|
2005 Scholars
Some of the students are sponsored together with the
Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology.
 Abigail Durrant
University of Surrey, United Kingdom
Supervisor: Prof. David Frohlich
Microsoft Research supervisor: Dr Abigail Sellen
Research title: Designing photographic experiences to support
autobiographical memory
Research summary: Surprisingly little is known about the role of
photographs in remembering life events. This project will examine this
issue in relation to current theory in photography and memory, and use
the findings to design new ways of capturing and consuming photographs.
 Alessandro Duminuco
Institut Eurécom, France
Supervisor: Prof. Ernst Biersack
Microsoft Research supervisor: Pablo Rodriguez Rodriguez
Research title: A peer-to-peer based file backup system
Research summary: Peer-to-Peer systems have the interesting property
of self-scaling, which means that the amount of resources grows with the
number of participants. While there exist already a large number P2P
systems for file sharing, very little work has been done in the area of
using P2P systems for file backup. Typically, file back-up is done in a
purely centralized manner. Such an organization requires a large amount
of resources (disks, tape robot) and also some human intervention. On
the other hand there is an increasing number of PCs each equipped with a
local disk with a capacity of tens of Giga Bytes. The goal of the thesis
is to investigate how the local disks of a large number of PCs can be
organized in such a manner as to allow a highly reliable file back-up
system. The thesis will first study existing approaches for distributed
file backup and then design and implement its own backup system. It is
envisioned to distribute each file that is backed up over multiple
machines and to use error correcting codes for loss recovery. In order
to evaluate the different design choices, a system model (machine
availability, etc) needs to be defined and a performance evaluation will
be carried out.
 Alexander Spengler
Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6), France
Supervisor: Prof. Patrick Gallinari
Co-supervisor: Prof. Bernhard Schölkopf, Max Planck Institute for
Biological Cybernetics
Research title: Machine learning with structured data. Application to
XML document transformation
Research summary: Many domains and applications are concerned with
complex data composed of elementary components which are linked
according to some structural or logical organisation. In the text
domain, for instance, the diffusion of structured data formats like XML
and HTML has considerably changed the fields of information retrieval
and information extraction. Other application domains concerned with
structured data include biology, image processing, multimedia (video),
natural language processing, social networks and many more. The aim of
this thesis is to investigate the potential of different families of
statistical learning methods for handling structured data and to derive
and analyse new methods for different data mining tasks (including
generic tasks like classification and clustering of structured data as
well as problems where transformations between structured
representations need to be learned). The primary field of application
for the experiments will be that of semi-structured documents (XML
textual documents for example). Semi-structured documents are defined by
both their content and their logical structure. In order to effectively
mine these documents either type of information needs to be
incorporated. Compared to other domains in which the data is made up of
only one of the two types, this is a much more complex task.
 Andrew Weeks
University of York, United Kingdom
Supervisor: Prof. Susan Stepney
Research title: Artificial chemical reaction networks for
meta-heuristic search
Research summary: The research aim is to develop an artificial
chemical reaction network framework that can be used as a robust
constructive computational search meta-heuristic, and apply it to
complicated constructive search problems, such as proof discovery. The
strategy is to investigate the relationship between complex chemical
reaction pathways and meta-heuristic search, in particular (i) the role
of auto-catalytic networks and hyper-cycles in amplifying good solutions,
and self organising the search process; (ii) the workings of catalysis,
to develop endogenous ‘embodied’ techniques for searching for complex
artefact construction pathways; (iii) the role of equilibrium and
non-equilibrium chemical processes in the construction approach, in
particular, computational analogues of the appropriate free energy and
enthalpy concepts; (iv) the ‘back reaction’ concept, as an indirect way
of discovering and constructing novel ‘reactants’.
 Aziem Chawdhary
Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
Supervisor: Prof. Peter O’Hearn
Microsoft Research supervisor: Dr Byron Cook
Research title: Automatic program analysis and verification with
separation logic
Research summary: There have recently been major advances in the
mechanical verification of software, perhaps most strikingly exemplified
by Microsoft’s SLAM model checker. However, current software model
checkers have only rudimentary treatments of heap-intensive properties
and of concurrency. Separation logic is a recent theoretical development
which provides a fresh approach to reasoning about the heap and about
concurrency. The purpose of this project is to investigate uses of
separation logic in automatic verification. The current plan is to
start, not from a generalist position, but by building a tool oriented
to specific code targets.
