School of Computing Science

Interaction in Motion: Why UI Placement Breaks or Makes On-the-Go AR

Group: Human Computer Interaction (GIST)
Speaker: Dr. Pavel Manakhov, Lancaster University
Date: 27 November, 2025
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Location: 423 SAWB

Abstract:

Augmented reality (AR) glasses have the potential to become the next interface to all things computing, encompassing all aspects of our interaction with digital information: from work-related tasks to casual interactions like ordering a taxi or choosing what podcast to listen to next. Similar to mobile phones, compact, all-day wearable AR glasses can be used anywhere, even while users are physically walking. Freed from the user’s hands, AR interfaces can seamlessly accompany the user wherever they go. This, however, immediately raises a critical question for 3D interface design: where should the UI be placed relative to the walking user? In this talk, we will explore this question together and discuss why this seemingly simple design decision has tremendous implications for interaction on the go, including the perception of displayed information and effective user input. Join me as I share the results of my research on interaction with AR interfaces during physical movement!

Bio:

Pavel Manakhov is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University. He currently collaborates on the GEMINI project, led by Prof. Hans Gellersen, which focuses on the fundamental role of gaze in interaction. Pavel holds a doctoral degree in Engineering and has recently submitted his second PhD in Computer Science at Aarhus University. His professional background includes extensive experience in UX Design and university-level teaching. His primary research goal is to enable efficient and safe interaction with spatial user interfaces of extended reality glasses during physical movement.

Resource Consumption of Data Centers and AI

Group: Low Carbon and Sustainable Computing
Speaker: Thomas Fricke
Date: 27 November, 2025
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/82012907272?pwd=Utt4bk30p1i4uvJPJn85jIq2a6xF0k.1

Details to follow.

Speaker profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ thomas-fricke-9840a21/

Resource Consumption of Data Centers and AI

Group: Low Carbon and Sustainable Computing
Speaker: Thomas Fricke
Date: 27 November, 2025
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/82012907272?pwd=Utt4bk30p1i4uvJPJn85jIq2a6xF0k.1

Title: Resource Consumption of Data Centers and AI

Abstract:

Not only the energy consumption of AI is exploding. Less known is that other resources like water or metal are also affected. The talk gives an overview on the devastating impact of datacenters on our environment.

Degrowth scenarios seem to be the only way to escape from this ecological nightmare.

Summarizing the known facts and serious predictions the talk gives an overview on the upcoming possible and impossible scenarios of the energy and resource consumptions. Even if predictions are not easy economical and ecological limits are discussed.

Finally, degrowth will be discussed. Can we degrow datacenters without loosing too much of our digital life? How much can be saved using alternative technologies.

What alternatives do we have? Saving some resources might easier than you think!

Speaker profile: https:// www.linkedin.com/in/ thomas-fricke-9840a21/

CVAS Seminar

Group: Computer Vision for Autonomous Systems (CVAS)
Speaker: Tong Shi and Paul Henderson
Date: 28 November, 2025
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Location: SAWB 423, Sir Alwyn Williams Building

This week we are doing another reading group!

Interaction in Motion: Why UI Placement Breaks or Makes On-the-Go AR

Group: Human Computer Interaction (GIST)
Speaker: Dr. Pavel Manakhov, Lancaster University
Date: 27 November, 2025
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Location: 423 SAWB

Abstract:

Augmented reality (AR) glasses have the potential to become the next interface to all things computing, encompassing all aspects of our interaction with digital information: from work-related tasks to casual interactions like ordering a taxi or choosing what podcast to listen to next. Similar to mobile phones, compact, all-day wearable AR glasses can be used anywhere, even while users are physically walking. Freed from the user’s hands, AR interfaces can seamlessly accompany the user wherever they go. This, however, immediately raises a critical question for 3D interface design: where should the UI be placed relative to the walking user? In this talk, we will explore this question together and discuss why this seemingly simple design decision has tremendous implications for interaction on the go, including the perception of displayed information and effective user input. Join me as I share the results of my research on interaction with AR interfaces during physical movement!

Bio:

Pavel Manakhov is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University. He currently collaborates on the GEMINI project, led by Prof. Hans Gellersen, which focuses on the fundamental role of gaze in interaction. Pavel holds a doctoral degree in Engineering and has recently submitted his second PhD in Computer Science at Aarhus University. His professional background includes extensive experience in UX Design and university-level teaching. His primary research goal is to enable efficient and safe interaction with spatial user interfaces of extended reality glasses during physical movement.

