WAIS seminar: Publication Workflows for Scientific Data

Wednesday 23rd April 2014 Speaker(s): Willi Hasselbring Organiser: Leslie Carr Time: 23/04/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 File size: 669 Mb Abstract For good scientific practice, it is important that research results may be properly checked by reviewers and possibly repeated and extended by other researchers. This is of particular interest for "digital science" i.e. for in-silico experiments. In this talk, I'll discuss some issues of how software systems and services may contribute to good scientific practice. Particularly, I'll present our PubFlow approach to automate publication workflows for scientific data. The PubFlow workflow management system is based on established technology. We integrate institutional repository systems (based on EPrints) and world data centers (in marine science). PubFlow collects provenance data automatically via our monitoring framework Kieker. Provenance information describes the origins and the history of scientific data in its life cycle, and the process by which it arrived. Thus, provenance information is highly relevant to repeatability and trustworthiness of scientific results. In our evaluation in marine science, we collaborate with the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel.

WAIS seminar: Application Performance Monitoring and Architecture Discovery with Kieker

Wednesday 23rd April 2014 Speaker(s): Willi Hasselbring Organiser: Leslie Carr Time: 23/04/2014 14:00-15:00 Location: B32/3077 File size: 802Mb Abstract The internal behavior of large-scale software systems cannot be determined on the basis of static (e.g., source code) analysis alone. Kieker provides complementary dynamic analysis capabilities, i.e., monitoring/profiling and analyzing a software system's runtime behavior. Application Performance Monitoring is concerned with continuously observing a software system's performance-specific runtime behavior, including analyses like assessing service level compliance or detecting and diagnosing performance problems. Architecture Discovery is concerned with extracting architectural information from an existing software system, including both structural and behavioral aspects like identifying architectural entities (e.g., components and classes) and their interactions (e.g., local or remote procedure calls). In addition to the Architecture Discovery of Java systems, Kieker supports Architecture Discovery for other platforms, including legacy systems, for instance, inplemented in C#, C++, Visual Basic 6, COBOL or Perl. Thanks to Kieker's extensible architecture it is easy to implement and use custom extensions and plugins. Kieker was designed for continuous monitoring in production systems inducing only a very low overhead, which has been evaluated in extensive benchmark experiments. Please, refer to http://kieker-monitoring.net/ for more information.

WAIS seminar: Computer Science, the Revolution in Schools

Tuesday 22nd April 2014 Speaker(s): Sue Sentance Organiser: Leslie Carr Time: 22/04/2014 15:00-16:00 Location: B32/3077 File size: 698 Mb Abstract Until recently, "computing" education in English schools mainly focused on developing general Digital Literacy and Microsoft Office skills. As of this September, a new curriculum comes into effect that provides a strong emphasis on computation and programming. This change has generated some controversy in the news media (4-year-olds being forced to learn coding! boss of the government’s coding education initiative cannot code shock horror!!!!) and also some concern in the teaching profession (how can we possibly teach programming when none of the teachers know how to program)? Dr Sue Sentance will explain the work of Computing At School, a part of the BCS Academy, in galvanising universities to help teachers learn programming and other computing skills. Come along and find out about the new English Computing Revolution - How will your children and your schools be affected? - How will our University intake change? How will our degrees have to change? - What is happening to the national perception of Computer Science?

WAIS seminar: Linked Cultural Media

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Speaker(s): Guus Schreiber Time: 09/04/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 File size: 546Mb Abstract In this talk I will discuss linked data for museums, archives and libraries. This area is known for its knowledge-rich and heterogeneous data landscape. The objects in this field range from old manuscripts to recent TV programs. Challenges in this field include common metadata schema's, inter-linking of the omnipresent vocabularies, cross-collection search strategies, user-generated annotations and object-centric versus event-centric views of data. This work can be seen as part of the rapidly evolving field of digital humanities. Speaker Biography Guus Schreiber Guus is a professor of Intelligent Information Systems at the Department of Computer Science at VU University Amsterdam. Guus’ research interests are mainly in knowledge and ontology engineering with a special interest for applications in the field of cultural heritage. He was one of the key developers of the CommonKADS methodology. Guus acts as chair of W3C groups for Semantic Web standards such as RDF, OWL, SKOS and REFa. His research group is involved in a wide range of national and international research projects. He is now project coordinator of the EU Integrated project No Tube concerned with integration of Web and TV data with the help of semantics and was previously Scientific Director of the EU Network of Excellence “Knowledge Web”.