  Brendan Sheehan
University College Dublin, Ireland
Supervisor: Dr Aaron Quigley
Co-supervisor: Prof. Paddy Nixon
Research title: Model driven visualisation of large scale relational
networks
Research summary: The visualisation of relational data has thus far
been largely concerned with handling small to medium size collections of
data. In the case of large scale relational networks the convention of
using nodes and edges is no longer practical. The simple reason for this
is that the resolution of the screen provides a restriction on how many
items of data can be displayed simultaneously. While techniques can be
developed to provide visualisations of such networks for the purposes of
exposition of some known relationship or where the frame provided by a
well defined question simplifies the visualisation problem, the question
of visualisation for purely exploratory purposes remains. Using
optimisation techniques to specify constraints on how the underlying
data is visualised, tools will be developed to allow the user to
arbitrarily introduce and retract parameters so as to impose
hypothetical models on the visualisation to reveal unanticipated
structure in the data. Initial research will look into how various graph
abstraction techniques handle multidimensional data. Particular emphasis
is given to geometric methods. For example how quadtree or Voronoi
partitioning of the underlying data space deals with various clustering
schemes such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Multidimensional
Scaling (MDS) and non-linear clustering methods such as Kohonen networks
will be analysed.
 Brian Amberg
Universität Basel, Switzerland
Supervisor: Prof. Thomas Vetter
Microsoft Research supervisor: Prof. Andrew Blake
Research title: Real time editing of face expressions in video
streams
Research summary: The aim of this PhD project is the extraction and
manipulation of facial expressions in video streams. To achieve this, an
expression model of the subject in the video stream will be built. This
model is fitted to the stream in order to extract expression, pose and
lightning conditions. The model will be able to synthesise new
expressions from the parameter set. This allows to render a modified
face back into the video stream, enabling applications like expression
change, exaggeration, or diminution. To achieve this aim several
obstacles from different fields have to be overcome. 1) An expression
model is needed that separates identity from expression. 2) Real time
fitting of the model to the video stream can only be achieved by
combining a multitude of methods on different scales of the problem.
Efficient tracking of the ROI can reduce the search space by focusing on
parts of each frame. Time and space coherence in a video sequence must
be exploited to achieve a speedup against single frame operations. A
probabilistic model of facial deformations must be learned to predict
the parameter set for future frames. 3) Rendering the modified face
seamlessly into a video stream requires the removal of the existing face
and in painting of background regions that were occluded in the original
image. Additionally techniques for the smoothing of cut-out edges are
needed to remove artefacts.
 Damian Serrano-Garcia
Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
Supervisor: Prof. Marta Patiño-Martínez
Research title: High performance database replication for storage
area networks
Research summary: New developments in database replication protocols
and new architectures such as system and storage area networks (SANs)
have changed dramatically the limits of the scalability for eager
database replication. In this project Damien will build upon these
developments to produce a highly scalable replicated database. SANs will
be exploited to attain low overhead replica coordination. New
correctness criteria such as 1-copy snapshot isolation will be exploited
to enhance scalability by removing read-write conflicts. Finally,
autonomic reconfiguration and optimisation will be exploited to maximise
performance.
 Dan Dobre
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Supervisor: Prof. Neeraj Suri
Research title: Group communication protocols & replication for web
services
Research summary: The project focus is on exploiting different
properties of message exchange patterns at the communication/application
level to derive fault-tolerant atomic broadcast protocols facilitating
fast message delivery. Currently, Dan is investigating the combined
application of distinct oracles (e.g., a leader and a weak atomic
broadcast oracle) to achieve a better coverage with respect to liveness
and/or to expedite message delivery. An interesting issue is to what
extent such ‘hybrid’ protocols meet the lower bound on delivery latency
in the normal case. Eventually the protocols will be migrated from the
static/crash model to dynamic/byzantine models.
