions that current (2005-now) research is taking and conclude with some illustrations/examples from ongoing research and applications that show great promise.

WAIS seminar: Mathematics for Web Science: Part 3-3

ABSTRACT In the first two seminars we looked at the evolution of Ontologies from the current OWL level towards more powerful/expressive models and the corresponding hierarchy of Logics that underpin every stage of this evolution. We examined this in the more general context of the general evolution of the Web as a mathematical (directed and weighed) graph and the archetypical “living network” In the third seminar we will analyze further some of the startling properties that the Web has as a graph/network and which it shares with an array of “real-life” networks as well as some key elements of the mathematics (probability, statistics and graph theory) that underpin all this. No mathematical prerequisites are assumed or required. We will outline some directions that current (2005-now) research is taking and conclude with some illustrations/examples from ongoing research and applications that show great promise.

Mining Events from Multimedia streams, Jon Hare

peaker(s): Jon Hare Organiser: Time: 25/06/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 Abstract The aggregation of items from social media streams, such as Flickr photos and Twitter tweets, into meaningful groups can help users contextualise and effectively consume the torrents of information on the social web. This task is challenging due to the scale of the streams and the inherently multimodal nature of the information being contextualised. In this talk I'll describe some of our recent work on trend and event detection in multimedia data streams. We focus on scalable streaming algorithms that can be applied to multimedia data streams from the web and the social web. The talk will cover two particular aspects of our work: mining Twitter for trending images by detecting near duplicates; and detecting social events in multimedia data with streaming clustering algorithms. I'll will describe in detail our techniques, and explore open questions and areas of potential future work, in both these tasks.

Provenance: Beyond Standardisation

Abstract: Provenance is a record that describes the people, institutions, entities, and activities, involved in producing, influencing, or delivering a piece of data or a thing in the world. Some 10 years after beginning research on the topic of Provenance, I co-chaired the provenance working group at the World Wide Web Consortium. The working group published 4 recommendations and several notes about the PROV standard for provenance in 2013. In this talk, I will present some use cases for provenance, the PROV standard and some flagship examples of adoption. I will then move onto our current research area in exploiting provenance, in the context of the SmartSociety and ORCHID projects. Doing so, I will present some methods, algorithms, and tools that we have developed in Southampton.

IT and other training in the always connected era

Abstract Google and YouTube are quickly becoming the training resource of choice for the IT literate, especially in relation to computer based applications. Many businesses are addressing this training issue in a number of ways, some more successful than others. Find out what the IT services at the university are doing to adapt to this change and contribute to the discussion on how the approach could be improved. Before the talk you could have a look at the following; * One service that has been licenced is Lynda http://go.soton.ac.uk/lynda or lynda.com (note you have to enter www.southampton.ac.uk as the organisation if you don’t log in through the go.soton link) * The IT training team publish a portfolio of systems and courses at http://www.southampton.ac.uk/isolutions/computing/training/portfolio/index.php. * More and more internal systems are being supported through online guides such as http://go.soton.ac.uk/bgsg

Work less, teach better and get better feedback: why we tried innovative teaching methods

Speaker: Patrick McSweeney Organiser: Time: 15/10/2014 11:00-11:45 Location: B32/3077 Abstract Having started at Southampton in 2005 I have seen quite a few changes to the way courses are taught and studied. I will reflect on some of the interesting changes I have observed and suggest their causes. As a practical example I will talk about codestrom, a peer feedback tool for learning programming. We have found that this teaching method has improved the student experience and reduced the work load for the module team. Together we will discuss how this and other recent developments can enable other teaching innovations which benefit staff as well as students. Hopefully the new class of PhD students will be able to contribute from the point of view of having recently been undergraduate students here and else where.

How Minecraft Affects How Young People Learn About Computer Science

Abstract: As one of the newest art forms available to young people, gaming has become an increasing influence on young people’s education, even if not used in a classroom environment. This talk aims to explore examples of how video games have changed how young people understand and learn about certain subjects, with particular focus on how the indie title Minecraft allows them to learn about the world of Computer Science and how groups are looking to forward the cause of education though games.