Thu 07 Aug 15:00: First-principles Investigation of Nonlinear Optical Crystals using CASTEP
In this one-hour talk, I will briefly introduce how CASTEP was used to answer some questions important within the scientific community of NLO crystal growth and characterization. A better understanding was possible with the help of utility tools developed in my research group at Tamkang University, Taiwan.
The talk will be informal and open to spontaneous digressions or discussions in related directions. Time permitting, I will report some recent minor technical progress, followed by a few reflections on challenges ahead.
- Speaker: Ming-Hsien Lee (Department of Physics, Tamkang University; TCM, 1991-1995)
- Thursday 07 August 2025, 15:00-16:15
- Venue: Seminar Room 3, RDC.
- Series: Theory of Condensed Matter; organiser: Bo Peng.
Fri 15 Aug 11:15: Recursive Definitions in Lean
The logic underlying the Lean programming language and theorem prover does not know recursive functions, yet Lean users can define functions recursively. In this session we’ll get to look at how Lean translates the user’s specification into something that the logic understands, whether by structural recursion, well-founded recursion or the brand-new partial fixpoint strategy. We’ll also see how this affects compiled code (namely not at all), and the difference between partial and unsafe.
This session will likely contain high amounts of improvised live-coding and benefit greatly from your questions, suggestions and discussions.
Joachim Breitner @nomeata
Ever since Joachim has found beauty and elegance in Functional Programming, he’s been working with and on functional programming languages, in particular Haskell.
He’s also always been fascinated by Interactive Theorem Proving and his academic persona used Isabelle and Coq for formalize mathematics and verify programs.
These two interests find their natural synthesis in the Lean programming language, and Joachim joined the Lean FRO to work on the Lean compiler itself.
Besides such serious nerdery, you’ll find Joachim dancing Swing and Tango (in particular when traveling to conferences, so talk to him if you want to join), paragliding and unapologetically making bad puns.
- Speaker: Joachim Breitner, Lean FRO
- Friday 15 August 2025, 11:15-12:15
- Venue: Computer Laboratory, LT1.
- Series: Computer Laboratory Computer Architecture Group Meeting; organiser: Tobias Grosser.
Fri 15 Aug 11:15: Recursive Definitions in Lean
The logic underlying the Lean programming language and theorem prover does not know recursive functions, yet Lean users can define functions recursively. In this session we’ll get to look at how Lean translates the user’s specification into something that the logic understands, whether by structural recursion, well-founded recursion or the brand-new partial fixpoint strategy. We’ll also see how this affects compiled code (namely not at all), and the difference between partial and unsafe.
Joachim Breitner @nomeata
Ever since Joachim has found beauty and elegance in Functional Programming, he’s been working with and on functional programming languages, in particular Haskell.
He’s also always been fascinated by Interactive Theorem Proving and his academic persona used Isabelle and Coq for formalize mathematics and verify programs.
These two interests find their natural synthesis in the Lean programming language, and Joachim joined the Lean FRO to work on the Lean compiler itself.
Besides such serious nerdery, you’ll find Joachim dancing Swing and Tango (in particular when traveling to conferences, so talk to him if you want to join), paragliding and unapologetically making bad puns.
This session will likely contain high amounts of improvised live-coding and benefit greatly from your questions, suggestions and discussions.
- Speaker: Joachim Breitner, Lean FRO
- Friday 15 August 2025, 11:15-12:15
- Venue: Computer Laboratory, LT1.
- Series: Computer Laboratory Computer Architecture Group Meeting; organiser: Tobias Grosser.
Tue 05 Aug 12:00: Towards Physical AI: Time-Series Prediction for Intent-Aware Robot Learning
Understanding human intent is fundamental to robots that can collaborate naturally and effectively. Intent prediction involves forecasting time-series data – such as human motion trajectories, gaze patterns, and interaction data – to enable machines to anticipate human actions, respond appropriately, and learn from interaction. This capability paves the way for safer, faster, and intuitive human-robot collaboration.
This work presents a framework that combines Imitation Learning techniques with Foundation Models to advance intent-aware robot learning. The approach is demonstrated across diverse tasks, including target prediction in extended reality, human-robot handovers, and multi-robot coordination. By leveraging multimodal cues—such as hand motion, gaze, and interaction history – the system enhances prediction accuracy. Additionally, large language and vision models enable the interpretation of high-level human instructions for task planning and robot navigation. Together, these contributions move toward the goal of Physical AI, where robots can learn from humans and understand and act on their intent in real-world environments.
