Events
Explore upcoming seminars, guest lectures, workshops, and other events hosted by the School of Computing Science.
Our events bring together students, researchers, industry partners, and the wider community to share ideas, showcase research, and foster collaboration.
This Week’s EventsAll Upcoming EventsPast EventsWebapp
This Week’s Events
Single-Agent Stability in Hedonic Games with Constrained Coalition Sizes.
Group: Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA)
Speaker: Adam Dunajski, University of Edinburgh
Date: 13 October, 2026
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: 422 Sir Alwyn Williams (SAWB), University of Glasgow
| Hedonic games are coalition formation games where agents form disjoint coalitions (groups) and each agent's utility depends only on the other agents within their group. We study stability in additively separable hedonic games where coalition sizes have to respect a fixed lower and upper bound. We consider four classic notions of stability based on single-agent deviations, namely, Nash stability, individual stability, contractual Nash stability, and contractual individual stability. For each stability notion, we consider two variants: in one, the coalition left behind by a deviator must still be of size at least the lower bound, and in the other there is no such constraint. This talk will introduce the above model, and provide a full picture of the existence of stable outcomes with respect to given parameters for the lower and upper bounds. Additionally, when there are only upper bounds on coalition sizes, we fully characterize the computational complexity of the associated existence problem, and for particular bounds we obtain polynomial-time algorithms for constructing stable outcomes. This is joint work with Martin Bullinger, Edith Elkind, and Matan Gilboa, and appeared in the proceedings of SAGT. Full paper available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12641 |
Mixed Choices: Taming Failures with Session Types in Erlang Processes
Group: Programming Languages at University of Glasgow (PLUG)
Speaker: Laura Voinea, University of Glasgow
Date: 14 October, 2026
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: F121 Lilybank Gardens and Online
Mixed Choices: Taming Failures with Session Types in Erlang Processes
Distributed systems fail. Processes time out. Messages cross in flight. And yet, these cases are often handled ad hoc in runtime code rather than made explicit in the protocol description. In this talk, we will show how multiparty session types, a type-based way of specifying communication protocols between interacting processes, can be extended with mixed choice to model the messy reality of asynchronous distributed systems: timeouts, exceptions, and race conditions between participants. We will then walk through our tool, which takes a protocol specification, validates it, and generates Erlang gen_statem code from it. The result is a workflow that makes protocol structure explicit and turns it into runnable Erlang/OTP state machines, instead of relying on informal concurrency logic. The generated code inherits the guarantees of the underlying theory, such as progress.
This is a practice talk for Lambda World 2026, based on our OOPSLA 2026 paper: Mixed Choice in Asynchronous Multiparty Session Types, https://doi.org/10.1145/3798256
GIST Seminar - PhD Introductions
Group: Human Computer Interaction (GIST)
Speaker: PhD Students
Date: 15 October, 2026
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Location: SAWB 423 and Zoom: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/84166272616?pwd=AfIAjDVABkfl0gRatrryb3uaxBWoDj.1
🗓 Date: 15th October 2026 (Thursday)
Upcoming events
Single-Agent Stability in Hedonic Games with Constrained Coalition Sizes.
Group: Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA)
Speaker: Adam Dunajski, University of Edinburgh
Date: 13 October, 2026
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: 422 Sir Alwyn Williams (SAWB), University of Glasgow
| Hedonic games are coalition formation games where agents form disjoint coalitions (groups) and each agent's utility depends only on the other agents within their group. We study stability in additively separable hedonic games where coalition sizes have to respect a fixed lower and upper bound. We consider four classic notions of stability based on single-agent deviations, namely, Nash stability, individual stability, contractual Nash stability, and contractual individual stability. For each stability notion, we consider two variants: in one, the coalition left behind by a deviator must still be of size at least the lower bound, and in the other there is no such constraint. This talk will introduce the above model, and provide a full picture of the existence of stable outcomes with respect to given parameters for the lower and upper bounds. Additionally, when there are only upper bounds on coalition sizes, we fully characterize the computational complexity of the associated existence problem, and for particular bounds we obtain polynomial-time algorithms for constructing stable outcomes. This is joint work with Martin Bullinger, Edith Elkind, and Matan Gilboa, and appeared in the proceedings of SAGT. Full paper available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12641 |
Mixed Choices: Taming Failures with Session Types in Erlang Processes
Group: Programming Languages at University of Glasgow (PLUG)
Speaker: Laura Voinea, University of Glasgow
Date: 14 October, 2026
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: F121 Lilybank Gardens and Online
Mixed Choices: Taming Failures with Session Types in Erlang Processes
Distributed systems fail. Processes time out. Messages cross in flight. And yet, these cases are often handled ad hoc in runtime code rather than made explicit in the protocol description. In this talk, we will show how multiparty session types, a type-based way of specifying communication protocols between interacting processes, can be extended with mixed choice to model the messy reality of asynchronous distributed systems: timeouts, exceptions, and race conditions between participants. We will then walk through our tool, which takes a protocol specification, validates it, and generates Erlang gen_statem code from it. The result is a workflow that makes protocol structure explicit and turns it into runnable Erlang/OTP state machines, instead of relying on informal concurrency logic. The generated code inherits the guarantees of the underlying theory, such as progress.