 Daniele Quercia
University College London, United Kingdom
Supervisor: Dr Stephen Hailes
Co-supervisor: Licia Capra
Research title: Distributed trust models for pervasive computing
Research summary: Pervasive computing environments must be able to
provide resources and services without relying on a centralised
infrastructure. This would not be possible in the absence of appropriate
security mechanisms. Fundamental to the creation of security are
mechanisms for assigning trust to different devices: without trust,
devices cannot collaborate effectively, and without collaboration, the
pervasive computing vision cannot be made a reality. Given the
importance of this area, researchers have been designing distributed
trust models for some time. However, the focus of such work has usually
been on the creation of very general trust-based frameworks that are
sufficiently imprecise that they are both difficult to apply and almost
impossible to falsify in real-life scenarios. In contrast, the proposed research
takes a more rigorously scientific
approach. It is comprised of the following steps: (i) select a set of
concrete real-life scenarios that both make use of pervasive devices and
benefit from a computational trust framework; (ii) deduce and formalise
the trust challenges posed by each scenario (iii) design computational
models that address those trust challenges (iv) evaluate these models
both qualitatively and quantitatively against criteria drawn from the
initial domain-specific investigation.
 David Stynes
University College Cork, Ireland
Supervisor: Dr Ken Brown
Microsoft Research supervisor: Dr Youssef Hamadi
Research title: Adversarial constraint solving
Research summary: The aim of the research is the combination of
constraint satisfaction techniques with artificial intelligence game
playing and/or mathematical game theory techniques to tackle
combinatorial problems in which two or more self-motivated agents with
different goals must produce a joint solution.
 Fabien Corblin
Université Joseph Fourier, France
Supervisor: Prof. Laurent Trilling
Co-supervisor: Dr Éric Fanchon, CEA-CNRS
Microsoft Research supervisor: Dr Youssef Hamadi
Research title: Modelling, inference and simulation of biological
networks using constraint logic programming (CLP)
Research summary: Computer tools are needed in systems biology to
analyse qualitatively the dynamics of interaction networks, to discover
the organisation of the cell’s molecular component. In this context,
Fabien’s
objective is to develop a general tool based on a unique specification
allowing the exploration of the model’s parameters’ and behaviours’
properties, by a mix of inference and simulation. This work is based on
the multi-valued asynchronous networks proposed by R. Thomas and E. Snoussi (1989, 1993). This formalism, which can be seen as a discrete
abstraction of a special class of piecewise affine differential
equations, allows a qualitative analysis of the dynamic behaviour of
such systems. This formalism has been recently extended by de Jong et
al. (2004) to take into account trajectories which are confined in the
neighbourhood of discretisation thresholds (‘sliding modes’). The goal
of this research is to investigate how a formal description of such a biological
switching network can be exploited through an implementation in CLP
(Constraint Logic Programming) in order to obtain the variety of
functionalities desired. This tool will be applied to the construction
of several biological networks.
 Florian Schroff
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Supervisor: Andrew Zisserman
Microsoft Research Supervisor: Antonio Criminisi
Research title: Multi-Class Image Interrogator
Research summary: The first part of this project focused on object recognition itself, more specifically segmentation in the sense of assigning a class-label to each pixel in the image.
The second part of the project focuses on "Harvesting Image Databases from the Web". The goal is to retrieve large numbers of images form the web for a specified object class. The user only has to specify the object-class and no further user interaction is required. This work returns images for a specified object class with higher precision than common image search engines.
Further focus lies in multi-class object recognition employing hierarchical models. In order to be scalable to many object classes it seems to be very important to share features between object classes. This idea will be investigated together with the related idea of using hierarchical models.
Hierarchical models could provide a generic mean to share more complicated high level features. Which kind of hierarchy is useful in the object recognition domain, e.g. hierarchies of object classes, parts that assemble an object class, or just abstract features, will be analysed.
 Georg Weissenbacher
ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Supervisor: Prof. Daniel Kröning
Microsoft Research supervisor: Prof. Sir Tony Hoare
Research title: Formal verification techniques for code optimisation
Research summary: Recent efforts like Tony Hoare’s Verifying Compiler
Grand Challenge suggest that there is a consensus in the formal
verification community that compilers and formal verification tools will
eventually coalesce. In compilers, code optimisation is often based on
relatively imprecise (conservative) results of light-weight analysis
algorithms, while formal verification tools typically perform less
efficient but significantly more accurate analyses. Georg will investigate
how the detailed information that is gained by using formal verification
techniques can be used to increase efficiency as well as quality of the
code generated by compilers.
