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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Tracing learning strategies in online learning environments: a learning analytics approach
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-28)Learning has expanded beyond formal education; yet, students continue to face the challenge of how to effectively direct their learning. Among the processes of learning, the selection and application of learning tactics ... -
Self-directed learning in new and changing environments: understanding human algorithms for exploration
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-25)In order to act, plan, and achieve goals, people must learn about their environment and the outcome of possible actions. One reason for human successes in developing new theories and strategies when confronted with new ... -
Formal modelling and approximation-based analysis for mode-switching population dynamics
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-25)This thesis explores aspects of model specification and analysis for population dynamics which arise when modelling complex interactions and communication structures in agent or component collectives. The motivating ... -
Relational reasoning for effects and handlers
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-25)This thesis studies relational reasoning techniques for FRANK, a strict functional language supporting algebraic effects and their handlers, within a general, formalised approach for completely characterising observational ... -
Approximating neural machine translation for efficiency
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-25)Neural machine translation (NMT) has been shown to outperform statistical machine translation. However, NMT models typically require a large number of parameters and are expensive to train and deploy. Moreover, its large ... -
Formalising cryptography using CryptHOL.
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)Security proofs are now a cornerstone of modern cryptography. Provable security has greatly increased the level of rigour of the security statements, however proofs of these statements often present informal or incomplete ... -
Modelling the psychophysics of eye movements in a large corpus of binocular reading behaviours
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)The position and shape of the pupil entrance of the eye plays a central role in video-based eye-tracking. As a result, any unexpected translation and deformation of the pupil image on camera may introduce systematic ... -
Novel platform for topic group mining, crowd opinion analysis and opinion leader identification in on-line social network platforms
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)In recent years, topic group mining and massive crowd opinion analysis from on-line social network platforms have become some of the most important tasks not only in research area but also in industry. Systems of this sort ... -
Interpretation of multi-parametric statistical models of large scale neuronal network activity
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)Multi-parametric statistical models have been shown to be successful in characterising the statistical properties of neuronal network activity for large scale populations, in a variety of in vitro and in vivo experimental ... -
Addressing variability in reuse prediction for last-level caches
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)Last-Level Cache (LLC) represents the bulk of a modern CPU processor's transistor budget and is essential for application performance as LLC enables fast access to data in contrast to much slower main memory. Problematically, ... -
Compositional Taylor model based validated integration
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)Validated integration is a family of methods that compute enclosures for sets of initial conditions in the Initial Value Problems. The Taylor model based validated integration methods use truncated Taylor series to approximate ... -
Visual articulated tracking in cluttered environments
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)This thesis is concerned with the state estimation of an articulated robotic manipulator during interaction with its environment. Traditionally, robot state estimation has relied on proprioceptive sensors as the single ... -
Analysing system behaviour by automatic benchmarking of system-level provenance
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)Provenance is a term originating from the work of art. It aims to provide a chain of information of a piece of arts from its creation to the current status. It records all the historic information relating to this piece ... -
Magnetic field optimization from limited data
(The University of Edinburgh, 2009)When a sensor coil is placed in the field of an electromagnetic transmitter, a voltage is induced and may be measured. The amplitude of this voltage depends on the distance from the transmitter and the angle between the ... -
LitCrit: exploring intentions as a basis for automated feedback on Related Work.
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)Learning the skill of academic writing is critical for post-graduate (PG) students to be successful, yet many struggle to master the required standard. Feedback can play a formative role in developing these skills, but ... -
Discovering and analysing lexical variation in social media text
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)For many speakers of non-standard or minority language varieties, social media provides an unprecedented opportunity to write in a way which reflects their everyday speech, without censorship or castigation. Social media ... -
Methods for morphology learning in low(er)-resource scenarios
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)A core issue that hampers development and use of language technology for underresourced and morphologically rich languages is data sparsity. In this work, we consider unsupervised morphological analysis and lemmatization ... -
Software testing: test suite compilation and execution optimizations
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)The requirements and responsibilities assumed by software have increasingly rendered it to be large and complex. Testing to ensure that software meets all its requirements and is free from failures is a difficult and ... -
Flexible neural architectures for sequence modeling
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)Auto-regressive sequence models can estimate the distribution of any type of sequential data. To study sequence models, we consider the problem of language modeling, which entails predicting probability distributions over ... -
Accelerating and simulating detected physical interations
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-25)The aim of this doctoral thesis is to present a body of work aimed at improving performance and developing new methods for animating physical interactions using simulation in virtual environments. To this end we develop a ...
