Informatics thesis and dissertation collection
The School of Informatics brings together research in Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. It provides a fertile environment for a wide range of interdisciplinary studies, leading to this new science of Informatics.
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Recent Submissions
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Robustness to external disturbances for legged robots using dynamic trajectory optimisation
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-09-30)In robotics, robustness is an important and desirable attribute of any system, from perception to planning and control. Robotic systems need to handle numerous factors of uncertainty when they are deployed, and the more ... -
Automated planning for cloud service configurations
(The University of Edinburgh, 2015-06-29)The declarative approach has been widely accepted as an appropriate way to manage configurations of large scale systems – the administrators describe the specification of the “desired” configuration state of the system, ... -
Local-to-global functional inequalities in simplicial complexes
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-09-06)A study of random walks over simplicial complexes with a particular emphasis on matroids. A framework is developed that yields results on the entropy contraction and modified log-Sobolev constant of the exchange walks ... -
Efficient neural networks
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-08-23)Improving the e ciency of neural networks has great potential impact due to their wide range of possible use cases and their high levels of arithmetic intensity. As neural network designs evolve and hardware grows more ... -
Learning from alternative sources of supervision
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-08-16)With the rise of the internet, data of many varieties including: images, audio, text and video are abundant. Unfortunately for a very specific task one might have, the data for that problem is not typically abundant ... -
Towards efficient universal neural machine translation
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-08-03)Humans benefit from communication but suffer from language barriers. Machine translation (MT) aims to overcome such barriers by automatically transforming information from one language to another. With the rapid development ... -
Generalization challenges in semantic parsing
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-07-29)Semantic parsing is the task of translating natural language utterances onto machine-interpretable programs, which can be executed against a real-world environment to obtain desired responses (e.g., a SQL query against a ... -
Dependable virtualised systems
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-28)Virtual machines and containers are widely used in data centres and in the cloud for software deployment and management. Their popularity is based on higher capacity utilisation, lower maintenance costs, and better ... -
Opinion summarization of multiple reviews: data synthesis and modeling
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-28)The proliferation of online reviews has accelerated research on opinion mining, where the ultimate goal is to glean information from reviews which help users make decisions more efficiently. While opinion mining has ... -
Expression and perception of identity through skin-toned emoji
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-28)The introduction of emoji skin tone modifiers to the Unicode Standard in 2015 was met with considerable debate on the extent to which these emoji would be used, who would actually use them, and what they would actually be ... -
Analysing privacy in online social media
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-28)People share a wide variety of information on social media, including personal and sensitive information, without understanding the size of their audience which may cause privacy complications. The networked nature of the ... -
Accurate and reliable probabilistic modeling with high-dimensional data
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-23)Machine learning studies algorithms for learning from data. Probabilistic modeling and reasoning define a principled framework for machine learning, where probability theory is used to represent and manipulate knowledge. ... -
On the volume and veracity of big and shared data
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-22)Big data is not new to us. Many efforts are devoted to efficient and parallel query processing of big data. Nevertheless there are still some missing pieces in the technical stack. Existing systems typically assume that ... -
Great expectations: unsupervised inference of suspense, surprise and salience in storytelling
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-22)Stories interest us not because they are a sequence of mundane and predictable events but because they have drama and tension. Crucial to creating dramatic and exciting stories are surprise and suspense. Likewise, certain ... -
Reclaiming scalability and privacy in the decentralized setting
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-07-11)The advent of blockchains has expanded the horizon of possibilities to novel decentralised applications and protocols that were not possible before. Designing and building such applications, be it for offering new ways for ... -
Automated Testing for Solidity smart contracts
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-21)Blockchains are the underlying technology for making secure online transactions using cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoins and Ethers. Executing, verifying, and enforcing credible transactions on permissionless blockchains ... -
Tackling the veracity and variety of big data
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-21)This thesis tackles the veracity and variety challenges of big data, especially focusing on graphs and relational data. We start with proposing a class of graph association rules (GARs) to specify regularities between ... -
Secure authentication and key agreement via abstract multi-agent interaction
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-17)Authentication and key agreement are the foundation for secure communication over the Internet. Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) protocols provide methods for communicating parties to authenticate each other, and establish ... -
Hotscotch: exploiting workload characteristics to improve read-throughput
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-14)Key-value stores are ubiquitous at all layers of the computational stack; offering constant average lookup, insertion, and deletion time. This dissertation looks at how we can exploit skew in the workloads to improve the ... -
Architectures for online simulation-based inference applied to robot motion planning
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-13)Robotic systems have enjoyed significant adoption in industrial and field applications in structured environments, where clear specifications of the task and observations are available. Deploying robots in unstructured ...