 Gilles
Raymond
Laboratoire d’Informatique de Robotique et de Micro-électronique de
Montpellier, France
Supervisors: Prof. Joël Quinqueton and Dr Christian
Bessière
Microsoft Research supervisor: Dr Youssef Hamadi
Research title: Semi-automatic agents for constraint
programming.
Research summary: Problems containing combinatorial
subparts are at the heart of computational challenges in areas as
diverse as bioinformatics and e-commerce. Constraint technology has been
recognised as a very promising technology for meeting those challenges.
However, the lack of highly qualified personnel is a bottleneck to the
spread of this technology in the industrial world. We propose to address
this issue by building semi-automatic agents that will learn constraint
programs from information provided by the user in his high level
language and not directly in the constraints formalism. Such agents will
work with the customer to understand the problem and to represent it as
a constraint program that returns appropriate solutions.
 Giorgio Gianforme
Università Roma Tre, Italy
Supervisor: Prof. Paolo Atzeni
Research title: Schema and data mapping and transformation:
foundations and application
Research summary: Many application settings involve the need to
exchange information between heterogeneous frameworks. In the database
world, different systems are often used to handle data, following
different models, and therefore data and their
description need to be translated from one to another. Model Management is a high
level-approach to solving such meta data problems. A major operator in
model management is ModelGen, which translates schemas from a source to
a target model. Given a source data model M1 (e.g., the ER model), a
target data model M2 (e.g., SQL DDL or XML Schema), and a source schema
S1 expressed in M1, ModelGen generates a target schema S2 in M2. The
current results in the ModelGen project of the database group of
‘Università Roma Tre’ can be the basis for various research challenges.
Giorgio’s research will consider three main directions: First, there is the need for a formal support to
the validity of the approach (correctness and completeness); second, the
customisation of the translations has to be studied, both at the schema
and at the instance level; third, it will be important to study the
validity and the adaptation of the approach to specific application
domains, in cross-disciplinary settings.
 Kai Kohlhoff
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Supervisor: Dr Michele Vendruscolo
Co-supervisor: Prof. Martin Zacharias, International University Bremen
Research title: Experimental and computational studies of free energy
landscapes for protein aggregation
Research summary: Deposits of misfolded proteins in cells or in
intracellular space play a significant role in a number of severe
medical disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The underlying
phenomena that cause misfolding and the formation of protein aggregates
and amyloid fibrils are not yet well understood. Using data from NMR and
X-ray crystallography techniques, Kai is interested in combining
experimental measurements with computational methods to improve speed
and detail of protein folding simulations. Identifying and applying new
constraints to the conformational space of a protein will help finding
the correct folding pathway on a protein’s free energy surface.
 Konrad Kieling
Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Supervisor: Dr Jens S. Eisert
Co-supervisor: Dr Martin
Plenio
Research title: Linear optical quantum computing: novel architectures and computational assessment of performance
Research summary: Among the different proposals for realization of quantum computation hardware, linear optical schemes are attractive due to simplicity of the required resources and only little decoherence. Unfortunately, non-unit success probabilities of the elementary gates are inherent in this scheme.
In this project the potentials and limits of the linear optics toolbox will be investigated in the context of resource preparation for one-way computation. Further, general properties of the gates that can be built with these ingredients will be studied. With less restrictive rules the problems of the scheme being probabilistic may be overcome. Therefore, possible extensions will be discussed, e.g. atoms that are coupled to the light field by means of cavities.
 Loïc Fejoz
INRIA Lorraine (LORIA), France
Supervisor: Dr Stephan Merz
Microsoft Research supervisor: Dr Tim Harris
Research title: Provably correct lock-free data structures
Research summary: The aim of this thesis is to design a method for
the development and verification of algorithms working on lock-free data
structures. The idea will be to start with a formal behavioural
specification of the data structure in a sequential setting and derive
an implementation that can be used in concurrent applications via a
series of refinement steps. These implementations are intended to be
more efficient for modern hardware and software than traditional
algorithms relying on central locks to protect concurrent modifications.
