Building an Optical Music Recognition system

Tom Powell presented his Part II project on Optical Music Recognition.

Abstract: Modern stave notation is used by musicians and composers
around the world. I am building an Optical Music Recognition system to
allow this notation to be read by computers. This would allow computers
to play back musical scores, to analyse them and to even transform them
into something new. In this talk I will describe how the sorts of
algorithms used in Google image search or auto-recognition of a friend
on Facebook can be also be used to recognise musical notes. I will show
how even the simple task of converting an image to black-and-white can
be surprisingly tricky. I will finish with a demonstration of my system
showing that computers, along with all of their other abilities, can now
become musicians too.

Package manager security

Simon Hollingshead presented his Part II project on package management.

Abstract: We all install and update software. For over fifteen years,
use of APT and RPM packages have tried to simplify this process on Linux
and, in recent years, other vendors are starting to borrow the idea.
From the Windows Store to the Google Play Store, the idea of a central
hub for application distribution seems to be gaining traction.

In my talk, I will explain the general protocol used to communicate
between a client and a repository, then look at reasons why even matured
Linux implementations are inadequate, albeit easily fixable. I will
conclude by demonstrating a pair of attacks capable of forcing any Arch
Linux machine, like Lingnan’s or mine, to install
deliberately-vulnerable packages to potentially allow it to be taken over.