Mon 17 Nov 13:05: Gearset: Title to be confirmed
Abstract to be confirmed.
Some catering will be provided.
- Speaker: Speaker to be confirmed
- Monday 17 November 2025, 13:05-13:55
- Venue: FW26, William Gates Building.
- Series: Technical Talks - Department of Computer Science and Technology ; organiser: Ben Karniely.
Mon 03 Nov 13:05: Jane Street: Title to be confirmed
Abstract to be confirmed
Some catering will be provided
- Speaker: Speaker to be confirmed
- Monday 03 November 2025, 13:05-13:55
- Venue: FW26, William Gates Building.
- Series: Technical Talks - Department of Computer Science and Technology ; organiser: Ben Karniely.
Mon 27 Oct 13:05: GSA Capital: Technology at GSA
Overview: In this presentation, we will provide an overview of GSA and what a systematic quantitative fund is. We will outline the role of our Technology teams, including the divisions, technology stacks and how it supports researchers in the development and deployment of trading strategies. Finally, one of our software developers will share a recent project that involved compressing exchange trade and order data into a binary format, reducing the replay time by approximately ten-fold, and enabling rapid generation of intraday equity trading signals.
Speaker: Junhui Yang joined GSA in 2023 as a software developer supporting the firm’s founder. He works on building and maintaining data pipelines, back testing frameworks, monitoring systems and other critical tools essential to the success of a quantitative fund. Prior to GSA , he read Mathematics and Computer Science at Merton College, University of Oxford and spent a brief period at Meta. Outside of work, he enjoys playing the violin and piano, and is a tea enthusiast.
Audience: We welcome students from all academic levels in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics and other closely related disciplines to attend. The event will start with a short presentation followed by informal chats with representatives from GSA over food and drinks. Please sign up via our event listings at https://www.gsacapital.com/join-us so we can gauge numbers for catering purposes.
About GSA : GSA Capital is a multi-award winning investment manager that has been delivering exceptional results for over 15 years. With offices in London and New York, GSA Capital combines a world-class proprietary platform with innovative thinking to develop and deploy systematic and process-driven investment strategies across all asset classes, geographies and timescales. For more information, visit our website at www.gsacapital.com
Some catering will be provided
- Speaker: Junhui Yang
- Monday 27 October 2025, 13:05-13:55
- Venue: FW26, William Gates Building.
- Series: Technical Talks - Department of Computer Science and Technology ; organiser: Ben Karniely.
Mon 20 Oct 13:05: Bloomberg: Observability in Action: Designing Effective Dashboards
Dashboards are a critical part of your observability stack. Looking at your dashboards—are they actually helping you understand the system? When well-designed, they surface intuitive information and help quickly diagnose outages. But poorly designed dashboards can do more harm than good: they generate noise instead of insights, contribute to alert fatigue, and bury real issues under a flood of useless data. In this tech talk, we’ll explore common design pitfalls through a fun fast food shop scenario that mimics real-world systems. We’ll look at examples of dashboards that mislead and ones that empower, and discuss how to create dashboards that deliver actionable insights, reduce noise, and support fast, confident decision-making. You’ll learn how to identify key signals, tailor visualizations to specific roles and needs, and align your observability strategy with real-world goals. Whether you’re a student, early-career engineer, or just curious about system reliability, you’ll walk away with practical tips for building dashboards that drive clarity, confidence, and impact.
Registration Link: https://bloomberg.avature.net/su/2ebe52ef137ab02f
Some catering will be provided
- Speaker: Speaker to be confirmed
- Monday 20 October 2025, 13:05-13:55
- Venue: FW26, William Gates Building.
- Series: Technical Talks - Department of Computer Science and Technology ; organiser: Ben Karniely.
Fri 28 Nov 16:30: What does the high heritability of psychological traits mean for psychologists and educators?
Behavioural genetics has a hundred-year history of pointing to the high heritability of psychological traits relevant to people’s everyday lives, and outcomes such as educational attainment linked to wellbeing and professional success. Recently, the availability of polygenic indices, derived from large-scale genomic studies, has brought behavioural genetics to the individual level, generating individualised predictions of genetic potential. This advance brings into focus the relevance of genomic information for both personal and policy decisions. The drawbacks of behavioural genetics are twofold: it tells us only about current population outcomes, not how they could be different under different circumstances; and it is relatively silent on the developmental mechanisms that deliver heritable outcomes. In this talk, I will use a computational framework to focus on developmental mechanisms. I will show how simulations of interventions to alter developmental outcomes for whole populations, which have been designed to show differing levels of trait heritability, can produce surprising results. These results point to the policy relevance of the notion of heritability itself.