 Michael Kaisser
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Supervisor: Prof. Bonnie Webber
Research title: Enlisting syntactic and semantic resources for
web-based question answering and fact extraction
Research summary: Michael Kaisser’s research challenge is the
possibility of more direct Natural Language access to the vast sea of
information expressed in Natural Language on the web. Specifically, he
is investigating how to search the web for facts. He wants to develop a
coherent linguistic approach to this task by exploiting (wherever
possible) freely available linguistic tools and resources. His research
area overlaps with what is usually called ‘Question Answering’. While
common search engines are keyword-based, a web search that starts with a
question is much more specific and provides more information that can be
used when searching for relevant answers or web sites that contain these
answers: Understanding a question syntactically and semantically can
help to understand which results are relevant to a user’s search and
which are not.
 Peter Buchlovsky
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Supervisor: Dr Timothy Griffin
Co-supervisor: Prof. Alan Mycroft
Microsoft Research supervisor: Dr Nick Benton
Research title: Computational effects and continuation-passing style
Research summary: Peter aims to analyse properties of programs that
use unusual control operators such as call/cc and various backtracking
primitives. The approach he uses is to transform programs into
continuation-passing style. The types of transformed programs have a
particular form which captures the control behaviour of the program.
Inspecting the types will allow reasoning about control flow and
refining models of backtracking programs. On the practical side, Peter
expects to obtain provably correct program transformations that can be used in the
implementation of optimising compilers.
 Philippe-Alexandre Pouille
Institut Curie, France
Supervisor: Dr Emmanuel Farge
Research title: In silico model for self-organised embryogenesis
mechano-genetics interplay
Research summary: The genetic control of embryonic morphogenetic
movements at gastrulation is better and better described in
developmental biology, especially in the early drosophila embryo.
However, the relationship between genetically controlled active single
cells shape changes and migration, and the consecutive generation of the
multi-cellular ‘macroscopic’ embryonic phenotype remains to be
quantitatively investigated. As well as the precise biomechanics leading
to feedback mechanical induction of developmental gene expression
modulation in response to these morphogenetic movements. The research
project consists in generating a biomechanical in silico viscoelastic
multi-cellular model of the embryonic active and reactive tissues, to
study such self-organised embryogenesis mechano-genetic interplay
participating to embryonic mechanical morphing and development.
 Robert Reitmeier
The University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
Supervisor: Dr Thorsten Altenkirch
Microsoft Research supervisor: Dr Simon Peyton-Jones
Research title: Dependent types for Haskell
Research summary: Dependent types are types expressed in terms of
data, explicitly relating their inhabitants to that data. As such, they
enable the programmer to express more of what matters about data. While
conventional type systems allow to validate programs with respect
to a fixed set of criteria, dependent types are much more flexible, they
realise a continuum of precision from the basic assertions we are used
to expect from types up to a complete specification of the program’s
behaviour. Haskell is a modern functional programming language with a
static type system. Haskell, or a future language similar to Haskell,
could significantly benefit by exploiting dependent types. This belief
is supported by the breadth of recent research in the Haskell community
seeking to approximate aspects of dependency within its existing type
system. Robert plans to explore the potential of dependent types for
Haskell by implementing and investigating a programming language which
extends Haskell by dependent types.
 Stewart Hickey
University of Limerick, Ireland
Supervisor: Dr Colin Fitzpatrick
Research title: Technologies for sustainable ICT
Research summary: When evaluating the environmental performance of
electronic products it is very important to consider all aspects of
their life cycle. This ensures that any action to improve the
performance contributes to the overall reduction in environmental impact
and avoids the transfer of burdens from one life cycle phase to another.
Most often with electronic products it is the Use Phase of the life
cycle that is most environmentally damaging. This project will examine
the life cycle of PC’s with an emphasis on the use phase. More
specifically it will focus on the use of networks and software in
reducing environmental impacts in a market friendly fashion.
 Tony O'Donovan
University College Cork, Ireland
Supervisor: Prof. Cormac Sreenan
Research title:
Research in wireless sensor networks
Research summary: Wireless sensor networks are collections of
autonomous devices (nodes) with computational, sensing and wireless
communication capabilities. Tony's research will
focus on the use of wireless sensor networks in the area of medical
informatics. Most wireless sensor network research involves networks of
hundreds or thousands of nodes and the difficulties entailed with
networks of this scale. This project on the other hand, will be concerned with
the issue of coordinating a small number of sensors to detect medical
emergencies in a low latency manner, possibly coupled with actuators to
mitigate the effects of the emergency condition. The main challenge will
be achieving close to 100% reliable communication and ensuring the
system is robust enough for use as a medical device.
back to top
|