WAIS seminar: Provenance Analytics and Crowdsourcing

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Speaker(s): Dr Trung Dong Huynh Organiser: Dr Tim Chown Time: 26/03/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 File size: 349Mb Abstract Understanding the dynamics of a crowdsourcing application and controlling the quality of the data it generates is challenging, partly due to the lack of tools to do so. Provenance is a domain-independent means to represent what happened in an application, which can help verify data and infer their quality. It can also reveal the processes that led to a data item and the interactions of contributors with it. Provenance patterns can manifest real-world phenomena such as a significant interest in a piece of content, providing an indication of its quality, or even issues such as undesirable interactions within a group of contributors. In this talk, I will present an application-independent methodology for analysing provenance graphs, constructed from provenance records, to learn about such patterns and to use them for assessing some key properties of crowdsourced data, such as their quality, in an automated manner. I will also talk about CollabMap (www.collabmap.org), an online crowdsourcing mapping application, and show how we applied the approach above to the trust classification of data generated by the crowd, achieving an accuracy over 95%.

WAIS seminar: Research Discussion: Lab of Things? What Things?

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Speaker(s): Kirk Martinez, Dr Jonathon S Hare and Dr Enrico Costanza Organiser: Dr Tim Chown Time: 19/03/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 File size: 676 Mb Abstract The new WAIS seminar series features classic seminars, research discussions, tutorial-style presentations, and research debates. This seminar takes the form of a research discussion which will focus on the Internet of Things (IoT) research being undertaken in WAIS and other research groups in ECS. IoT is a significant emerging research area, with funding for research available from many channels including new H2020 programmes and the TSB. We have seen examples of IoT devices being built in WAIS and other ECS groups, e.g. in sensor networking, energy monitoring via Zigbee devices, and of course Erica the Rhino (a Big Thing!). The goal of the session is to briefly present such examples of existing Things in our lab with the intent of seeding discussion on open research questions, and therefore future work we could do towards new Things being deployed for experimentation in Building 32 or its environs. The session will discuss what 'things' we have, how they work, what new 'things' might we want to create and deploy, what components we might need to enable this, and how we might interact with these objects.

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.

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.

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.

Anonymisation, Deanonymisation and Data Management

Speaker: Dr Kieron O'Hara Organiser: Time: 04/02/2015 11:00-11:45 Location: B32/3077 Abstract In order to reap the potential societal benefits of big and broad data, it is essential to share and link personal data. However, privacy and data protection considerations mean that, to be shared, personal data must be anonymised, so that the data subject cannot be identified from the data. Anonymisation is therefore a vital tool for data sharing, but deanonymisation, or reidentification, is always possible given sufficient auxiliary information (and as the amount of data grows, both in terms of creation, and in terms of availability in the public domain, the probability of finding such auxiliary information grows). This creates issues for the management of anonymisation, which are exacerbated not only by uncertainties about the future, but also by misunderstandings about the process(es) of anonymisation. This talk discusses these issues in relation to privacy, risk management and security, reports on recent theoretical tools created by the UKAN network of statistics professionals (on which the author is one of the leads), and asks how long anonymisation can remain a useful tool, and what might replace it.

More women in informatics research and education

Speaker: Lynda Hardman Organiser: Time: 04/02/2015 12:30-13:30 Location: B32/3077 Abstract The challenges of addressing gender inequalities in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine is widely acknowledged. We currently hold a bronze award and ECS is one of many academic units in the University which has gained Athena Swan Charter status. In this seminar, Professor Lynda Hardman, Chair of the Informatics Europe working group "Women in Informatics Research and Education” will be explaining the causes of issued underlying gender inequality and constructive routes to addressing this important agenda. In undertaking to commit to an action plan which is a prerequisite of gaining charter status, the University or academic department agreed to accept and incorporate the Athena Swan six principles listed below: * To address gender inequalities requires commitment and action from everyone, at all levels of the organisation * To tackle the unequal representation of women in science requires changing cultures and attitudes across the organisation * The absence of diversity at management and policy-making levels has broad implications which the organisation will examine * The high loss rate of women in science is an urgent concern which the organisation will address * The system of short-term contracts has particularly negative consequences for the retention and progression of women in science, which the organisation recognises * There are both personal and structural obstacles to women making the transition from PhD into a sustainable academic career in science, which require the active consideration of the organisation. This seminar is designed to provide an opportunity to explore these issues NOTE: Lynda will be basing here talk on some of the work she directed as chair of the "Women in Informatics Research and Education” working group. The purpose of the working group is to actively participate and promote actions that contribute to improve gender balance in Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies. The first concrete result of the working group's activities was the publication of the booklet "More Women in Informatics Research and Education" in 2013. The booklet is a compact source of clear and simple best practices to deans and heads of departments that aim to increase the participation of women as both students and employees in their institutions. Many tips included were also inspired by colleagues already in leading positions who have already implemented actions in their institutions to attract more women and ensure their continued participation in the organization at commensurate ratios with their male colleagues. The booklet is endorsed by the European Commission and features a foreword by Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, responsible for the Digital Agenda.