Internal Conference & Industrial Engagement Event 2015

Professor Philip Wadler, Chair of Theoretical Computer Science Title: “The Inevitable Coincidence: A Basis for Concurrency and Distribution”

The principle of Propositions as Types is an inevitable coincidence: independently formulated notions of logic and computation turn out to be identical. Under it, propositions correspond to types, proofs to programs, and simplification of proofs corresponds to evaluation of programs. It is a robust notion, adapting to almost all areas of computation, but with one important exception: concurrency! I will explain what Propositions as Types means, why it is important, and why concurrency and distribution may at last be about to benefit from this approach. And I will explain how this links to a broader research effort on extending the benefits of types to communication by introducing session types.

Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. He is an ACM Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, past chair of ACM SIGPLAN, past holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship, and a winner of the POPL Most Influential Paper Award. Previously, he worked or studied at Stanford, Xerox Parc, CMU, Oxford, Chalmers, Glasgow, Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs, and visited as a guest professor in Copenhagen, Sydney, and Paris. He has an h-index of 60, with more than 18,000 citations to his work according to Google Scholar. He contributed to the designs of Haskell, Java, and XQuery, and is a co-author of Introduction to Functional Programming (Prentice Hall, 1988), XQuery from the Experts (Addison Wesley, 2004) and Generics and Collections in Java (O’Reilly, 2006). He has delivered invited talks in locations ranging from Aizu to Zurich.

Professor Steve Renals, Chair of Speech Techology Title: “(Deep) Neural Networks for Speech Recognition”

Neural networks have become a very hot topic in speech technology, with recent work on neural network acoustic and language modelling extending the state-of-the-art, and attracting an extraordinary amount of interest. This talk will give an overview of current work in the area, making links with work done since the late 1980s, while showing what is new. In particular, I’ll discuss how neural networks can learn suitable representations for distant speech recognition based on multichannel input and approaches to adapting neural networks to different domains, speakers, or acoustic conditions. I’ll finish by talking about some current challenges that could drive future work in neural networks for speech recognition.

Steve Renals is professor of Speech Technology and director of the Institute for Language, Cognition, and Communication in the School of Informatics, at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, he was director of the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR). He received a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Sheffield in 1986, an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1987, and a PhD in Speech Recognition and Neural Networks, also from Edinburgh, in 1990. From 1991-92 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), Berkeley, and was then an EPSRC postdoctoral fellow in Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge (1992-94). From 1994-2003 he was lecturer, then reader, in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, moving to Edinburgh in 2003. He has over 200 publications in speech and language processing, and has led several large projects in the field, including EPSRC Programme Grant Natural Speech Technology and the AMI and AMIDA Integrated Projects. He is a senior area editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing and a member of the ISCA Advisory Council. He is a fellow of the IEEE, and a member of ISCA and of the ACM.

Professor Nigel Topham, Chair of Computer Systems Title: “Many Cores Make Light Work”

The central idea behind pervasive parallelism is that parallel computing is a key enabling technology for a wide variety of future computing platforms. To be truly pervasive it must enable not only the obvious high-end compute platforms, but also find widespread use in deeply embedded devices. This talk begins with a brief overview of diverse strands of parallel systems research in the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. We then discuss the silicon technology trends that are shaping the evolution of next-generation embedded systems, and fuelling the impetus for many-core embedded systems. We then present a disruptive example of many-core embedded computing to illustrate the principles and justify the claim that many-core architectures have a key role to play in low-power and mobile computing. Our example is high-bandwidth optical wireless communication (OWC), an emerging application that is known for its high computational requirements, similar to those found in software-defined radio. In order to facilitate the deployment of OWC in embedded devices supporting the Internet of Things (IoT), it must be delivered within a small energy envelope. This talk outlines the challenges posed by OWC in this context, and describes how current silicon trends and OWC challenges have shaped the design of a 32-core chip recently implemented by the PASTA research group in the School of Informatics at Edinburgh.