
Wed 21 May 13:30: Random multiplicative functions and beyond
In this talk, I will survey recent progress on random multiplicative functions, a probabilistic model for multiplicative functions. I will also discuss its connections to other problems, such as the Erdos multiplication table problem, Fydorov-Hiary-Keating conjecture, and Polya’s conjecture on positive definite quadratic characters.
- Speaker: Max Xu (Courant Institute, NYU)
- Wednesday 21 May 2025, 13:30-15:00
- Venue: MR4, CMS.
- Series: Discrete Analysis Seminar; organiser: Julia Wolf.
Fri 23 May 14:30: Recent advances in critical infrastructures forecasting via Physics-Enhanced Machine Learning
This talk will introduce the concept of Physics-Enhanced Machine Learning (PEML) which combines data, physics and expert and domain knowledge to enhance modelling and forecasting capabilities of critical infrastructures such as bridges, ferry quays and wind turbines. PEML approaches developed to address challenges such as parameter identification and virtual sensing will be described. An overview of recent developments on model updates in the presence of sparse information, equation discovery in the presence of non-smooth nonlinearity, and measurements disentanglement will be provided. Finally open challenges are going to be summarised.
- Speaker: Alice Cicirello, University of Cambridge, UK
- Friday 23 May 2025, 14:30-15:30
- Venue: CivEng Seminar Room (1-33) (Civil Engineering Building).
- Series: Engineering Department Structures Research Seminars; organiser: Shehara Perera.
Thu 05 Jun 16:00: Dr Ewan Harrison, Wellcome Sanger Institute
This Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar will take place on Thursday 5 June 2025, starting at 4:00pm, in the Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre (JCBC)
Speaker: Dr Ewan Harrison, Head of Respiratory Virus and Microbiome Initiative, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Title: TBC
Host: Patrycja Kozik, MRC -LMB, Cambridge
Refreshments will be available following the seminar.
- Speaker: Dr Ewan Harrison, Wellcome Sanger Institute
- Thursday 05 June 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
- Series: Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar Series; organiser: Ruth Paton.
Thu 29 May 16:00: Regulation of human T cell responses by the microenvironment – novel mechanisms underlying T cell cytotoxicity
This Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar will take place on Thursday 29 May 2025, starting at 4:00pm, in the Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre (JCBC)
Speaker: Prof. Christina Zielinski, Chair of Infection Immunology at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology and the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, where she works on the regulation of human T cells and their translational impact in autoimmunity, infections, and cancer.
Title: ‘Regulation of human T cell responses by the microenvironment – novel mechanisms underlying T cell cytotoxicity’
Host: Rahul Roychoudhuri, Professor of Cancer Immunology, Pathology
Refreshments will be available following the seminar.
- Speaker: Prof. Christina Zielinski, Chair of Infection Immunology, Leibniz Institute HKI
- Thursday 29 May 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
- Series: Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar Series; organiser: Ruth Paton.
Thu 22 May 16:00: Prof. Vincenzo Bronte, Universita di Verona, Italy
This Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar will take place on Thursday 22 May 2025, starting at 4:00pm, in the Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre (JCBC)
Speaker: Prof. Vincenzo Bronte, Universita di Verona, Italy
Title: TBC
Host: Virginia Pedicord, CITIID , Cambridge
Refreshments will be available following the seminar.
- Speaker: Prof. Vincenzo Bronte, Universita di Verona, Italy
- Thursday 22 May 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
- Series: Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar Series; organiser: Ruth Paton.
Thu 05 Jun 14:30: Independent spanning trees in the hypercube
We say two spanning trees of a graph are completely independent if their edge sets are disjoint, and for each pair of vertices, the paths between them in each spanning tree do not have any other vertex in common. Pai and Chang constructed two such spanning trees in the hypercube Q_n for sufficiently large n, while Kandekar and Mane recently showed there are 3 pairwise completely independent spanning trees in hypercubes Q_n for sufficiently large n. We prove that for each k, there exist k completely independent spanning trees in Q_n for sufficiently large n. In fact, we show that there are (1/12+o(1))n spanning trees in Q_n.