Host: Prof Dénes Szücs (ds377@cam.ac.uk)
- Speaker: Prof Michael Thomas, Birkbeck, University of London
- Friday 28 November 2025, 16:30-18:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.
- Series: Zangwill Club; organiser: Psychology Reception.
Tue 28 Apr 16:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Professor Thomas Nikolaus (Universität Münster)
- Tuesday 28 April 2026, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: MR2, CMS.
- Series: Mordell Lectures; organiser: HoD Secretary, DPMMS.
Tue 28 Apr 16:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Professor Thomas Nikolaus (Universität Münster)
- Tuesday 28 April 2026, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: MR2, CMS.
- Series: Mordell Lectures; organiser: HoD Secretary, DPMMS.
Mon 13 Oct 13:05: Perplexity AI: Inference at Perplexity AI
Abstract: Perplexity is a search and answer engine which leverages LLMs to provide high-quality citation-backed answers. The AI Inference team within the company is responsible for serving the models behind the product, ranging from single-GPU embedding models to multi-node sparse Mixture-of-Experts language models. This talk provides more insight into the in-house runtime behind inference at Perplexity, with a particular focus on efficiently serving some of the largest available open-source models.
Biography:Nandor Licker is an AI Inference Engineer at Perplexity, focusing on LLM runtime implementation and GPU performance optimization.
Some catering will be provided
- Speaker: Speaker to be confirmed
- Monday 13 October 2025, 13:05-13:55
- Venue: FW26, William Gates Building.
- Series: Technical Talks - Department of Computer Science and Technology ; organiser: Ben Karniely.
Mon 13 Oct 13:00: Predicting wind extremes in a warming climate: from general circulation to storm-resolving models via improved turbulence representation
A wave of unprecedented extreme weather events, breaking records worldwide, has raised urgent questions about the ability of current weather and climate models to anticipate the emerging impacts of climate change on human life and infrastructure. Among these, extreme wind speeds and gusts, often associated with midlatitude cyclones and low-level jets, pose a growing threat to critical sectors of society. In this talk, I will first present projections of near-surface extreme winds over the midlatitudes of both hemispheres under an idealized warming scenario, based on CMIP -class models. I will then illustrate how global kilometer-scale simulations may provide new insight into how the structure and intensity of North Atlantic midlatitude cyclones respond to climate warming. Finally, I will discuss results from a set of experiments with the GFDL -AM4 model that incorporate improved turbulence representation via the CLUBB scheme. These highlight the role of prognosed momentum fluxes in better capturing low-level jet dynamics and improving the simulation of the diurnal precipitation cycle. Together, these studies demonstrate the importance of refined physics and high-resolution modeling for advancing our understanding and prediction of wind extremes in a warming climate.
- Speaker: Emanuele Silvio Gentile, University of Reading
- Monday 13 October 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: MR3, CMS.
- Series: Quantitative Climate and Environmental Science Seminars; organiser: Bethan Wynne-Cattanach.
Fri 21 Nov 12:00: Bayesian Brains Without Probabilities
Over the past few decades, waves of complex probabilistic explanations have swept through cognitive science, explaining behaviour as tuned to environmental statistics in domains from intuitive physics and causal learning, to perception, motor control and language. Yet people produce stunningly incorrect answers in response to even the simplest questions about probabilities. How can a supposedly rational brain paradoxically reason so poorly with probabilities? Perhaps our minds do not represent or calculate probabilities at all and are, indeed, poorly adapted to do so. Instead, the brain could be approximating Bayesian inference through sampling: drawing samples from its distribution of likely hypotheses over time. Only with infinite samples does a Bayesian sampler conform to the laws of probability, and in this talk I show how using a finite number of samples systematically generates classic probabilistic reasoning errors in individuals, and how an extended model explains estimates, choices, response times, and confidence judgments in a variety of tasks.
Host: Dr Deborah Talmi (dt492@cam.ac.uk)
- Speaker: Prof Adam Sanborn, University of Warwick
- Friday 21 November 2025, 12:00-13:30
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.
- Series: Zangwill Club; organiser: Psychology Reception.