This is a practice talk for Lambda World 2026, based on our OOPSLA 2026 paper: Mixed Choice in Asynchronous Multiparty Session Types, https://doi.org/10.1145/3798256
GIST Seminar - PhD Introductions
Group: Human Computer Interaction (GIST)
Speaker: PhD Students
Date: 15 October, 2026
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Location: SAWB 423 and Zoom: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/84166272616?pwd=AfIAjDVABkfl0gRatrryb3uaxBWoDj.1
🗓 Date: 15th October 2026 (Thursday)
Confident Stopping Decisions
Group: Information Retrieval (IR)
Speaker: Aaron HA Fletcher, University of Sheffield
Date: 19 October, 2026
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: Sir Alwyn Williams Building, 422 Seminar Room
Abstract:
When should screening search results stop? Finding most relevant documents does not necessarily mean there is enough evidence to make a decision. Drawing on two SIGIR 2026 papers, this talk explores confidence-based and decision-theoretic stopping methods for systematic reviews and patent search, balancing screening effort against the consequences of incorrect decisions
Bio:
Aaron H.A. Fletcher is a PhD researcher in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, supervised by Mark Stevenson. His research focuses on stopping methods for technology-assisted review and decision-making in document screening.
REF-optimized paper writing advice
Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Stephen Brewster, University of Glasgow
Date: 20 October, 2026
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Teams
Containers for Dummies
Group: Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA)
Speaker: Jake Trevor, University of Glasgow
Date: 20 October, 2026
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: 422 Sir Alwyn Williams (SAWB), University of Glasgow
Recursively defined structures are ubiquitous in computer science. When formalising such structures in a system like Lean or Agda, they are required to satisfy a condition called strict positivity. Work in such a system long enough, and you will surely run into positivity problems when trying to formalise things in the natural way. Containers are a tool developed (among other reasons) to tackle positivity problems. They are flexible enough to model a variety of structures in a way which is strictly positive by construction - and therefore, amenable to use in a theorem prover like lean or agda.
Despite their usefulness, containers remain something of a mystery to many people. Part of this, I believe, is due to the presentation in the existing work, which tends to be about the category theory underpinning them. In my experience however, they are much like monads; it is not necessary to understand the theoretical underpinning to use containers or find them useful. A simpler presentation is possible.
In this talk, I will give this simpler presentation. I will explain what containers are, why they are useful, and how to use them, without reference to the categorical
underpinnings. This will be heavily motivated by examples, which have been adapted from my own research work.
Campus5G: A Campus Scale Private 5G Open RAN Testbed
Group: Networked Systems Research Laboratory (NETLAB)
Speaker: Jiaxun Yang, University of Edinburgh
Date: 22 October, 2026
Time: 10:00 - 11:00
Location: SAWB 423, Sir Alwyn Williams Building
Abstract:
Open RAN promises greater flexibility in how mobile networks are built and operated, creating opportunities for experimentation with new network architectures and systems software. Realising this flexibility in a working deployment, however, presents practical challenges in infrastructure, software integration and device compatibility. This talk introduces Campus5G, a private 5G Open RAN testbed deployed across the University of Edinburgh’s central campus. Campus5G combines commercial radio hardware with a flexible software infrastructure, supporting experimentation with different network components while providing connectivity to ordinary mobile devices. I will describe the network architecture and the engineering decisions behind its deployment, covering radio planning, fronthaul connectivity, synchronisation, and the integration of RAN and core network software. I will also share our experience of operating the network and supporting users, including handset compatibility and SIM provisioning. The talk will conclude with lessons for researchers building similar testbeds and discuss the opportunities Campus5G provides for research into network automation, RAN resource management and edge computing.
Bio:
Jiaxun Yang (FlyGoat) is a PhD student and Research Assistant at the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He received his BEng in Electronics and Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh.
His research focuses on computer systems and networking, spanning operating systems, computer architecture, heterogeneous computing, CXL-based memory disaggregation and tiering, and mobile networking, including 5G core and radio access networks. He is also involved in the deployment and operation of Campus5G, as well as research on Open RAN and AI-RAN systems. His research contributions have been published at venues including ACM SoCC, ACM TACO, ACM MobiSys Workshops, Open AI-RAN 2026, and ACM MobiCom 2026 Demos.
Beyond academia, Jiaxun is an active open-source contributor, serving as a developer, reviewer, and maintainer for major systems software projects, including the Linux kernel, QEMU, and LLVM.
zkFOL: succinct cryptographic certificates for first-order logic
Group: Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA)
Speaker: Murdoch Jamie Gabbay, Heriot-Watt University
Date: 27 October, 2026
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: 422 Sir Alwyn Williams (SAWB), University of Glasgow
There is a technique in cryptography called *succinct proof*, whereby a *prover* can prove to a *verifier* that it knows some piece of information --- which may be prohibitively large, or just secret --- just by transmitting a much shorter short (`succinct') cryptographic signature. This made the news recently when Google used cryptography to show that they knew a solution to a problem without directly revealing the solution:
2. Cryptographic certificates of validity for trustworthy AI,https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23768
How User-AI Mistreatment Occurs and Matters in Conversational Systems?
Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Fanqi Zeng, University of Oxford
Date: 03 November, 2026
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Teams
Explainable Graph-Based Early Detection of Time Synchronisation Attacks on the O-RAN Open Fronthaul
Group: Networked Systems Research Laboratory (NETLAB)
Speaker: Muhammad Arif
Date: 05 November, 2026
Time: 10:00 - 11:00
Location: SAWB 423, Sir Alwyn Williams Building
Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) disaggregates radio and baseband functions over standardised open interfaces, making the Open Fronthaul (O-FH) and its Synchronisation Plane (S-Plane) critical to coordinated operation, which depends on accurate time and phase alignment across distributed components. IEEE~1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) provides high-accuracy timing, but commonly deployed configurations offer limited protection against compromised timing sources and manipulated synchronisation messages. Previous work has shown that PTP spoofing can lead to gNB failure within approximately two seconds, highlighting the need for early detection. This study presents an early and explainable graph-based framework for detecting PTP synchronisation attacks in O-RAN. A Hybrid O-RAN testbed is implemented with User Equipment (UEs) generating service traffic, a logical Radio Unit (RU), an srsRAN Distributed Unit/Central Unit (DU/CU), and a simulated Ethernet-based Lower-Layer Split Category~3 (LLS-C3) S-Plane topology over the O-FH between the RU and DU. The evaluated attack compromises a legitimate backup Grandmaster, reconfigures it to win the Best Master Clock Algorithm (BMCA) election, and then manipulates PTP timestamps to introduce progressive time synchronisation disruption. From 100 experimental runs, comprising 30 benign and 70 attack runs, topology-aware graphs are constructed from PTP and O-FH/eCPRI measurements. A three-layer Graph Attention Network (GAT)-augmented GraphSAGE classifier attains 99.21\% accuracy and 99.54\% F1-score. In live DU-side evaluation, the framework achieves a mean live detection latency of 484~ms, below the approximately two-second failure timescale reported in previous work. Integrated Gradients (IG) shows that Time Error and O-FH traffic measurements provide the main feature-level evidence, while the Boundary Clocks directly connected to the RU and DU contribute most strongly at node level. Compared with existing S-Plane approaches based on transport or cryptographic protection, auxiliary positioning measurements, and PTP packet-sequence learning, the proposed framework explicitly models distributed synchronisation relationships while combining run-level generalisation, live sub-second detection, and feature- and node-level explanation.
How to review a systems research paper
Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Jeremy Singer, Colin Perkins, University of Glasgow
Date: 10 November, 2026
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Teams
Peer review is a vital part of academic work, although it often goes unnoticed. In this practical workshop, we will discuss how the peer review process works in general, then think about how to write a good review of paper for a Systems venue. After a short presentation, we will have some example papers to review as part of an interactive discussion. Please come along if (a) you are an experienced reviewer and can give advice, or (b) you haven’t done much/any reviewing but would like to find out how it works.
Theory-Insight-Guided Empirical Research for Understanding Applied Combinatorial Solving
Group: Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA)
Speaker: Jakob Nordström, University of Copenhagen
Date: 17 November, 2026
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: 422 Sir Alwyn Williams (SAWB), University of Glasgow
Combinatorial optimization solvers have improved dramatically since the turn of the millennium. Although the problems they solve are believed to be exponentially hard in the worst case, state-of-the-art solvers often perform remarkably well on practical instances. Explaining this gap between worst-case complexity and empirical performance remains a major challenge.
We propose that computational complexity theory can shed light on this problem by providing benchmarks formulas for which results of computational solver experiments can be compared against theoretical predictions. Another theory-inspired approach is to run solvers on real-world problem instances and study the solver-generated proofs to gain insights into the reasoning performed by the solver. We give examples of these approaches applied to Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solving.
"Sticking their heads out above the parapets": Lived experiences of legal risks in research
Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Daniel Thomas, University of Strathclyde
Date: 24 November, 2026
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Teams
Overbroad computer crime, intellectual property, and other laws are well known to create legal risks that can discourage essential research. Notable examples include the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the UK Computer Misuse Act. Because such laws fail to distinguish malicious hacking from good-faith testing and research, researchers face serious legal risks for public-interest research activity like identifying software or hardware vulnerabilities or scraping data. Despite the research community’s broad awareness of these risks, our understanding of their practical impacts is limited, as most of the community’s knowledge comes from anecdotal evidence rather than systematic study. We conduct the first qualitative study focused on researchers’ lived experiences, to empirically document the impacts of legal risks and threats on research and researchers, and how researchers navigate legal risk situations. Our study engages two participant groups: researchers with legal-risk experiences in the UK or the US (NR = 36), who discuss 130 projects and incidents spanning over three decades, and professionals that offer support to researchers navigating legal risks (NS = 8), who have collectively supported thousands of researchers. We thus provide an unprecedented big-picture view of researchers’ experiences with legal risks. We synthesise actionable strategies for researchers, and our findings provide evidence to support policy reform.
Past events
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