- Speaker: Benedict Randall Shaw (Cambridge)
- Thursday 05 June 2025, 14:30-15:30
- Venue: MR12.
- Series: Combinatorics Seminar; organiser: ibl10.
Thu 22 May 14:30: Multiply Intersecting Families.
A family F ⊂ P(n) is r-wise k-intersecting if |A1 ∩ · · · ∩ Ar| ≥ k for any A1, . . . , Ar ∈ F. It is easily seen that if F is r-wise k-intersecting for r ≥ 2, k ≥ 1 then |F| ≤ 2 . The problem of determining the maximal size of a family F that is both r1-wise k1-intersecting and r2-wise k2-intersecting was raised in 2019 by Frankl and Kupavskii. They proved the surprising result that, for (r1, k1) = (3, 1) and (r2, k2) = (2, 32) then this maximum is at most 2(n−2) , and conjectured the same holds if k2 is replaced by 3. In this talk I shall not only prove this conjecture but also determine the exact maximum for (r1, k1) = (3, 1) and (r2, k2) = (2, 3) for all n.
- Speaker: Agnijo Banerjee (Cambridge)
- Thursday 22 May 2025, 14:30-15:30
- Venue: MR12.
- Series: Combinatorics Seminar; organiser: ibl10.
Tue 20 May 17:00: Deep Learning Approaches for Label-Free Tumour Image Segmentation Spectroscopy in Cancer Diagnosis
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Thomas Hartigan
- Tuesday 20 May 2025, 17:00-17:45
- Venue: Lecture Theatre 2, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building.
- Series: Foundation AI; organiser: Pietro Lio.
Thu 29 May 15:00: Numerical shape optimization with finite elements: a bit of theory and a bit of practice
Shape optimization is about finding domain geometries that minimize a given objective function. Dido’s isoperimetric problem of finding a geometry with maximal area for a given perimeter is a classical example. In most applications, evaluating the objective function requires solving a boundary value problem on the domain to be optimized. For example, to compute the energy dissipated by a fluid flowing in a pipe one must first compute a solution to a fluid model. The presence of such constraints makes shape optimization problems particularly challenging. Even computing approximate solutions with numerical methods is not straightforward because this requires solving a boundary value problem on a computational domain that changes at each iteration of the optimization algorithm. In this talk, I will describe how the finite element method enables a natural implementation of the moving-mesh shape optimization method that generalizes straightforwardly to higher-order discretizations. I will also explain how finite element software can automated the evaluation of shape derivatives along finite element directions. Finally, I will present how these aspects have been realized in the automated PDE -constrained shape optimization toolbox Fireshape. The talk is designed to be accessible to a general academic audience interested in applied mathematics. Prior knowledge of the finite element method is not assumed.
- Speaker: Alberto Paganini (University of Leicester)
- Thursday 29 May 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Centre for Mathematical Sciences, MR14.
- Series: Applied and Computational Analysis; organiser: Georg Maierhofer.
Thu 26 Jun 10:00: LMB Seminar - Fast and slow pathways of ribosomal subunit association
We have studied Mg+ enforced ribosomal subunit association by time-resolved cryo-EM, and found several intermediates states that indicate the existence of multiple pathways. One of these is very rapid (~10 ms), the others are in the range of hundreds of ms. The results can be rationalized on the basis of electrostatic interactions and bridge formations between subunits incubated with Mg+ ions.
- Speaker: Joachim Frank, Columbia University
- Thursday 26 June 2025, 10:00-11:00
- Venue: In person in the Max Perutz Lecture Theatre (CB2 0QH) .
- Series: MRC LMB Seminar Series; organiser: Scientific Meetings Co-ordinator.
Wed 21 May 12:00: AI Accelerators 101
LLMs are arguably among the largest technology investments since the moon landing, and rely on custom hardware accelerators both for training and inference. The talk will cover accelerating LLM transformer architectures using the combination of a compiler and a systolic compute array. The key enabler to achieving meaningful performance using the systolic compute array are deep program analyses of the model architecture in the Neuron Compiler. I will briefly report on our effort to build a verified (using Lean) compiler from XLA /HLO to the Trainium ISA .
