Research Student Symposium 2023/2024

Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester.

The 2024 Computer Science PhD Symposium will be held from Thursday 16th May to Friday 17th May.

The symposium exists to give all PhD. students in Computer Science at Manchester the chance to present their work to the Department. Second- and third-year students give short talks; first-year students will present posters. It is a great opportunity---for both staff and students---to learn about some of the fascinating research being carried out in the Department, across all areas of the subject.

This is a provisional timetable. You are advised to check from time to time in case the schedule has been altered.

Location details

All talk sessions: Kilburn 1.5

Poster session: Kilburn Atlas 1/Staff and PG Common Room (Floor 1)

Day 1: Poster Session & Invited and Contributed Talks

09:15--09:30 Assemble
09:30--9:40 Welcome and announcements (Ian Pratt-Hartmann)
09:40--11:00 Contributed talks (20 minutes)
- Yiqi Liu: LLMs as Narcissistic Evaluators: When Ego Inflates Evaluation Scores (Chenghua Lin)
- Tharindu Madusanka: Reasoning with Natural Language: Probing Transformers ability to understand logical semantics and rules of inference (Ian Pratt-Hartmann)
- Zhenyu Wu: Conceptual Schema Inference for Data Lakes using Language Models (Norman Paton, Jiaoyan Chan)
- Taohong Zhu: Testing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Control Systems with Large Language Models (Youcheng Sun)
11:00--12:00 Coffee and 1st year poster session (Atlas 1/PGR common room)
12:00--13:00 Contributed talks (20 minutes)
- Chenghao Wu: Appearance and Geometry Reconstruction of Woven Cloth from a Single Micro Image (Zahra Montazeri)
- Fatima Abacha: Robust Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Scenarios (Mustafa Mustafa)
- Ruichang Zhang: Load-shaping Strategies for Residential Households with Privacy-Cost Trade-offs based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (Mustafa Mustafa)
13:00--14:00 Lunch break (PGR common room)
14:00--15:20 Prizewinning talk (40 minutes) and contributed talks (20 minutes)
- Kaled Alshmrany Efficient Hybrid Fuzzing for Detecting Vulnerabilities and Achieving High Coverage in Software (Best Thesis prize talk) (Lucas Cordeiro, Ning Zhang)
- Nicole Lubasinski: A Meal-Based Glycemic Clustering Algorithm: Towards a Bolus Targeting Solution (BTS) (Simon Harper)
- Xidan Song: Improving Robustness of Quantized Neural Networks (Lucas Cordeiro)
15:20--15:40 Tea break
15:40--17:00 Contributed talks (20 minutes)
- King Chung: The more you parallelise the more you save: Methods on approaching parallelism (James Garside)
- Henry De Libero: 2D Materials for Spintronics (Thomas Thomson)
- Christopher Wright: Introduction to Quantum Compilation (Mikel Lujan)
- Shashank Pathak: GFLean: An Autoformalisation Framework for Lean via GF (Ian Pratt-Hartmann)
17:00 End of first day

Day 2: Contributed Talks

09:40--11:00 Contributed talks (20 minutes)
- Daumantas Kojelis: The "simplicity" of the Fluted Fragment (Ian Pratt-Hartmann)
- Guokun Liu: Decidable fragments of first-order modal logic (Ian Pratt-Hartmann)
- Yang Li: Multi-Agent Learning in Open-Ended Worlds (Wei Pan)
- Qianshan Zhan: Transferability and Source-free Transfer Learning (Xiao-Jun Zeng)
11:00--11:20 Tea break
11:20--12:20 Contributed talks (20 minutes)
- Tianyu Ren: Enhancing Cooperation through Selective Interaction and Long-term Experiences in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (Xiao-Jun Zeng)
- Yi-Yu Lin: Reward-Guided Individualised Communication for Deep Reinforcement Learning in Multi-Agent Systems (Xiao-Jun Zeng)
- Haotong Zhang: Spatial Reasoning with Language Models (Ian Pratt-Hartmann)
13:00--14:00 Lunch break (PGR common room) 1
14:00--15:20 Contributed talks (20 minutes)
- Areej Alhassan: DiscHPO: Generative Models and Sentence Transformers for the Recognition and Normalisation of Continuous and Discontinuous Phenotype Mentions (Goran Nenadic)
- Arooj Hussain: Understanding Disease Progression by Modelling Diagnosis and Medication LIfecycles from Electronic Healthcare Records (Goran Nenadic)
- Mingyang Li: What is a Good General Sense Clinical Knowledge Graph: Construction, Evaluation and Application (Goran Nenadic)
- Fuqi Xu: Research on Research papers: Learning from 300,000 publications (Robert Stevens, Goran Nenadic, Anirbit Murkerjee)
15:20--15:40 Tea break
15:40--17:00 Contributed talks (20 minutes)
- Sarah Almulhem: Personality effect on the physical activity goal achievement (Markel Vigo)
- Meznah Aloqalaa: An Investigation into the Reproducibility of Research Objects (Carole Goble)
- Simon Kolker Uncertain Machine Ethics Decision Making (Louise Dennis)
17:00 End of symposium