Bio: Mukund Mitra holds a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from NIT Raipur and is currently affiliated with the Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore. He was awarded the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship (PMRF), conferred to the top 1% of researchers in India. He has published in top venues including ICRA , ACM IUI , and ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI).
His research focuses on developing predictive models for Physical Artificial Intelligence, with emphasis on imitation learning and generative models. His work contributes to time-series data prediction, with applications spanning user interface design, eXtended Reality (XR), and motion planning for autonomous systems.
- Speaker: Mukund Mitra, Indian Institute of Science
- Tuesday 05 August 2025, 12:00-13:00
- Venue: Cambridge University Engineering Department, JDB Seminar Room.
- Series: Probabilistic Systems, Information, and Inference Group Seminars; organiser: Melanie Ellwood.
Wed 26 Nov 14:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Or Ordentlich, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- Wednesday 26 November 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: MR5, CMS Pavilion A.
- Series: Information Theory Seminar; organiser: Dr Varun Jog.
Wed 03 Dec 14:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Dr Stefan Bucher, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge
- Wednesday 03 December 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: MR5, CMS Pavilion A.
- Series: Information Theory Seminar; organiser: Prof. Ramji Venkataramanan.
Wed 06 Aug 15:00: Hopf algebras and Quillen's spectral sequence
Quillen defined a spectral sequence relating the homology of locally symmetric spaces to algebraic K-theory of Z and other number rings. In joint work with Brown, Chan, and Payne (arXiv:2405.11528), we introduce a Hopf algebra structure on this spectral sequence and give applications to the cohomology of the moduli space of principally polarized abelian varieties.
- Speaker: Søren Galatius (Columbia)
- Wednesday 06 August 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: MR14.
- Series: Topology talk; organiser: Oscar Randal-Williams.
Wed 12 Nov 14:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Yuxin Chen, University of Pennsylvania
- Wednesday 12 November 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: MR5, CMS Pavilion A.
- Series: Information Theory Seminar; organiser: Dr Varun Jog.
Thu 25 Sep 16:00: Milner Seminar September 2025 - Focus on spatial biology
Join us for the September Milner Seminar. Presentations and Q&A will be followed by refreshments and networking.
Speakers: Esther Baena, Owkin “MOSAIC: Intra-tumoral heterogeneity characterization through large-scale spatial and cell-resolved multi-omics profiling”
Mats Nilsson, Stockholm University and Wellcome Sanger Institute “In situ transcriptomics to map cells, molecules, and genetic variance across tissue sections”
Register at: https://milner.glueup.com/event/milner-seminars-focus-on-spatial-biology-148904/
- Speaker: Esther Baena, Owkin and Mats Nilsson, Stockholm University and Wellcome Sanger Institute
- Thursday 25 September 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre.
- Series: Milner Seminar Series; organiser: Mary-Jane Roebuck.
Tue 25 Nov 16:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Tobias Roddiger, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
- Tuesday 25 November 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: Computer Lab, FW26 and Online.
- Series: Mobile and Wearable Health Seminar Series; organiser: Cecilia Mascolo.
Fri 05 Sep 08:45: Embedding sustainability in our veterinary curriculum
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Tim WIlliams
- Friday 05 September 2025, 08:45-10:00
- Venue: LT2.
- Series: Friday Morning Seminars, Dept of Veterinary Medicine; organiser: Fiona Roby.
Tue 30 Sep 14:00: BSU Seminar: "Effective Health Technologies Faster? Value-Based, Response Adaptive Learning in Clinical Trials" This will be a free hybrid seminar. To register to attend virtually, please click here: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom...
Clinical trials are used to evaluate the health benefit of new health technologies, such as pharmaceuticals, but are quite costly and therefore have been the subject of much study. Health technology adoption decisions are often made based on not only health benefit, but the costs of drugs and treatment processes. Is it possible that this mismatch between incentives at different steps of the health innovation pipeline, clinical effectiveness on the one hand and cost-effectiveness on the other, may lead to suboptimal decisions? We introduce and explore a stream of work that seeks to improve the allocation of resources to clinical trials in a way that balances health value for money for treatments that are ultimately approved. The stream uses work from Bayesian sequential optimal learning and from game theory. We first look at basic trade-offs in a simple two-arm fully sequential trial design, to balance the costs of collecting more trial data with the expected opportunity costs averted by making decisions with better information. We then explore how the theory can apply to UK-NIHR funded clinical trials (including retrospective looks at the ProFHER trial, the CACTUS trial, and the HERO trial), and overview extensions that allow the framework to apply to multiarm trials, precision medicine trials, and explore implications for conditional approval schemes (motivated by the UK Cancer Drugs Fund).
