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Student team heading to Germany following selection to compete in Audi’s Autonomous Driving Competition
‘DriverLeics’ are one of only ten teams chosen from universities across Europe to take part in the 2018 competition kicking off on Tuesday 12 June
A bird’s eye view
Photos of Leicester’s landmarks taken by PhD student Rafael Ktistakis
Leicester passes 5 million readers milestone on The Conversation
With topics ranging from Facebook data to Julius Caesar, to heart attack risk factors and how colour can help us communicate, Leicester experts have contributed a wide variety of opinion articles to the platform
An ERC Consolidator Grant for Nir Piterman
We are delighted to announce that Nir Piterman has just been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant!
The DSynMA grant, worth €1,872,272, will take distributed synthesis to this new frontier by considering novel interaction and communication concepts that would create an adaptable framework of correct-by-construction application of collaborating devices.
Grant abstract:
Computing is changing from living on our desktops and in dedicated devices to being everywhere. In phones, sensors, appliances, and robots – computers (from now on devices) are everywhere and affecting all aspects of our lives. The techniques to make them safe and reliable are investigated and are starting to emerge and consolidate. However, these techniques enable devices to work in isolation or co-exist. We currently do not have techniques that enable development of real autonomous collaboration between devices. Such techniques will revolutionize all usage of devices and, as consequence, our lives. Manufacturing, supply chain, transportation, infrastructures, and earth- and space exploration would all transform using techniques that enable development of collaborating devices.
When considering isolated (and co-existing) devices, reactive synthesis – automatic production of plans from high level specification – is emerging as a viable tool for the development of robots and reactive software. This is especially important in the context of safety-critical systems, where assurances are required and systems need to have guarantees on performance. The techniques that are developed today to support robust, assured, reliable, and adaptive devices rely on a major change in focus of reactive synthesis. The revolution of correct-by-construction systems from specifications is occurring and is being pushed forward.
However, to take this approach forward to work also for real collaboration between devices the theoretical frameworks that will enable distributed synthesis are required. Such foundations will enable the correct-by-construction revolution to unleash its potential and allow a multiplicative increase of utility by cooperative computation.
A Prestigious Machine Learning Publication by Leandro Minku
Congratulations to Leandro Minku, whose paper "A Systematic Study of Online Class Imbalance Learning with Concept Drift" has recently been accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems!
