Distinguished Seminar Series
Our Distinguished Seminar Series brings some of the leading thinkers in computing and communications to Lancaster to share their cutting edge research.
All are welcome to join us for the seminars, which take place throughout the academic year.
Recent events:
Wednesday 9th March 2016
Professor Jon Crowcroft, Marconi Professor, University of Cambridge
Systems at Scale
In this talk, I'll present a range of work in the computer lab on building next generation cloud, data center and rack scale systems for the future, including: Unikernels, type safe, library operating systems for cloud computing; qjump: a bounded latency data center protocol stack; and CAND, a flexible rack scale network fabric.
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Monday 22nd February 2016
Abigail Sellen, Principal Scientist, MSR
Symbiotic Design
The last few years have witnessed a resurgence in the idea of the "smart" machine, much of it spurred on by recent advancements in AI, computer vision, robotics, machine learning and natural language processing. Computer systems that can act on our behalf, understand our intentions, and converse with us in human-like ways have once again taken hold of our collective imagination. But how realistic are these visions, and what does all of this mean for HCI? In this talk I will use some recent examples of designing and building "smart" technologies to argue that rather than aiming to build systems which replace human capabilities, we need to design systems that work in partnership with users. Further, building on Licklider's notion of human-computer symbiosis, we need to engage in a process of "symbiotic design" whereby user behaviour is made intelligible to machines and machines are made intelligible to users.
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Wednesday 2nd December 2015
Professor Nobuko Yoshida, Imperial College London
Multiparty Session Types and their Applications
We give a summary of our recent research developments on multiparty session types for verifying distributed and concurrent programs, including our collaborations with industry partners and NSF-funded project (Ocean Observatories Initiatives). The OOI provides an ultra large-scale cyberinfrustracture (OOI CI) for 25-30 years of sustained ocean measurements to study climate variability, ocean circulation and ecosystem dynamics. We shall first talk how Robin Milner, Kohei Honda and Yoshida started collaborations with industry to develop a web service protocol description language called Scribble and discovered the theory of multiparty session types through the collaborations with Red Hat. We then talk about the recent developments in Scribble and the runtime session monitoring framework used in the OOI and verifications of a network protocol. Finally we summarise our recent results and applications using Multiparty Session Types.
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Thursday 12th November 2015
Professor Mischa Dohler, King's College London
“Will 5G enable the Internet of Things?”
Based on my entrepreneurial experience with Worldsensing as well as academic research over past years, I will review the possibility of a cellular system to enable the connectivity needed for the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). I will discuss the tradeoff between different connectivity technologies, such as low-power short-range, low-power wide-area and cellular systems. I will discuss why the low-power approach was wrong all along, and why systems like Zigbee will shortly be discontinued. I will then review the work we do at King’s on machine-to-machine (M2M) in 5G, involving novel approaches to the random access channel as well as the decoupling of up and downlinks (which recently won us the Best Paper Award at Globecom 2014).