This will be a free hybrid seminar. To register to attend virtually, please click here: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/IMAzE11MRtyNkOGZpkv4GA
- Speaker: Professor Stephen Chick, INSEAD
- Tuesday 30 September 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Large Seminar Room, East Forvie Building, Forvie Site Robinson Way Cambridge CB2 0SR..
- Series: MRC Biostatistics Unit Seminars; organiser: Alison Quenault.
Thu 12 Feb 14:00: Title to be confirmed Host – Antoine Hocher
Abstract not available
Host – Antoine Hocher
- Speaker: Dr Tom Williams from Bristol Palaeobiology Research Group, University of Bristol
- Thursday 12 February 2026, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Biffen Lecture theatre tbc and Zoom.
- Series: Genetics Seminar ; organiser: Caroline Newnham.
Tue 07 Oct 10:00: Monotone Circuit Complexity of Matching
We show that the perfect matching function on $n$-vertex graphs requires monotone circuits of size $2}$. This improves on the $n{\Omega(\log n)}$ lower bound of Razborov (1985). Our proof uses the standard approximation method together with a new sunflower lemma for matchings.
- Speaker: Bruno Cavalar (Oxford)
- Tuesday 07 October 2025, 10:00-11:00
- Venue: Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, Room SS03.
- Series: Algorithms and Complexity Seminar; organiser: Tom Gur.
Mon 04 Aug 13:00: Trio of talks: actionable security and privacy, security and privacy perceptions in South Asia, and reproductive security and privacy on TikTok in the post-Roe era
”It’s time. Time for digital security.”: An End User Study on Actionable Security and Privacy Advice
Anna Lena Rotthaler, Paderborn University
Anna Lena is a third-year PhD student whose research focuses on making security and privacy advice more usable for end users.
Digital security advice is the focus of much research, with unsatisfying results: End users do not follow experts’ security advice, and users and experts struggle to prioritize existing advice. Several studies point out that users are overwhelmed by the amount of available security advice, and make recommendations on how to improve existing advice. Nevertheless, we still do not know how to effectively give security advice. Inspired by daily habit apps, we developed a set of 30 pieces of short and actionable advice, and the Security App, an Android smartphone app to provide this advice to end users, to reduce mental effort, and to build secure habits. We conducted a 30-day online end-user (N=74) study to evaluate whether the set of advice is actionable and meaningful to users, whether users adopt the advice, and whether the app has an impact on security awareness and behavior. Our results show that the app is an appropriate tool to provide security advice to end users. Participants perceive the majority of tasks as comprehensible, actionable, and useful, and we show that the app in fact introduces secure behaviors. Our results can serve as a basis for future research on security advice and creating secure habits, and the possibility to effectively teach secure behavior.
Digital security and privacy perceptions in South Asian contexts: Case studies on UPI and Facebook matrimony groups
Deepthi Munagara, Paderborn University
Deepthi Mungara is a second year PhD student at Paderborn University whose work focuses on digital security and privacy in South Asian contexts and she also works on security testing.
In this talk, Deepthi presents two case studies that examine how cultural norms and digital literacy shape user experiences with security and privacy on digital platforms. The first study explores India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), revealing gaps between user concerns and the security advice provided by apps, banks, and regulators, based on interviews and a content analysis. The second study investigates Facebook matrimony groups in Pakistan, where users—navigating cultural taboos and legal restrictions—employ cautious privacy strategies to avoid risks like identity theft, blackmail, and social judgment. Across both studies, Deepthi highlights how users’ decisions are deeply influenced by cultural, social, and informational contexts, and she calls for clearer, culturally informed communication and stronger platform-level protections to support user security and trust.