Resource Consumption of Data Centers and AI

Group: Low Carbon and Sustainable Computing
Speaker: Thomas Fricke
Date: 27 November, 2025
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/82012907272?pwd=Utt4bk30p1i4uvJPJn85jIq2a6xF0k.1

Details to follow.

Speaker profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ thomas-fricke-9840a21/

Resource Consumption of Data Centers and AI

Group: Low Carbon and Sustainable Computing
Speaker: Thomas Fricke
Date: 27 November, 2025
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/82012907272?pwd=Utt4bk30p1i4uvJPJn85jIq2a6xF0k.1

Title: Resource Consumption of Data Centers and AI

Abstract:

Not only the energy consumption of AI is exploding. Less known is that other resources like water or metal are also affected. The talk gives an overview on the devastating impact of datacenters on our environment.

Degrowth scenarios seem to be the only way to escape from this ecological nightmare.

Summarizing the known facts and serious predictions the talk gives an overview on the upcoming possible and impossible scenarios of the energy and resource consumptions. Even if predictions are not easy economical and ecological limits are discussed.

Finally, degrowth will be discussed. Can we degrow datacenters without loosing too much of our digital life? How much can be saved using alternative technologies.

What alternatives do we have? Saving some resources might easier than you think!

Speaker profile: https:// www.linkedin.com/in/ thomas-fricke-9840a21/

CVAS Seminar

Group: Computer Vision for Autonomous Systems (CVAS)
Speaker: Tong Shi and Paul Henderson
Date: 28 November, 2025
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Location: SAWB 423, Sir Alwyn Williams Building

This week we are doing another reading group!

The Economic Implications of AI-Orchestrated Cyberattacks

Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Mazaher Kianpour, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Date: 01 December, 2025
Time: 13:30 - 14:30
Location: Room F121, Lilybank Gardens and Zoom

Abstract

In September 2025, Chinese state-sponsored actors deployed Claude Code as an autonomous operator, executing 80-90% of an espionage campaign across roughly 30 organizations. This case represents a shift from AI-assisted attacks to AI-orchestrated operations, and it breaks several fundamental assumptions underlying how we model cybersecurity economics. This talk examines what the Claude campaign reveals about those broken assumptions, what it means economically, and what research we actually need. It is a call to rebuild cybersecurity economics for the age of agentic AI.

Speaker: 

Mazaher Kianpour is a cybersecurity educator and researcher focused on the economics of defense strategy and how organizations make informed security decisions under uncertainty. He works with Norwegian institutions developing curriculum on cyber defense and regulatory compliance. His research explores how organizations calibrate "appropriate and proportionate" security measures under conditions of rapid technological change and endogenous threat evolution, with current focus on implications of agentic AI for cyber risk modeling and economics. Based in Norway, he contributes to security education and practitioner training across Norwegian institutions.

A Crack in the Bark: Leveraging Public Knowledge to Remove Tree-Ring Watermarks

Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Marc Juarez, University of Edinburgh
Date: 02 December, 2025
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Zoom

Abstract:

As image generation models improve, distinguishing AI-generated images from authentic photographs has become increasingly difficult. Combined with the widespread accessibility of these models, this raises critical concerns about intellectual property protection and content authentication. Watermarking techniques have emerged as a promising approach for addressing these issues, but their real-world robustness remains an open question. In this talk, we will explore current image generation watermarking techniques and dive into the technical details of our recent USENIX '25 paper, which evaluates Tree-Ring watermarking, a popular watermarking technique for diffusion models. The paper demonstrates that, an attacker with access to the target model’s autoencoder—a realistic assumption in practice—can perfectly remove Tree-Ring watermarks. Our findings reveal a significant gap between the security claims in the original paper and what attackers can achieve in real-world scenarios, highlighting how the common practice of reusing autoencoders introduces vulnerabilities that industry has largely overlooked.

Bio:

Marc Juarez is a Lecturer in Cyber Security and Privacy at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. Prior to his current appointment, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Computer Science Department of the University of Southern California. His research focuses on investigating the privacy risks that arise from the application of machine learning techniques. More specifically, Marc’s work involves designing and evaluating countermeasures against machine learning-based attacks for privacy-aware Internet protocols, studying the privacy of deployed machine learning models, and developing mechanisms to measure the fairness properties of such models.

