SICSA PhD Conference 2009

The inaugural SICSA postgraduate conference for PhD students in Informatics and Computer Science in Scotland was held at St Andrews University on 3rd June 2009. The venue was The Gateway building, which is no. 16 on the campus map

The conference was open to all PhD students in computer science and informatics, not just those students funded by SICSA. Students had the opportunity to network with other Scottish PhD students and academic staff and to gain an impression of the breadth of PhD research going on across Scotland.

Pictures of the conference are on flickr.

Conference programme

In putting together the 2009 conference programme, our aim has been to give you an opportunity to meet one of the world's leading computer scientists, Prof Robin Milner

, who has made an immense contribution to the discipline, to hear about Scottish PhD research projects and to meet visitors and staff supported by the SICSA initiative.

10.00-10.30 Coffee and mingling,

10.30-10.40 Welcome. Prof Jon Oberlander, SICSA Director

10.40-11.40 Keynote address: The Space and Motion of Large Informatic Systems. Prof Robin Milner. Univ of Cambridge and Edinburgh.

Abstract: We are building Ubiquitous Systems that will be so well embedded in our natural environment that it will be hard to tell which is which. The natural sciences -- physics, chemistry, biology -- create models for the natural world; what kind of models can be integrated with them, to explain the informatic part? The von Neumann Abstract Machine isn't fit for this purpose. After discussing models generally, I'll describe a new model -- a rigorous one --that I hope can be used to program, simulate, analyse and thus understand these large informatic components. I call it the Ubiquitous Abstract Machine.

11.40-12.40 Presentations from Scottish PhD students on their research

  1. Luís Fabrício Wanderley Góes: (Edinburgh): Speculative Skeleton-based Parallel Programming for Software Transactional Memory
  2. Angus Macdonald (St Andrews) DBHarvester: A Resource Harvesting Distributed Database
  3. Larry Tan (Stirling): Formalising and Implementing Web and Grid Service Compositions
  4. Ibrahim Adeyanju (RGU). Reuse and Revision for Textual Case Based Reasoning

12.40-14.00 Lunch and poster presentations

14.00-15.30 Presentations from Scottish PhD students on their research

  1. Mark Meiklejohn (Strathclyde): Automated Software Engineering from Natural Language Requirements Specifications
  2. Jerry Wei (Dundee): Title to be confirmed
  3. Michael Kriegel (Heriot-Watt): Collaborative Authoring Of Emergent Narratives
  4. Hien Nguyen (Aberdeen): Designing Persuasive Dialogue Systems
  5. Ross Mcilroy (Glasgow): Compiling multi-core Java for the Playstation 3
  6. Mark Shovman (Abertay): Studying Comprehension of Data Visualisations

15.30-15.50 Tea and coffee break

15.50-16.20 Invited lecture: Engineering the Progammable and Social Web. Dr Chen Wu, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia. (SICSA visitor)

16.20-16.50 Invited lecture: Designing, Creating, and Evaluating Novel Interactions - being continuously surprised by users. Dr Eva Hornecker , University of Strathclyde. (SICSA lecturer).