Reproductive Security & Privacy Advice on TikTok in the post-Roe Era
Rachel Rodriguez Gonzalez, Paderborn University and The George Washington University
In summer 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade, a seminal case that linked the right to privacy to the right to reproductive self determination at the federal level. Reproductive self determination in the US is now regulated at the state level, with vast differences across states. With the current landscape of online tracking and selling data, people who may become pregnant are at risk of prosecution based on data from their digital footprint, including online searches, period trackers, and fitness trackers. After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, social media creators reacted on TikTok, including by giving privacy advice regarding reproductive health under the new legal situation. To create a future advice landscape that empowers users to protect their security and privacy after significant shifts in legislation, we need to understand the landscape of security and privacy advice: how general-purpose advice was adapted to reproductive health, what domain-specific advice emerged, and whether, collectively, this advice is sound, actionable, and effective. We report on an in-depth analysis of 92 TikTok videos giving advice on reproductive security and privacy in reaction to the overturn of Roe v. Wade. We find that content creators connected general-purpose security advice (like using encrypted messengers) to reproductive privacy, and that domain-specific advice (like ceasing the use of period tracking apps) emerged. Though each piece of advice was often sound, it collectively lacked nuance, actionability, completeness, and practicality due to the complexities of the legal, technical, and interpersonal threat landscape. Based on our analysis, we provide recommendations for advice-givers, social media platforms, and the security community towards stronger, more actionable, and more complete communication of domain-specific security and privacy advice.
- Speaker: Anna Lena Rotthaler (Paderborn University), Deepthi Munagara (Paderborn University), and Rachel Rodriguez Gonzalez (Paderborn University and The George Washington University)
- Monday 04 August 2025, 13:00-15:00
- Venue: Webinar & FW11, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building..
- Series: Computer Laboratory Security Seminar; organiser: Alexandre Pauwels.
Wed 30 Jul 14:00: Co-Optimizing and Designing Pervasive Mobile Systems and Built Infrastructure with Humans-in-the-Loop for Smarter, Healthier, and Safer Environments. https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/2189185886?pwd=MzJ1L2s0aFpHMFlDS21lVW9LN0VZQT09
We have seen remarkable growth in smart devices and artificial intelligence in all aspects of our lives. Despite these successes, there still exists a large gap between realizing robust, practical, and omnipresent AI that coexists and interacts with humans and the physical world. There are many great success stories in bringing the benefits of AI from the productivity tools, digital assistants, and chatbots in the digital world to our physical world, ranging from smart wearables that track health and fitness, to sensors for monitoring the environment and robots that interact with our physical world. Traditionally, these diverse areas are explored by equally diverse communities. In this talk, we argue that to create truly autonomous and intelligent physical spaces, we need to co-design applications and services at all scales and levels with both humans and computers in the loop, ranging from infrastructure found all around our environments (e.g., sensors and smart speakers) down to wearables and personal smartphones enable humans and computers to interface with each other. Towards this vision, we will present several lines of work that 1) demonstrates how co-optimizing our environments with humans-in-the-loop can significantly improve important metrics for both our built environments (e.g., energy consumption) and humans (e.g., health and comfort), 2) enables new modalities for computers and AI to interact with our physical world through drones, robots, and foundation models, and 3) enhances the natural language interface between humans and the digital world through efficient AI architectures for speech enhancement.
Biography: Stephen Xia is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. His research lies at the intersection between systems, embedded machine learning, and signal processing, spanning areas in mobile and embedded computing, Internet-of-Things, cyber-physical systems, artificial intelligence, and smart health. His work focuses on realizing truly intelligent and autonomous environments by embedding and utilizing compute, perception, actuation, storage, and networking resources commonly found all around us. Stephen’s research has been highlighted by many popular media outlets, including Mashable, Fast Company, and Gizmodo, and has received various distinctions including multiple Best Demo Awards, Best Presentation Awards, and Best Paper Awards. Prior to Northwestern, Stephen was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and received his B.S. from Rice University, all in Electrical Engineering.
https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/2189185886?pwd=MzJ1L2s0aFpHMFlDS21lVW9LN0VZQT09
- Speaker: Stephen Xia, Northwestern University
- Wednesday 30 July 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Computer Lab, FW26 and Online.
- Series: Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence Seminar Series; organiser: Cecilia Mascolo.
