School of Computing Science

Events

Students sitting in a lecture theatre

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.

Quick links

This Week’s EventsAll Upcoming EventsPast EventsWebapp

This Week’s Events

There are no events scheduled for this week

Upcoming events

Playing with the Future: Studying and sharing advanced technologies through research-led gaming at University of Glasgow

Group: CS Cakes Talks
Speaker: Tim Peacock, University of Glasgow
Date: 25 September, 2026
Time: 16:00 - 17:00
Location: 422 Sir Alwyn Williams (SAWB), University of Glasgow

How may gaming techniques be used in universities to find new ways of studying, simulating and sharing advanced technologies and concepts, from AI to Quantum, with varied audiences? This seminar will provide a brief snapshot of projects to develop such games, both physical and digital, as research and learning tools in the University of Glasgow's Games & Gaming Lab (UofGGamesLab). This cross-disciplinary Lab involves around 300 staff/students and alumni, in Subject areas across all four Colleges, from Archaeology and Computing Science to Urban Studies and Virus Research.
 
Bio: Dr Tim Peacock is Senior Lecturer in History & War Studies and Director/co-founder of UofGGamesLab. He leads varied projects; from running tabletop crisis exercises with the United Nations (UN) in Geneva and AI cyber resilience games with large organisations to transforming world heritage sites into historical educational video games. His research ranges across nuclear history, space security, games/wargaming, AI, and politics, including social-political and military impacts of new technologies.
 



Fata Seminar - What did you do last summer?

Group: Formal Analysis, Theory and Algorithms (FATA)
Speaker: Various
Date: 28 September, 2026
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Location: SAWB 423, Sir Alwyn Williams Building

Various members of the section will give a short (~1 slide) presentation on what they did over the summer

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

Abstract:
Safety research often focuses on model- generated harms, but users may also direct hostility, coercion, and adversarial pressure at models. Understanding how and when that occurs is essential for accurately interpreting model behaviour, alignment drift, and real-world deployment risks. In this paper, we audit 777K English LMSYS-Chat-1M conversations with two independent detectors: an eight-category lexicon for hostility directed at the model, and the dataset's moderation signal; and show that they capture different, weakly overlapping phenomena. The lexicon identifies insults, threats, and jailbreak coercion aimed at the assistant, while moderation flags are dominated by toxic-content solicitation rather than hostility at the model. Together, they mark about 5% of user turns; adjusting the narrower lexicon-harassment union for measured precision puts mistreatment aimed at the assistant at 0.90%. These absolute rates describe arena-style evaluation traffic and should not be read as deployment-wide base rates. We find that user hostility varies 13-fold across models, driven largely by who each model attracts rather than by model behaviour: first-turn hostility spreads far wider than post-response hostility, and more than fifteenfold separates the extremes even after deduplicating opening prompts. Within conversations, assistant apologies are consistently associated with higher odds of next-turn hostility under both detectors; the effect survives restricting to non-refused prior turns and to jailbreak-free conversations, and is positive in 20 of 23 models. Yet across models, more apologetic models receive less hostility overall. Finally, hostility also shows temporal structure, with coercive openings front-loading the first turn while affective hostility accumulates over a session. We release the lexicon, the detector cross-validation pipeline, and all derived tables.
 
Speaker's bio:
Dr Fanqi Zeng is a UKRI Metascience AI Early Career Fellow (Principal Investigator) in the Department of Sociology and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford. He holds a PhD in Engineering Mathematics from the University of Bristol. His research bridges AI and the social sciences, harnessing computational methods and large-scale data to illuminate patterns within complex societal and natural systems. His current work explores the transformative impact of AI on society and human behaviour. His work has been funded by UKRI and the John Fell Fund. His research has appeared in leading interdisciplinary journals, including Science, Nature Cities, Nature Communications, PNAS, and PNAS Nexus.

"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

To view past events, please click here

Events Webapp