Loughborough University
Leicestershire, UK
LE11 3TU
+44 (0)1509 263171
Loughborough University

Computer Science

Research

Photograph of a lecture theatre

Departmental Seminars - 2012/13

  • Date: Wednesday, 9 October 2013, N1.12, Haslegrave Building @ 2.30pm
  • Speaker: Dr Richard Mortier, University of Nottingham
  • Title: Control and Understanding: Owning Your Home Network
  • Abstract: Does your home network work the way you want it to, every day?  Does your parents?  Your neighbours?  Home networking has become mundane, but it remains one of the most complex domestic technologies that people have to install and manage.  In contrast to much work in the space, the Homework project began by explicitly considering the users' needs rather than blindly reusing existing technology.  Properly addressing these needs requires more than just new user interfaces bolted on top of existing infrastructure, having interesting design and implementation implications that go much further down the stack.  In this talk I will give some background to Homework, briefly describe some of the ethnographic work we carried out, and go into the impact this had on our technology design.  In doing so I will describe the design and implementation of our Homework Router on Linux using Open vSwitch and NOX, and some of the capabilities we have built using it: putting people into the protocols, providing physically mediated access control, reducing interaction overhead for secure wireless association, and enabling users to implement network policies.  I may also reflect briefly on the process of doing work like this that sits at the intersection of HCI and systems/networking.
  • Date: Wednesday, 15 May 2013, N1.12, Haslegrave Building @ 3.00pm
  • Speaker: Dr Hamish Carr, Leeds University
  • Title: Urban-scale LiDAR Scan and Engineering Analysis
  • Abstract: Most urban modelling to date has focussed on the conventional computer graphics pipeline that constructs individual buildings with textures for visual fidelity when rendering.  Civil engineers, however, are more interested in finite element models that allow them to predict the behaviour of a building under load.  Moreover, at the urban level, engineers rarely have the leisure of building an urban model one building at a time.  The engineering requirements can instead be addressed by performing an aerial LiDAR scan (ALS) and converting it directly to a suitable model.  We show how to perform an ALS to capture facade details in dense urban settings, and how to convert it rapidly to effective FEM models of individual buildings.
  • Date: Wednesday, 17 April 2013, N1.12, Haslegrave Building @ 2.30pm
  • Speaker: Dr Kirk Martinez, University of Southampton
  • Title: Deploying Wireless Sensor Networks in Glaciers
  • Abstract: The Glacsweb project aims to develop wireless sensor networks so they can be used extensively in the study of glaciers and climate change.  The project is in its tenth year now and has been through several cycles of hardware, software and radio communications.  The systems are now capable of surviving arctic winters and small nodes have run for two years on battery power, inside the glacier.  This seminar will provide an insight into the problems and solutions - ranging from the use of low power ARM-based Linux systems to low power radio with custom protocols.

