Fri 24 May 13:00: STING and inflammatory disease: insights from monogenic conditions
This Cambridge Immunology and Medicine Seminar will take place on Friday 24 May 2024, starting at 1:00 pm, in the Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre (JCBC)
Speaker: Dr Karen Mackenzie, MRC Clinician Scientist Fellow and Honorary Consultant in Clinical Genetics, Institute for Regeneration and Repair, Centre for Inflammation Research, University of Edinburgh
Host: James Nathan, Wellcome Senior Clinical Fellow, Professor of Respiratory Medicine, University of Cambridge
Refreshments will be available following the Seminar.
- Speaker: Dr Karen Mackenzie, MRC Clinician Scientist Fellow and Honorary Consultant in Clinical Genetics, Institute for Regeneration and Repair, Centre for Inflammation Research, University of Edinburgh
- Friday 24 May 2024, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
- Series: Immunology and Medicine Seminars; organiser: Ruth Paton.
Tue 21 May 11:30: The ALPHA axion dark matter experiment
This seminar is hosted by the Institute of Astronomy, and will take place at the Madingley Road site.
The axion represents a well-motivated dark matter candidate with a relatively unexplored range of viable masses. Recent calculations argue for post-inflation axion mass ranges corresponding to frequencies of roughly 10-100 GHz. These frequency ranges offer challenges for the traditional cavity halscope which can be overcome through the use of metamaterial resonators that fill large volumes. The ALPHA (Axion Longitudinal Plasma HAloscope) experiment, located at Yale University, is an axion dark matter detector probing the 10-45 GHz frequency range. Axions can convert into photons in the tunable and cryogenically-cooled resonator within the 16-T magnet of the experiment, and be detected with the quantum-limited amplification and readout. In this talk, I will describe the general design parameters of the experiment, including the expected sensitivity, and discuss some of the challenges associated with resonator designs.
- Speaker: Dr Jón Guðmundsson (Stockholm)
- Tuesday 21 May 2024, 11:30-12:30
- Venue: Hoyle Lecture Theatre, Institute of Astronomy.
- Series: Cavendish HEP Seminars; organiser: Dr Steve Dennis.
Thu 30 May 14:30: Percolation through isoperimetry
Let G be a d-regular graph of growing degree on n vertices, and form a random subgraph G_p of G by retaining edge of G independently with probability p=p(d). Which conditions on G suffice to observe a phase transition at p=1/d, similar to that in the binomial random graph G(n,p), or, say, in a random subgraph of the binary hypercube Q^d?
We argue that in the supercritical regime p=(1+epsilon)/d, epsilon>0 being a small constant, postulating that every vertex subset S of G of at most n/2 vertices has its edge boundary at least C|S|, for some large enough constant C=C(\epsilon)>0, suffices to guarantee the likely appearance of the giant component in G_p. Moreover, its asymptotic order is equal to that in the random graph G(n,(1+\epsilon)/n), and all other components are typically much smaller.
We further give examples demonstrating the tightness of this result in several key senses.
This is joint work with Sahar Diskin, Joshua Erde and Mihyun Kang.
- Speaker: Michael Krivelevich (Tel Aviv)
- Thursday 30 May 2024, 14:30-15:30
- Venue: MR12.
- Series: Combinatorics Seminar; organiser: ibl10.
Thu 23 May 14:30: Graphs forced by rainbow stars
We study colourings of the edges of the complete graph K_n. For some graph H, we say that a colouring contains a rainbow H, if there is an embedding of H into K_n, such that all edges of the embedded copy have pairwise distinct colours. Only two special types of rainbow trees of small diameter are forced by a high number of vertices of high colour degree, and then only two rainbow stars suffice. Whilst the optimal colour degree is known for one type of trees, we will discuss some bounds for the other type (of larger diameter).
- Speaker: Peter Wagner (Rostock)
- Thursday 23 May 2024, 14:30-15:30
- Venue: MR12.
- Series: Combinatorics Seminar; organiser: ibl10.