Mon 04 Aug 11:00: Complexity beyond entanglement - magic of many-body systems
Driven by groundbreaking experimental advances, quantum matter is currently entering the era of quantum error correction – where elementary computations can be demonstrated in a fault-tolerant manner. From a many-body theory viewpoint, these developments motivate the question: what are states that are challenging to realize in the presence of error correction? Entanglement alone is not informative about state complexity, and in fact, it is a free resource in such situations. In this talk, we will tackle quantum state complexity of many-body systems under the lens of non-stabilizerness – also known as magic. Magic quantifies the difficulty of realizing states in most error corrected codes, and is thus of fundamental practical importance. However, very little is known about its significance to many-body phenomena. I will start the seminar by giving a short review on magic in spin systems, with a focus on quantities that can be used to compute it – stabilizer Renyi entropies and robustness of magic. The, I shall present method(s) to measure magic in tensor network simulations, and illustrate a series of applications to many body systems, including its relevance in critical matter and gauge theories, and its relations to entanglement. These results indicate that a large amount of quantum resources are required to generate interesting many-body phenomena under the assumption of error correction; at the same time, a picture emerges where error correction is – unexpectedly – intimately tied to various forms of correlated quantum matter, in a universal manner.
- Speaker: Marcello Dalmonte (ICTP Trieste)
- Monday 04 August 2025, 11:00-12:15
- Venue: Seminar Room 3, RDC.
- Series: Theory of Condensed Matter; organiser: Bo Peng.
Tue 29 Jul 14:00: Modelling the language of extremist communities
Extremist groups develop complex in-group language, also referred to as cryptolects, to exclude or mislead outsiders. Though this is a longstanding and well-documented social norm, it highlights key shortcomings in current natural language processing technologies, e.g. large language models (LLMs), especially when used for content moderation. In this talk, I will describe recent methods, datasets, and models we developed to address these challenges. Our experiments center on two online extremist platforms, Incels and Stormfront, which promote alt-right and misogynistic ideologies, respectively.
- Speaker: Christine de Kock, University of Melbourne
- Tuesday 29 July 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Webinar & LT2, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building..
- Series: Computer Laboratory Security Seminar; organiser: Anna Talas.
Tue 23 Sep 10:00: Fault-Tolerant System-on-Chip Design for Harsh Space Environments Note unusual time
Reliability is crucial for ensuring safe operation and optimizing efficiency in safety-critical applications. Fault-tolerant integrated circuits are central components of reliable microelectronic systems that manage safety-critical applications operating in harsh environments, including Space missions.
In Space missions, integrated circuits face exacerbated reliability challenges, primarily due to high radiation levels. With the growing demand for higher performance, lower power consumption, and greater integration in emerging Space missions, ensuring the reliability of complex high-performance System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms is becoming increasingly challenging.
This talk presents the latest European developments in designing reliable SoCs for Space missions. In addition, it highlights the ESA Ultra Deep Submicron (UDSM) initiative. UDSM initiative paves the way for the development of the next generation of fault-tolerant ASI Cs, FPG As, and Microprocessors building blocks, to accomplish higher levels of integration and performance, and to achieve technological sovereignty.
Note unusual time
- Speaker: Mohamed Mounir, ESA (European Space Agency)
- Tuesday 23 September 2025, 10:00-10:30
- Venue: SS03, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building.
- Series: Computer Laboratory Computer Architecture Group Meeting; organiser: Prof Simon Moore.
Tue 29 Jul 17:15: Hierarchical Protein Structure Representation Learning via Topological Deep Learning
Protein representation learning (PRL) is crucial for understanding structure-function relationships, yet current sequence- and graph-based methods fail to capture the hierarchical organization inherent in protein structures. We introduce Topotein, a comprehensive framework that applies topological deep learning to PRL through the novel Protein Combinatorial Complex (PCC) and Topology-Complete Perceptron Network (TCPNet). Our PCC represents proteins at multiple hierarchical levels—-from residues to secondary structures to complete proteins—-while preserving geometric information at each level. TCP Net employs SE(3)-equivariant message passing across these hierarchical structures, enabling more effective capture of multi-scale structural patterns. Through extensive experiments on four PRL tasks, TCP Net consistently outperforms state-of-the-art geometric graph neural networks. Our approach demonstrates particular strength in tasks such as fold classification which require understanding of secondary structure arrangements, validating the importance of hierarchical topological features for protein analysis.
- Speaker: Zhiyu Wang
- Tuesday 29 July 2025, 17:15-18:30
- Venue: Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, Lecture Theatre 1.
- Series: Foundation AI; organiser: Pietro Lio.