[FATA Seminar] Spatial Programming for Environmental Monitoring

Group: Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA)
Speaker: Josh Millar and Ryan Gibb, Imperial / Cambridge
Date: 02 December, 2025
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: Room 422, SAWB

Large-scale environmental monitoring demands real-time, spatially-aware coordination across distributed networks. However, existing distributed computing models poorly capture spatial structure, hindering dynamic collaboration and fine-grained access control. We argue that space must be treated as a first-class concept in programming models for these systems based on bigraphs – a formalism that explicitly models spatial arrangements, data movement, and access policies, while supporting real-time reconfiguration and localised reasoning. This approach facilitates secure, composable, and dynamically verifiable coordination across geographically distributed nodes and organisations, paving the way for scalable, responsive environmental networks.

Scottish Programming Languages Seminar

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 03 December, 2025
Time: 10:00 - 17:30
Location: Learning and Teaching Building, University of Strathclyde

The SPLS hybrid event will be held by the MSP Group of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at University of Strathclyde. Talks will take place in room TL325 in the Learning and Teaching Building (49 Richmond Street). There will be signs directing you from the main entrance of the building. A special PhD event will be held in the morning, starting at 1000hrs. The PhD Event will be held in LT1414a in Livingstone Tower, home to the Department of Computer & Information Sciences. It will be an introduction to SPLI in specific, and doing a PhD in general, as well as a chance to meet your fellow PhD students from other institutes. It is intended to be most useful to students early in their PhD, although everyone is free to attend (including non-PhD students). Find out more about the programme and register for the event. Registration will close on 26 November.

Title TBA

Group: Programming Languages at University of Glasgow (PLUG)
Speaker: Jacob Trevor
Date: 03 December, 2025
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: F121 Lilybank Gardens and Online

Jake will give us a talk/rant about package managers. Details TBA.

Accessing Innovate UK Funding

Group: Glasgow Computing Science Innovation Lab
Speaker: Prof. Surajit Ray, Dr Andrew Feeney, Ms Jill Dykes, University of Glasgow
Date: 09 December, 2025
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Location: Room 422, SAWB

Innovate UK is an important source of funding for research and innovation in the UK but is often poorly understood, particularly in academia where the dynamics of research council funding are more familiar.

This session will provide an introduction to the main types and workings of Innovate UK funding.  The session is aimed primarily at early career academic researchers, and researchers new to the UK / Innovate UK funding.  Industry colleagues from the companies who participate in GLACSIL and our Industry Advisory Board are welcome to attend too.

There will be an introductory talk from Jill Dykes, Business Development Manager, School of Computing Science, about the types of funding available, plus talks from 2 colleagues in the College of Science and Engineering who will share their experiences of accessing Innovate UK funding, and discuss its role in supporting their research.

This will be a hybrid session (Teams details below) with lunch provided for in-person attendees.

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Join the meeting now

Meeting ID: 369 305 307 651 55

Passcode: B255Jt78

AGENDA

12pm – 12:30pm : lunch and networking

12:30pm – 12:40pm: introduction to Innovate UK funding – Jill Dykes, Business Development Manager, School of Computing Science

12:40pm – 1pm: Case Study 1 – Dr Andrew Feeney, Senior Lecturer, School of Engineering, University of Glasgow

1pm – 1:20pm: Case Study 2 – Professor Surajit Ray, School of Maths & Statistics, University of Glasgow

1:20pm – 1:30pm: Innovate UK funding insights and tips – Jill Dykes, Business Development Manager, School of Computing Science

1:30pm – 2pm: networking & refreshments

CASE STUDY SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Dr Andrew Feeney is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Medical and Industrial Ultrasonics (C-MIU), James Watt School of Engineering, at the University of Glasgow. He obtained his PhD in ultrasonics from Glasgow in 2014, where his thesis focused on the integration of nickel-titanium shape memory materials into ultrasonic transducers, with the aim of exploring novel approaches to establishing systems with tunable dynamic properties. He then undertook postdoctoral research into sub-sea ultrasonically assisted exploration technology, investigating the influence of ultrasonic vibrations on different sub-sea geological materials, and the development of novel ultrasonic devices for minimally-invasive surgeries, based on conventional flextensional transducer configurations. In 2016, he joined the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick, where he was Research Fellow in the Centre for Industrial Ultrasonics (CIU) until 2020. His research during this period focused on engineering a new generation of high frequency flexural ultrasonic transducers for operation in a range of liquid and gas measurement environments, including at elevated levels of pressure and temperature (hundreds of bar and °C respectively). Some of the innovations developed in this research are now used by industry.