Fri 14 Nov 16:30: Naive Wisdom: Behavioral Evidence from Newborn Chicks
For many years, the scientific community neglected or even denied the existence of anything resembling a mind in newborn animals, whether human or non-human. However, since the latter half of the twentieth century, a series of seminal studies has revealed a dramatically different scenario. Today it is well established that newborn animals enter the world equipped with a rich repertoire of innate predispositions and skills that facilitate learning and enable them to successfully navigate their social and physical environments. In this talk, I will present an overview of research highlighting key aspects of the newborn mind, with particular focus on behavioural methodologies and findings in which I have been directly involved—chiefly investigating the newborn domestic chick, as well as extending some findings to human infants.
Host: Prof Nicky Clayton (nsc22@cam.ac.uk)
- Speaker: Prof Lucia Regolin, University of Padua
- Friday 14 November 2025, 16:30-18:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.
- Series: Zangwill Club; organiser: Psychology Reception.
Fri 07 Nov 16:30: Subcortical Contributions to Speech and Language
Up to 8% of children experience stuttering, and a comparable proportion struggle with developmental language disorder (DLD), a condition marked by unexplained difficulties in acquiring a first language. Despite their prevalence, the neural bases of these developmental conditions remain poorly understood. Using quantitative MRI , our work has identified distinct alterations in subcortical brain structures: elevated iron concentration in the putamen in stuttering, and reduced myelin in the caudate nucleus in DLD . These findings highlight separable subcortical circuits underlying motor control for speech and language learning. In stuttering, we combined non-invasive brain stimulation with fluency training to reduce speech disfluencies, linking behavioural improvement to functional changes in the putamen and connected speech motor cortex. In DLD , our results challenge the dominant view that the disorder stems solely from deficits in procedural learning circuits. Instead, we find involvement of additional subcortical learning systems, including the medial temporal lobe and cerebellum. Ongoing longitudinal studies are mapping how these neural differences shape developmental trajectories in speech, language, and brain maturation.
Host: Dr Mirjana Bozic (mb383@cam.ac.uk)
- Speaker: Prof Kate Watkins, University of Oxford
- Friday 07 November 2025, 16:30-18:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.
- Series: Zangwill Club; organiser: Psychology Reception.
Fri 31 Oct 16:30: Trust in “Moral” Machines
As use of artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more widespread, machine systems are increasingly required not only to display artificial intelligence but artificial morality too. AI is already used to aid decisions about life support, criminal sentencing, and the allocation of scarce medical resource, and so-called “moral machines” are even being thought to be able to act as “artificial moral advisors” by giving moral advice and helping to improve human moral decision making. In this talk, I will explore what it means to trust AI in the moral domain. Drawing on insights from social psychology and moral cognition, I will discuss how people conceptualise trust in AI, how judgments of effectiveness and ethicality intertwine, and how perceptions of intelligence shape attributions of morality. I will consider how people trust “artificial moral advisors,” and how people trust other humans who rely on AI for socio-relational tasks. Drawing on these findings, I will ask whether – and in what sense – we should place trust in ‘moral’ machines, and what kind of future we are willing to accept as AI takes on roles that shape not only our decisions, but our relationships, values, and humanity itself.
Host: Prof Simone Schnall (ss877@cam.ac.uk)
- Speaker: Prof Jim A.C. Everett, University of Kent
- Friday 31 October 2025, 16:30-18:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.
- Series: Zangwill Club; organiser: Psychology Reception.
Fri 03 Oct 14:00: Intelligent Sensing and Energy Devices for Pervasive and Sustainable Healthcare
Abstract:
The rapid ageing of populations and the global impact of the COVID -19 pandemic have exposed critical shortcomings in medical resources and healthcare systems, underscoring the urgent need for innovative biomedical technologies. Traditional centralized healthcare remains predominantly offline and reactive, with physiological monitoring occurring intermittently at clinical facilities. In contrast, recent advancements in smart materials, wearable technologies, wireless communication, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things are paving the way for a paradigm shift toward continuous, pervasive, and personalized digital health solutions. However, significant challenges persist in achieving advanced monitoring modalities, accessibility, and sustainability.
This talk will first present our recent progress in developing cost-effective, accessible sensing technologies for ambulatory monitoring of deep-tissue signals. I will introduce wireless, flexible near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) devices for measuring local hemodynamics and tissue oxygenation, mechano-acoustic sensors to decode tissue mechanics, and radio-frequency metamaterial sensors for non-contact vital sign detection. The second part of the talk will cover our recent efforts in developing flexible energy devices targeted at sustainable and reliable power sources for wearable bioelectronics. These works represent steps toward accessible, affordable, and continuous health monitoring, addressing diverse needs such as pediatric care, rehabilitation, and energy autonomy, and paving the way for pervasive and sustainable healthcare.