Wed 22 May 13:00: Modelling ocean connectivity and future change at the Antarctic margins
Many Antarctic margin processes are changing including accelerated rates of ice sheet mass loss and a slowdown in the production of dense bottom waters. Although these changes are localised around the Antarctic continent, they have the potential to remotely disrupt downstream processes of climatic importance via advective connections along the shelf. In the first part of this talk I will present some work from my PhD thesis that investigates ocean connectivity around the Antarctic margins from a modelling perspective. The results from this work suggest there is widespread zonal connectivity between adjacent regions of the shelf, and that such connectivity is important to consider when interpreting and linking observed changes with upstream drivers. In the second part of the talk I will present results from simulations that investigate future climate-driven changes to Antarctic margin processes under different emission scenarios, with and without future freshwater contributions. Such changes are poorly constrained because many climate models fail to adequately resolve key features of the Antarctic margin including the narrow westward flowing currents, and the formation of both dense and abyssal water masses. Results from these simulations suggest that even under a mid-range emissions scenario without additional meltwater forcing, substantial changes in Antarctic continental shelf circulation and hydrography are possible by the end of this century.
- Speaker: Hannah Dawson, University of Tasmania
- Wednesday 22 May 2024, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: BAS Seminar Room 1; https://bas-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/91268978510.
- Series: British Antarctic Survey - Polar Oceans seminar series; organiser: Dr Birgit Rogalla.
Thu 16 May 14:30: Tight anti-concentration of Rademacher sums
We consider lower bounds on anti-concentration probabilities of the form P(|X| >= x), where X = a_1 ε_1 ... a_n ε_n is a Rademacher sum; ε_i are independent and uniform signs +1 or -1, and a_i > 0 are constants normalised so that Var(X) = 1. We determine the infimal value of P(|X| >= x) over Rademacher sums X for all values x >= 0, giving a partial answer to a question by Keller and Klein. In particular, for x = 1 we improve on a sequence of results to produce the optimal lower bound P(|X| >= 1) >= 7/32, confirming a conjecture of Hitczenko and Kwapień.
- Speaker: Lawrence Hollom (Cambridge)
- Thursday 16 May 2024, 14:30-15:30
- Venue: MR12.
- Series: Combinatorics Seminar; organiser: ibl10.
Wed 15 May 14:15: Regularization of pseudo-automorphisms
A pseudo-automorphism f: X → X of a projective algebraic variety is a birational self-map inducing a regular automorphism from the complement of a codimension 2 open subset of X onto its image. Any surface pseudo-automorphism is regular. But It is a subtle problem to characterize pseudo-automorphisms in higher dimension that can be made regular in some birational model. This question is strongly related to the dynamics of f, and more specifically to its dynamical degrees. We shall discuss in more details the case of families of abelian varieties, which we studied in depth with Alexandra Kuznetsova.
- Speaker: Charles Favre, École Polytechnique
- Wednesday 15 May 2024, 14:15-15:15
- Venue: CMS MR13.
- Series: Algebraic Geometry Seminar; organiser: Holly Krieger.
Fri 24 May 13:00: STING and inflammatory disease: insights from monogenic conditions
This Cambridge Immunology and Medicine Seminar will take place on Friday 24 May 2024, starting at 1:00 pm, in the Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre (JCBC)
Speaker: Dr Karen Mackenzie, MRC Clinician Scientist Fellow and Honorary Consultant in Clinical Genetics, Institute for Regeneration and Repair, Centre for Inflammation Research, University of Edinburgh
Host: James Nathan, Wellcome Senior Clinical Fellow, Professor of Respiratory Medicine, University of Cambridge
For anyone who can’t attend in person, please join the Cambridge Immunology and Medicine Seminar on Zoom:
Join Zoom Meeting: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/89741634903?pwd=dzcxbU45NjAwQXo1dmlNMjR3V0lUUT09
Meeting ID: 897 4163 4903 Passcode: 539740
Refreshments will be available following the Seminar.
- Speaker: Dr Karen Mackenzie, MRC Clinician Scientist Fellow and Honorary Consultant in Clinical Genetics, Institute for Regeneration and Repair, Centre for Inflammation Research, University of Edinburgh
- Friday 24 May 2024, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
- Series: Immunology and Medicine Seminars; organiser: Ruth Paton.