Dr Feeney currently leads the Adaptive Ultrasonics and Systems (Adaptus) Research Group, established to realise adaptive ultrasonics and systems for adaptable or intelligent medical and industrial technologies. The Adaptus Research Group utilises advanced materials including those exhibiting shape memory behaviour and metamaterials, integrating them with a wide range of ultrasonic devices and electro-mechanical systems to control and optimise dynamic performance. The group operates across a few key themes, including advanced materials, biomedical devices, industrial sensing, and sustainable manufacturing. He is currently funded through EPSRC-UKRI, Innovate UK, Horizon Europe, and industry. Dr Feeney is a Chartered Engineer and member of both the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the IEEE.

Professor Surajit Ray is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on uncertainty quantification for AI algorithms in medical image analysis, as well as the theory and geometry of mixture models and functional data analysis. He is particularly interested in problems arising from “large magnitude,” both in the dimensionality of data and in the scale of datasets. His methodological work spans multivariate mixtures, structural equation models, high-dimensional clustering, and functional clustering. Collaborative projects include medical image segmentation, immunology, and climate–ecosystem dynamics, with a growing emphasis on translating medical imaging software tools into clinical practice.

TBC

Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Stephen McQuistin, University of St. Andrews
Date: 09 December, 2025
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Zoom

TBC

Group: Networked Systems Research Laboratory (NETLAB)
Speaker: Kelsey Collington
Date: 10 December, 2025
Time: 10:00 - 11:00
Location: Room 422, SAWB

[FATA] Festive event

Group: Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA)
Speaker: N/A
Date: 16 December, 2025
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Location: Room 422, SAWB

Calendar blocker

Measuring and understanding Distributed Denial of Service attacks

Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Daniel R. Thomas, University of Strathclyde
Date: 20 January, 2026
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Zoom

Bio:

Dr Daniel R. Thomas is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde where he is Director of the NCSC certified Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR). His research interests are in measuring security and cybercrime so that we can monitor improvement, evaluate interventions and inform regulators. This reveals which techniques work and provides the missing economic incentives to improve security and reduce cybercrime. He co-organises the Strathclyde International Perspectives on Cybercrime Summer School [link](https://www.strath.ac.uk/science/computerinformationsciences/strathcyber/cybercrimesummerschool) , which next runs 24th-28th August 2026.

TBC

Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Tom Spink, University of St. Andrews
Date: 27 January, 2026
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Zoom

TBC

TBC

Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Yuvraj Patel, University of Edinburgh
Date: 03 February, 2026
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Zoom

TBC

TBC

Group: Systems Seminars
Speaker: Tao Chen, University of Birmingham
Date: 19 February, 2026
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Location: Room 422, Sir Alwyn Williams Building and Zoom

TBC

HRI 2026

Group: Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
Speaker: SICSA Event, SICSA
Date: 16 March, 2026
Time: 00:00 - 00:00
Location: TBA

The ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is the premier venue for innovations on human-robot interaction. Sponsored by the ACM special interest groups on computer-human interaction (SIGCHI) and artificial intelligence (SIGAI) as well as the IEEE robotics and automation society (RAS), HRI brings together researchers spanning robotics, human-computer interaction, human factors, artificial intelligence, engineering, and social and behavioral sciences. The theme of the 21st edition of HRI is HRI Empowering Society. Our field has the potential to bring about positive change in many areas of our societies such as healthcare, transport, remote working, agriculture and industry. However, this change cannot happen if we do not engage properly with the end users who will potentially utilize robots in their jobs and daily lives. For this reason, HRI 2026 will focus on: 1) how we can ethically integrate robots in everyday processes without creating disruptions or inequalities, carefully thinking at the future of work and services; 2) how we can make them accessible to the general public (in terms of design, technical literacy and cost) with the final aim to make robots more willingly adopted as technological helpers. More information is available on the HRI 2026 website