Daniel Kroening is a Senior Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon, where he works on the correctness of the Neuron Compiler for distributed training and inference. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and is the co-founder of Diffblue Ltd., a University spinout that develops AI that targets code and code-like artefacts. He wrote the CBMC (for C), JBMC (for Java) and EBMC (for SystemVerilog) model checkers; CBMC is the engine of Kani (for verifying unsafe Rust). He has received the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Inventor Recognition Award, an IBM Faculty Award, a Microsoft Research SEIF Award, the Wolfson Research Merit Award, and the Rance Cleaveland Test-of-Time tool award. He serves on the CAV steering committee and was co-chair of FLOC 2018 , EiC of Springer FMSD , and is co-author of the textbooks on Decision Procedures and Model Checking.
We will have Pizza! Register such that we can get the right amount of food:
- Speaker: Daniel Kroening - AWS
- Wednesday 21 May 2025, 12:00-13:00
- Venue: Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, LT2.
- Series: tcg40's list; organiser: Tobias Grosser.
Tue 20 May 14:00: Two Tales of End-to-End Encryption
End-to-end encryption has become the gold standard for securing communications, bringing strong privacy guarantees to billions of users worldwide. My talk will discuss two potential avenues through which the security protections of end-to-end encryption might be undermined, concerning government circumvention and commercial circumvention respectively. First, I examine a recent case of a large-scale law enforcement hack of an encrypted communication network called Encrochat in Europe. Second, I raise security concerns related to the integration of AI features across apps and devices—a growing trend, following remarkable recent advances in generative artificial intelligence.
- Speaker: Sunoo Park, NYU
- Tuesday 20 May 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Webinar & LT2, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building..
- Series: Computer Laboratory Security Seminar; organiser: Anna Talas.
Fri 16 May 14:00: Connectome-based Echo State Networks
The Echo State Network (ESN) framework is an efficient recurrent neural network paradigm of importance for both neuroscience and machine learning. It is quick and efficient to train, and also has been suggested as a possible model of brain function. It is not fully known how network structure influences ESN functionality, dynamics, and robustness. We used biological networks to study this, compared with randomly initialised ESNs. In both biological and artificial neural network contexts, neurons and clusters demonstrate functional specificity. We asked if synapse-resolution connectome-based ESNs demonstrate functional specificity/generality at the neural level. We used the larval Drosophila melanogaster connectome, which exhibits a hierarchical modular structure according to type, class, and function. We built connectome-based ESNs from this and compared neural specificity metrics between connectome and equivalent random networks across tasks in memory, decision-making, and time-series prediction. Connectome ESNs contain smaller subsets of task-selective neurons, while random networks exhibit more distributed, “general” groups. We tested the interpretation of these metrics by systematically pruning nodes based on their measure of engagement, finding that connectome ESNs maintain performance more robustly across pruning. Finally, we investigated structural features of the networks, uncovering correlations between task-relevance and characteristics such as recurrence, node degree, and biological cell-type annotations. We find that correlations are consistent across connectome and conventional ESNs, but that connectome ESNs exhibit stronger correlations. These findings indicate that biologically-inspired connectivity can enable sparsely selective and compact neural networks, which may reduce energy consumption and optimise robustness. The approaches and metrics used in this research may suggest a way to initialise better performing, more efficient and robust ESNs, as well as provide insight into individual node feature importance in biological networks.
- Speaker: James McAllister (Ulster)
- Friday 16 May 2025, 14:00-14:45
- Venue: CBL Seminar Room, Engineering Department, 4th floor Baker building.
- Series: Computational Neuroscience; organiser: Daniel Kornai.
Mon 23 Jun 14:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Gemma Hood (Leipzig)
- Monday 23 June 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: MR13.
- Series: Partial Differential Equations seminar; organiser: Dr Greg Taujanskas.
Mon 16 Jun 14:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Leonhard Kehrberger (Leipzig)
- Monday 16 June 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: MR13.
- Series: Partial Differential Equations seminar; organiser: Dr Greg Taujanskas.
Fri 23 May 12:00: What If We Succeed?