Short Bio:
Changsheng Wu is a Presidential Young Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also an assistant professor by courtesy in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a PI in the Institute for Health Innovation and Technology and the N.1 Institute for Health, NUS . He received his PhD in MSE from Georgia Tech and carried out postdoctoral research in the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics at Northwestern University. His research focuses on developing wireless wearables and intelligent robots for energy harvesting, biosensing and therapeutic applications, leveraging bioelectronics, materials science, and advanced manufacturing to create solutions for sustainable living and environment. He has been recognized by international awards including MRS Early Career Distinguished Presenter, Asia Pacific Biomedical Engineering Consortium (APBEC) Young Scholar Award, NGPT Young Investigator Award, and TechConnect Innovation Award.
- Speaker: Dr Changsheng Wu, National University of Singapore
- Friday 03 October 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Department of Engineering, LT6.
- Series: Engineering - Mechanics and Materials Seminar Series; organiser: div-c.
Fri 10 Oct 16:00: Short- vs Long-Distance Dynamics in b->sll Decays
Flavor-changing neutral current decays such as b->sll are highly suppressed in the Standard Model (SM) and therefore provide sensitive tests for new physics. The long-standing tension between SM predictions and experimental measurements in both branching ratios and angular observables in b->sll decays can be attributed to a modification of the Wilson coefficient C9 of the semileptonic effective operator O9 by approximately 20–25 % relative to its SM value. This deviation might originate from a short-distance b->sll contribution, signaling new physics, or from unaccounted-for long-distance contributions within the SM, arising from the non-local matrix elements of the four-quark operators. We discuss our current theoretical understanding of these non-local matrix elements, focusing in particular on rescattering contributions induced by intermediate D>"> D()_s states.
- Speaker: Arianna Tinari (Zurich U.)
- Friday 10 October 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: MR19 (Potter Room, Pavilion B), CMS.
- Series: HEP phenomenology joint Cavendish-DAMTP seminar; organiser: Nico Gubernari.
Fri 17 Oct 16:30: Mental Navigation and the Default Mode Network: From Spatial Maps to Conceptual Knowledge
In parallel with other species, humans possess a remarkable ability to encode detailed spatial information about our environments, forming cognitive maps that enable inference and generalisation for goal-directed behaviour. Long linked to the hippocampal-entorhinal system, growing evidence now suggests that the neural mechanisms supporting spatial navigation also extend to abstract domains, involving a broader network of cortical regions. In this talk, I will propose that the default mode network (DMN), traditionally associated with mind-wandering and self-referential processing, plays a domain-general role in constructing and traversing cognitive maps: structured representations of relational knowledge that span both spatial and non-spatial domains. I will present recent findings from our lab using ultra-high-field 7T fMRI, showing how spatial learning and memory are encoded across the DMN during navigation in virtual environments, and how these same regions organize conceptual knowledge along interpretable representational axes to support abstract mental navigation. Together, these results suggest that the DMN implements a unified computational architecture for mapping space, memory, meaning, and value. This framework bridges classical theories of cognitive maps with contemporary systems neuroscience and offers translational insights into disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, where both spatial navigation and DMN function are compromised.
Host: Prof Trevor Robbins (twr2@cam.ac.uk)
- Speaker: Dr Deniz Vatansever, Fudan University
- Friday 17 October 2025, 16:30-18:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.
- Series: Zangwill Club; organiser: Psychology Reception.
Fri 24 Oct 16:30: Revisiting Hebb and the Hippocampal Index in Humans: Toward a Neurotechnology of Memory
In this talk I will present two strands of studies where we investigated two prominent mechanisms suggested to underlie human episodic memory. First, Hebbian learning (i.e “fire-together, wire together”) or Spike-Timing-Dependent-Plasticity (STDP), which posits that the firing of neurons in close temporal proximity is crucial for laying down a memory trace. Recording the co-firing of single-neuron in epilepsy patients in the medial-temporal-lobe during a memory task we found results that are consistent with STDP . I will also show results from rhythmic stimulation studies demonstrating that the manipulation of temporal patterns in the range of milliseconds modulates episodic memory formation. A second idea that has influenced memory research is the “Indexing Theory” which posits that the human hippocampus stores episodic memories via an Index – an agnostic conjunctive type of code that points to the different elements that belong to the episode. I will present recent evidence from human single neuron recordings where we found neurons that are consistent with such an indexing function. I will also present unpublished results from an ultra-highfield fMRI at 7T which support these human single unit findings and suggest that the Index is predominantly located in the hippocampal subfield CA3 . I will close the talk by presenting a recent theoretical framework where we integrate these findings with Concept Cells (so-called Jennifer Anniston cells) and the Engram Allocation Theory. At the end I will speculate how results from both streams could lead to the development of novel treatment for patients with memory problems.
