Computing Science and Mathematics
Seminars, 2020/2021
Seminars will take place via Microsoft Teams, with a meeting link to be shared via the seminar-announce emails. Unless otherwise stated, from 15.00 to 16.00 on
Friday afternoons during semester time, followed by informal discussions.
Spring 2021
| Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
|---|---|---|
| Friday 22 January |
Andrew Wallace, Heriot-Watt University | PervAsive low-TeraHz and optical sensing for Car Autonomy and Driver Assistance (PATHCAD)* What if it rains? While media coverage about the future of the autonomous car changes from the naïve acceptance of a disruptive technology to the damning realisation that it may actually have the occasional accident due to adverse weather, adversarial attack, and hardware/software malfunction, the vast majority of trials have taken place in good weather with considerable pre-mapping and detailed route planning. The PATHCAD project explored alternatives to vehicle sensing for scene mapping and actor recognition in adverse conditions, based on video, LiDAR and radar technologies. I shall present work to develop a higher resolution radar system, to recognise and track actors and predict their behaviour in radar images, and discuss how active LiDAR imaging can penetrate bad weather by use of full waveform processing, potentially aided by concurrent radar sensing. As time allows, I will present some additional material on how fast, eye-safe, full wave, automotive LiDAR systems can be built from improvements in solid state semiconductor arrays, allied to random sampling, compressed sensing and approximate computing. * Much of the work was supported by Jaguar Land Rover and EPSRC (EP/N012402/1) as part of the TASCC programme, and was carried out by the Universities of Birmingham, Edinburgh and Heriot=Watt. |
| Friday 29 January |
No seminar | |
| Friday 5 February |
No seminar | Internal Event |
| Friday 12 February |
Tomas Sauer, University of Passau, Germany | Continued Fractions: Music, Moments and Hurwitz Continued fractions are a classical topic of mathematics, especially known for their role in number theory which also answers the musical question why the octave has 12 semitones. Since the concept can be applied in general Euclidean rings, there is also a lot of applications connected to polynomials and rational functions that directly relate to signal processing, but also to moment sequences and orthogonal polynomials or to Prony's problem. The talk will highlight some of these connections. Speaker Bio: Professor Tomas Sauer is the Chair of Mathematical Image Processing at University of Passau and Director of the applied research institute FORWISS in Germany. Since 2017, he is also the Head of of Fraunhofer IIS research group "Knowledge Based Image Processing" in Passau. Prior to this, from 2000 till 2012 he was Professor for Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing at University of Giessen. He received his Diploma (1990), PhD (1993) and habilitation (1999) from University of Erlangen, Germany. |
| Friday 19 February |
Peter Hinow, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, USA | Automated Feature Extraction from Large Cardiac Electrophysiological Data Sets A multi-electrode array-based application for the long-term recording of action potentials from electrogenic cells makes possible exciting cardiac electrophysiology studies in health and disease. With hundreds of simultaneous electrode recordings being acquired over a period of days, the main challenge becomes achieving reliable signal identification and quantification. We set out to develop an algorithm capable of automatically extracting regions of high-quality action potentials from terabyte size experimental results and to map the trains of action potentials into a low-dimensional feature space for analysis. Our automatic segmentation algorithm finds regions of acceptable action potentials in large data sets of electrophysiological readings. We use spectral methods and support vector machines to classify our readings and to extract relevant features. We show that action potentials from the same cell site can be recorded over days without detrimental effects to the cell membrane. The variability between measurements 24 h apart is comparable to the natural variability of the features at a single time point. Our work contributes towards a non-invasive approach for cardiomyocyte functional maturation, as well as developmental, pathological, and pharmacological studies. This is joint work with Viviana Zlochiver, Stacie Kroboth (Advocate Aurora Research Institute), and John Jurkiewicz (graduate student at UWM). |
| Friday 26 February |
No seminar | Internal Event (Reading Week) |
| Friday 5 March |
Dr Lee Christie, Robert Gordon University | Spatial-Temporal Modelling for Outbound and Inbound Public Transit Isochrones In this talk we will present a new travel-time analysis library developed at RGU. The Java class library has been developed for a project with the Highlands and Islands Transport Partnership (HITRANS) and has also been used in another current research project with the West Yorkshire Combined Authority. The transport library can be used to efficiently generate "isochrones", a way of visualising the areas reachable from (or to) a specified start (or end) point in a given amount of time. The core functionality makes use of Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm, applied to a spatial-temporal graph representing road network and public transit timetabling data, and can incorporate hypothetical routes, which can be evaluated in parallel. The current uses are analysing the current state of accessibility from the highlands to the central belt, and analysing the potential impact on accessibility within Leeds by adding connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV). |
| Friday 12 March |
||
| Friday 19 March |
No seminar | Internal Event |
| Friday 26 March |
No seminar | Internal Event |
| Friday 2 April |
No seminar | Easter Holiday |
| Friday 9 April |
||
| Friday 16 April |
||
| Friday 23 April |
Mosab Bazargani, Queen Mary University of London | A Dynamic Cutoff Time Strategy for Parameter-less Late Acceptance Hill-Climbing Throughout the course of an optimization run, the probability of yielding further improvement becomes smaller as the search proceeds, and eventually the search stagnates. Under such a state, letting the algorithm continue to run is a waste of time as there is little hope that subsequent improvement can be made. The ability to detect the stagnation point is therefore of prime importance. If such a point can be detected reliably, then it is possible to make better use of the computing resources, perhaps restarting the algorithm at the stagnation point, either with the same or with a different parameter configuration. This talk presents a method that is able to reliably detect the stagnation point for one-point stochastic local search algorithms applied to combinatorial optimization problems. The strategy is derived from the coupon collector's problem, and is scalable based on the employed perturbation operator and its induced neighbourhood size, as well as from feedback from the search. The suitability and scalability of the method is illustrated with the Late Acceptance Hill-Climbing algorithm on a comprehensive set of benchmark instances of three well-known combinatorial optimization problems: the Travelling Salesman Problem, the Quadratic Assignment Problem, and the Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem. |
| Friday 30 April |
No seminar | Internal Event |
| Friday 7 May |
||
| Friday 14 May |
||
| Friday 21 May |
||
| Friday 28 May |
No seminar | Internal Event |
Previous Seminar Series
Computing Science and Mathematics
Faculty of Natural Sciences
University of Stirling
Stirling
FK9 4LA
Scotland
UK