Many experts claim that recent advances in AI put artificial general intelligence (AGI) within reach. Is this true? If so, is that a good thing? Alan Turing predicted that AGI would result in the machines taking control. I will argue that Turing was right to express concern but wrong to think that doom is inevitable. Instead, we need to develop a new kind of AI that is provably beneficial to humans. Unfortunately, we are heading in the opposite direction and we need to take steps to correct this. Even so, questions remain about whether human flourishing is compatible with AGI .
- Speaker: Stuart Russell Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley
- Friday 23 May 2025, 12:00-13:00
- Venue: Department of Engineering - LT2.
- Series: Information Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series; organiser: Kimberly Cole.
Mon 09 Jun 15:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Matthew Hornsey (University of Queensland)
- Monday 09 June 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.
- Series: Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS); organiser: Yara Kyrychenko.
Thu 29 May 17:00: Universal Diophantine Equations in Isabelle
If you have a question about this talk, please contact Anand Rao Tadipatri.
=== Hybrid talk ===
Join Zoom Meeting https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/89856091954?pwd=Bba77QB2KuTideTlH6PjAmbXLO8HbY.1
Meeting ID: 898 5609 1954 Passcode: ITPtalk
- Speaker: Jonas Bayer (University of Cambridge)
- Thursday 29 May 2025, 17:00-18:00
- Venue: MR14 Centre for Mathematical Sciences.
- Series: Formalisation of mathematics with interactive theorem provers ; organiser: Jonas Bayer.
Thu 22 May 17:00: Completeness Theorems for Variations of Higher-Order Logic RESCHEDULED
Mike Gordon’s Higher-Order Logic (HOL) is one of the most important logical foundations for interactive theorem proving. The standard semantics of HOL , due to Andrew Pitts, employs a downward closed universe of sets, and interprets HOL ’s Hilbert choice operator via a global choice function on the universe.
In this talk, I introduce a natural Henkin-style notion of general model corresponding to the standard models. By following the Henkin route of proving completeness, I discover an enrichment of HOL deduction that is sound and complete w.r.t. these general models. Variations of my proof also yield completeness results for weaker deduction systems located between standard and (fully) enriched HOL deduction, relative to less constrained models.
=== Online talk ===
Join Zoom Meeting https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/89856091954?pwd=Bba77QB2KuTideTlH6PjAmbXLO8HbY.1
Meeting ID: 898 5609 1954 Passcode: ITPtalk
RESCHEDULED
- Speaker: Andrei Popescu (University of Sheffield)
- Thursday 22 May 2025, 17:00-18:00
- Venue: Online; live-streamed at MR14 Centre for Mathematical Sciences.
- Series: Formalisation of mathematics with interactive theorem provers ; organiser: Anand Rao Tadipatri.
Fri 23 May 16:00: WalkEar: Estimating ground reaction forces and gait parameters from commodity ear-worn wearables
Gait is a key health metric, sometimes described as the sixth vital sign. Temporal, spatial and kinetic gait parameters are valuable in enhancing sport performance and early health diagnostics of health conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. Full gait assessment requires a gait clinic and existing wearable gait tracking systems typically measure isolated subsets of parameters tailored to specific applications. This is useful when the condition to be monitored is known but fails to offer a comprehensive view of an individual’s gait traits when their pathology is unknown or changing, or a general assessment is required. To support holistic walking gait tracking, we introduce WalkEar a sensing platform designed to simultaneously track a set of walking gait parameters using commodity ear-worn wearables. WalkEar operates by detecting gait events using them to derive temporal gait parameters and segment the IMU data. We then use regression techniques to predict kinetic gait parameters and estimate the full vertical reaction force. Each parameter is calculated on a step-to-step basis to enable assessment of gait variability and asymmetry. We developed an earbud prototype and collected data from 30 subjects using gold standard force plates and instrumented treadmill ground truth. Experiments show strong agreement between our system and the ground truth showing the promise of using ubiquitous earbuds for continuous gait monitoring.
- Speaker: Jake Stuchbury- Wass, PhD student, Dept of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge
- Friday 23 May 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: JDB Seminar Room, CUED.
- Series: Engineering - Dynamics and Vibration Tea Time Talks; organiser: div-c.