  • Date: Wednesday, 20 March 2013, N1.12, Haslegrave Building @ 2.30pm
  • Speaker: Dr Paul Neilson, Head of Business Operations, Prozone
  • Title: An Introduction to Prozone and the Application of Analytics in Elite Football
  • Abstract: ProzoneSports pioneered the application of data and analytics within professional football and now provide products and services to over 300 football clubs across 5 continents.  In addition, Prozone also provide data and analytical solutions to a range of global media clients across broadcast, mobile, online and print.  The presentation will explain the technologies and workflows utilised to create unique data content and deliver rich and engaging performance analysis software solutions.  The Prozone business model is heavily dependent on IT and it is hoped that the presentation may identify potential areas of future collaboration with Loughborough University.
  • Date: Wednesday, 6 March 2013, N1.12, Haslegrave Building @ 3.00pm
  • Speaker: Dr Payam Barnaghi, University of Surrey
  • Title: How to make data usable on the Internet of Things
  • Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently received considerable interest from both academia and industries working on technologies to develop the future Internet.  IoT is a joint and complex discipline that requires synergetic efforts from several communities, such as the telecommunication industry, device manufacturers, semantic Web, informatics and engineering.  Much of the IoT initiative has been enabled by manufacturing low-cost and energy-efficient hardware for devices with communication capacities (eg sensors and RFID tags), the growth in wireless sensor network technologies, and the interest in integrating the physical and cyber worlds.  Data collected by different sensors and devices is usually multimodal (temperature, light, sound, video, etc) and diverse in nature (the quality of data can vary with different devices through time and it is mostly location and time dependent).  The diversity, volatility, and ubiquity make the task of processing, integrating, and interpreting real world data a challenging task.  The talk will cover some of the state-of-the-art research and developments in IoT and will present related ontology development, linked data, domain knowledge integration and AI applications for automated knowledge extraction from IoT data.
  • Date: Wednesday, 6 February 2013, N1.12, Haslegrave Building @ 3.00pm
  • Speaker: Professor Philip Willis, Professor of Computing, University of Bath
  • Title: From Video to Visual Effects:
  • Abstract: Visual effects often involve much computer modelling to create objects to be inserted into live film footage.  This is time-consuming and may require several attempts to produce what the Director had in mind.  We have been exploring an alternative approach.  This starts with video footage of plausible real-world objects, which the Director can supply or approve beforehand.  From this video we then extract a model which is both geometrically similar and also moves in a similar way.  This model can be included in the live-action scene, viewed from different angles and adjusted to suit the new scene.  Only single-viewpoint source video is used, with no need for laboratory conditions, range-finders or stereo cameras.  The talk will be illustrated with two very different models, one of trees moving in the wind and another of moving water surfaces combined and re-rendered to make various different scences.
  • Date: Wednesday, 30 January 2013, N1.12, Haslegrave Building @ 2.00pm
  • Speaker: Dr Richard Clegg, UCL, London
  • Title: TARDIS - reallocating ISP traffic in time and space
  • Abstract: TARDIS (Traffic Assignment and Retiming Dynamics with Inherent Stability) is a system which allows network operators to delay or redirect traffic in order to reduce their transit bills.  Traffic shifts in space, between alternate locations, and time, to later periods, are treated in a unified and consistent manner.  An algorithm is given for calculating the cost of traffic across both dimensions which correctly accounts for transit billing including the widely used 95th percentile method.  TARDIS is then formulated as dynamical system that determines how best to allocate traffic in space and time in order to minimise transit costs.  A continuous approximation of this system is proved to be stable.  TARDIS is evaluated through data driven traces from two different networks and is shown to reduce provider transit bills under a wide variety of conditions.
  • Date: Wednesday, 9 January 2013, N1.12, Haslegrave Building @ 3.00pm
  • Speaker: Dr Keshav Dahal, Reader in Computational Intelligence, University of Bradford
  • Title: Improving Metaheuristic Performance by Evolving Multi-objective Functions
  • Abstract: This talk will present some of the recent development in multi-objective approaches for solving complex scheduling problems.  The first part of the talk will investigate multi-objective and weighted single objective approaches to a real world workforce scheduling problem.  We show that multi-objective genetic algorithms can create solutions whose fitness is close to that of the solution created by the genetic algorithms using weighted sum objectives even though the multi-objective approaches know nothing of the weights.  In second part of the talk will discuss the variable fitness function approach to enhance the metaheuristic approaches by evolving weights for each of the multiple objectives.  We show  that the variable fitness function approach significantly improves performance of constructive and variable neighbourhood search approaches on workforce scheduling problem instances.
  • Date: Friday, 19 October 2012, N1.12, Haslegrave Building @ 2.00pm
  • Speaker: Professor Philip Scarf, Associate Dean, Research and Innovation, University of Salford
  • Title: Statistical modelling in sport
  • Abstract: This talk considers how modelling can be used to shed light on a variety of sporting problems.  We look at:
  1. How the timing of a declaration in the third innings of a test match can be "optimised"
  2. Route choice in mountain running events and an empirical basis for Naismith's rule
  3. Actions in a football match which contribute to the final result of the game
  4. How we might rank players in test cricket putting batting and bowling contributions on the same scale
  5. Optimum strategy in the track
  6. Tournament design
  • Date: Wednesday,  October 2012, N1.12, Haslegrave Building @ 3.00pm
  • Speaker: Dr Caroline Jay, University of Manchester
  • Title: Mind the gaps: are the periods between events the key to understanding how people perceive and interact with digital information?
  • Abstract: Precisely how humans experience time is not clear, but we know that the relative timing of two events, down to a fraction of a second, makes a huge difference to the way stimuli are perceived.  We also know that the duration of many cognitive and motor processes is predictable.  How people perceive and respond to latency, for example, is well understood.  This seminar asks: can we harness this knowledge of the perceptual system to determine how to provide digital information, and understand how users will respond to it?  I discuss research from two domains - Virtual Environments and the Web - which indicates that considering the time between events, in particular, can help us to both understand and improved the user experience.
  • Date: Wednesday, 19 September 2012, N112, Haslegrave Building @ 1.00pm
  • Speaker: Dr Gabor Barton, Reader in Biomechanics, Liverpool John Moores University
  • Title: Virtual Rehabilitation in Cerebral Palsy: CAREN and the Goblin Post Office
  • Abstract: Virtual reality is a computer generated simulation of the real world in which the user can interact with a virtual environment through a human-machine interface (Holden, 2005). There is a growing interest in applying virtual reality in a movement rehabilitation context because a computer based reactive environment provides the key elements of motor learning - repetition, feedback, and motivation (Rizzo et al., 2002). There is evidence that problems resulting from brain damage improve in response to specific exercises. Virtual reality based computer games can focus on control of specific movements, and provide enhanced motivation for continuing these training exercises. This talk presents results of a project in which a series of studies were conducted both with healthy controls and children with CP aiming to improved selective movement control of the core and consequential improvement of movement function. Quantification of game performance ranged from simple methods of movement variability to determination of the maximal settled speed which develops as a result of an adaptive algorithm adjusting forward speed of the games.
  • Date: Monday, 3 September 2012, N112, Haslegrave Building @ 3.00pm
  • Speaker: Professor Manfred Droste, Universität Leipzig, Germany
  • Title: Weighted Automata and Quantitative Logics
  • Abstract: In automata theory, a classical result of Buchi-Elgot-Trakhtenbrot states that the recognizable languages are precisely the ones definable by sentences of monadic second order logic. We will present a generalization of this result to the context of weighted automata. A weighted automaton is a classical non-deterministic automaton in which each transition carries a weight describing e.g. the resources used for its execution, the length of time needed, or its reliability. The behaviour (language) of such a weighted automaton is a function associating to each word the weight of its execution. We develop syntax and semantics of a quantitative logic; the semantics counts 'how often' a formula is true. Our main results show that if the weights are taken either in an arbitrary semiring or in an arbitrary bounded lattice then the behaviours of weighted automata are precisely the functions definable by sentences of our quantitative logic. The methods also apply to recent quantitative automata model of Henzinger et al. where weights of paths are determined, e.g., as the average of the weights of the path's transitions. Buchi's result follows by considering the classical Boolean algebra {0,1).  Joint work with Paul Gastin (ENS Cachan), Heiko Vogler (TU Dresden), resp. Ingmar Meinecke (Leipzig).