- Speaker: Prof Simon Hanslmayr, University of Glasgow
- Friday 24 October 2025, 16:30-18:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.
- Series: Zangwill Club; organiser: Psychology Reception.
Fri 17 Oct 13:00: Sense and Sensibility in Cognition: Unraveling the Neural Basis of Emotional Regulation
In this Zangwill seminar, I explore how the brain regulates emotion—what goes wrong in disorders like depression and ADHD , and how we can measure affective states across species with increasing precision. From mouse genetic models of attention deficits focused on the developing hippocampus to neural signatures of pain-induced depression, we uncover how emotional dysregulation takes shape at the molecular, cellular, and systems level. For example, we consider the affective consequences of chronic pain, where both human imaging and rodent studies reveal early hippocampal changes, including enhanced neurogenesis and microglial modulation, as potential contributors to depression. We also harness deep learning to decode facial expressions in animals, revealing moments of pleasure, fear, and altered states—and extend this work to humans by tracking how young children express emotion and curiosity in natural social settings. Combining genetics, neuroimaging, behavior, and AI, this talk offers a multi-layered perspective on “hot” cognition and its neural underpinnings, opening new doors for early detection and intervention in affective and developmental disorders.
Host: Prof Trevor Robbins (twr2@cam.ac.uk)
- Speaker: Dr Xiao Xiao, Fudan University
- Friday 17 October 2025, 13:00-14:30
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.
- Series: Zangwill Club; organiser: Psychology Reception.
Fri 10 Oct 13:00: Evaluating Baseline and Forecasting Success: Making REDD+ More Credible
Abstract
Projects that aim to Reduce Emissions from tropical Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) have great potential to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss, but substantial funding is needed to scale up efforts. The trade of carbon credits, quantified as the amount of avoided carbon emissions relative to a baseline (“counterfactual”), can be a key finance mechanism but face numerous challenges. We address the challenges of 1) evaluating the method used to estimate counterfactuals and 2) producing reliable forecasts of carbon outcomes in prospective projects with two studies, using remotely sensed forest loss data and pixel matching to track deforestation and carbon loss trends.
In the first study, we evaluated counterfactual-estimating methods with placebo “projects”, where there are no REDD + activities and where we project and counterfactual outcomes are expected to follow the same trend. We found that the ex-post method (estimates made after project start) outperformed the ex-ante methods (forecasts made at project start), supporting the use of ex-post methods for credit issuance and showcases the potential of using the placebo approach to help develop more credible counterfactual-estimating methods.
In the second study, we used historical carbon loss to generate forecasts of counterfactual carbon loss after project start, and constructed predictive models for within-project carbon loss and carbon credit production (difference between project and counterfactual carbon loss), using factors theorised to influence REDD + project effectiveness (slope, remoteness, project size, GDP , corruption index) as predictors. Predictions for both counterfactual carbon loss (goodness-of-fit: 0.62) and within-project carbon loss (goodness-of-fit: 0.87) performed reasonably well, but the predictive performance of carbon credit production were low (goodness-of-fit: 0.32), suggesting a mismatch between the prediction of project vs. counterfactual carbon losses or unknown biases that require further research.
Bio
E-Ping is a third-year postdoc, working with Keshav and Professor David Coomes (Plant Sciences) on using satellite data to quantify the benefit of emissions reduction and its permanence in tropical forest conservation projects in the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) framework, with the aim of improving credibility of conservation finance mechanisms through carbon markets.
- Speaker: E-Ping Rau, University of Cambridge
- Friday 10 October 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Room GS15 at the William Gates Building and on Zoom: https://cl-cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/4361570789?pwd=Nkl2T3ZLaTZwRm05bzRTOUUxY3Q4QT09&from=addon .
- Series: Energy and Environment Group, Department of CST; organiser: lyr24.
Tue 11 Nov 14:00: Title tbc Note: This talk will unusually take place on a Tuesday.
Abstract not available
Note: This talk will unusually take place on a Tuesday.
- Speaker: Mehtaab Sawhney (Columbia University)
- Tuesday 11 November 2025, 14:00-15:30
- Venue: MR4, CMS.
- Series: Discrete Analysis Seminar; organiser: Julia Wolf.