Prof Simon Dobson

Deputy Head of School

Professor

Phone: +44 (0)1334 46 1626
Email: Simon.Dobson@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office: C0.27
Location: Jack Cole Building (Computer Science )

Biography

Simon Dobson is Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, and was Head of School from 2007 – 2021. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy, in 2020.

Simon's main home page and blog can be found at simondobson.org.

Simon works on complex and sensor systems, especially on sensor analytics and the modelling of complex processes. His research has generated over 150 internationally peer-reviewed publications, driven by leadership roles in research grants worth over EUR30M – most recently as part of a £5M EPSRC-funded programme grant in the Science of Sensor Systems Software He has served, amongst other activities, on the steering committee of the ACSOS conference; as programme and general chairs for the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing; as an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems; as a member of the executive of UKCRC, the expert committee on UK computing research; as the chair of the BCS Distinguished PhD Dissertations award panel; and on the programme committees of a wide range of leading international conferences and specialised workshops. He was a director and vice-president of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics from 2006 – 2009, and has served on a number of national and EU committees and strategic initiatives.

Simon has previously worked at the UK STFC‘s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory; at Trinity College Dublin and UCD Dublin in Ireland; and was also the founder and CEO of Aurium, a research-led Dublin-based start-up company. He holds a BSc from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and DPhil from the University of York, both in computer science, is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Teaching

At undergraduate level I teach:

CS4203 Computer security

As part of the new Digital MSc in Data Science I teach:

CS5728 Complex systems modelling and simulation

I also supervise final-year, MSci, and MSc projects.

Research areas

I'm a computer scientist interested in complex systems, where chains of cause and effect can be difficult to establish. I build computational tools for simulation at scale and in the cloud, integrate sensors and real-time data, and develop new methods for data analytics.

PhD supervision

Berné Nortier

Selected publications

Open access

Belief propagation on networks with cliques and chordless cycles
Mann, P. S. & Dobson, S. A., 8 May 2023, In: Physical Review E. 107, 13 p., 054303.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open access

Online continual learning for human activity recognition
Schiemer, M., Fang, L., Dobson, S. & Ye, J., 8 Jul 2023, In: Pervasive and Mobile Computing. 93, 20 p., 101817.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open access

Degree correlations in graphs with clique clustering
Mann, P. S., Smith, V. A., Mitchell, J. B. O. & Dobson, S. A., 30 Apr 2022, In: Physical Review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics. 105, 4, 14 p., 044314.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open access

N-strain epidemic model using bond percolation
Mann, P. S., Smith, V. A., Mitchell, J. B. O. & Dobson, S. A., 20 Jul 2022, In: Physical Review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics. 106, 1, 20 p., 014304.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open access

epyc: computational experiment management in Python
Dobson, S. A., 18 Apr 2022, In: Journal of Open Source Software. 7, 72, 3 p., 03764.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open access

Bayesian inference federated learning for heart rate prediction
Fang, L., Liu, X., Su, X., Ye, J., Dobson, S., Hui, P. & Tarkoma, S., 2021, Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare: 9th EAI International Conference, MobiHealth 2020, Virtual Event, November 19, 2020, Proceedings. Ye, J., O'Grady, M. J., Civitarese, G. & Yordanova, K. (eds.). Cham: Springer, p. 116-130 15 p. (Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering; vol. 362 LNICST).
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Open access

ContrasGAN: unsupervised domain adaptation in Human Activity Recognition via adversarial and contrastive learning
Rosales Sanabria, A., Zambonelli, F., Dobson, S. A. & Ye, J., 6 Nov 2021, (E-pub ahead of print) In: Pervasive and Mobile Computing. In Press, p. 1-34 34 p., 101477.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open access

Cooperative coinfection dynamics on clustered networks
Mann, P., Smith, V. A., Mitchell, J. B. O. & Dobson, S., 9 Apr 2021, In: Physical Review E. 103, 4, 042307.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open access

Exact formula for bond percolation on cliques
Mann, P. S., Smith, V. A., Mitchell, J. B. O., Jefferson, C. A. & Dobson, S. A., 4 Aug 2021, In: Physical Review E - Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics. 104, 2, 10 p., 024304 .
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open access

Percolation in random graphs with higher-order clustering
Mann, P. S., Smith, V. A., Mitchell, J. B. O. & Dobson, S. A., 25 Jan 2021, In: Physical Review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics. 103, 1, 11 p., 012313 .
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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