Thu 16 May 14:00: Exact many-body dynamics in quantum circuits via space-time duality
In recent years, quantum circuits have emerged as useful effective models to understand generic quantum many-body dynamics, and as concrete platforms for quantum simulation. The most appealing feature of these systems is that, contrary to generic many-body systems in continuous time, the dynamics of quantum circuits are sometimes amenable to analytical treatment. In the talk I will present a fruitful route to achieve this goal based on imposing a duality symmetry between space and time. I will review how this symmetry allows to fully characterise entanglement spreading and operator growth and what are its implications on the spreading of quantum information. I will then show that the duality symmetry, and the constraints it imposes, can be systematically relaxed while retaining exact solvability.
- Speaker: Bruno Bertini, University of Nottingham
- Thursday 16 May 2024, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: TCM Seminar Room.
- Series: Theory of Condensed Matter; organiser: Gaurav.
Tue 14 May 12:00: A selective and biased choice of techniques for building a distributed data store
Single-machine data stores cannot support the scale and ubiquity of data today. The Internet applications and services must process a huge number of concurrent requests and events per second. So, they use distributed (or replicated) data stores which store and process data on multiple machines, offering key advantages in performance, scalability, and reliability. The purpose of the talk is to present a selective and biased choice of techniques and results which can be used for building an efficient distributed data store. Biased, because I only present solutions and results developed within a research project that I did with my PhD students. Selective, because an exhaustive description would be too exhausting to fit into a single talk. Therefore I will be discussing just the design of our novel database index for key-value data store systems, and only skim our other contributions that are directly related to distributed systems. The index, called Jiffy, has been designed with performance and scalability in mind. Therefore it has been designed as a lock-free concurrent data structure, which can dynamically adapt to the changing workload. It achieves superior performance despite built-in atomic operations (batch updates, snapshots, and range scans). During the talk I will be presenting Jiffy’s architecture, the algorithms for inserting and looking up the key-value pairs, and the operations used for resizing the data structure dynamically. The other contributions of our project include: efficient support for replica state recovery after failures, either by extending the classic Paxos consensus algorithm, or through the use of persistent memory, and a bit surprising theoretical results which are applicable to distributed data store systems that compromise consistency in favour of high availability and speed, but also support operations ensuring strong consistency (which requires consensus among replicas). (Based on a keynote talk at DEBS ‘23)
- Speaker: Paweł T. Wojciechowski, Poznan University of Technology
- Tuesday 14 May 2024, 12:00-13:00
- Venue: SS03, Computer Laboratory.
- Series: Logic and Semantics Seminar (Computer Laboratory); organiser: Jamie Vicary.
Tue 16 Jul 14:00: Data-Agnostic Model Poisoning to Manipulating Federated Learning
In this presentation, a data-agnostic model poisoning attack targeting federated learning systems will be explored. The proposed attack leverages a new adversarial graph autoencoder (GAE)-based framework that operates independently of training data access, thereby ensuring both its efficacy and stealth. The proposed attack allows the adversary to reconstruct the graph’s structural correlations adversarially, optimizing the disruption of federated learning performance. This is achieved by generating malicious local models that incorporate the adversarial graph structure alongside the benign features of training data. Furthermore, an algorithm has been developed to iteratively refine the malicious models using GAE with sub-gradient descent. Numerical results demonstrate a progressive decline in the accuracy of federated learning systems subjected to this attack, which notably eludes detection by existing defensive measures. Consequently, this attack presents a formidable risk, potentially compromising all benign devices within the network.
Short bio: Dr. Kai Li received the B.E. degree from Shandong University, China, in 2009, the M.S. degree from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, in 2010, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW , Australia, in 2014. Currently, he is a Visiting Research Scientist with the Division of Electrical Engineering, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, U.K., and a Senior Research Scientist with the CISTER Research Centre, Porto, Portugal. He is also a CMU -Portugal Research Fellow, jointly supported by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, PA, USA , and the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Lisbon, Portugal. In 2022, he was a Visiting Research Scholar with the CyLab Security and Privacy Institute, CMU . Prior to this, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the SUTD -MIT International Design Centre, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore, from 2014 to 2016. He has also held positions as a Visiting Research Assistant with the ICT Centre, CSIRO , Brisbane, QLD , Australia, from 2012 to 2013, and a full-time Research Assistant with the Mobile Technologies Centre, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, from 2010 to 2011. He has been an Associate Editor of journals, such as Internet of Things (Elsevier) since 2024, Nature Computer Science (Springer) since 2023, Computer Communications (Elsevier) and Ad Hoc Networks (Elsevier) since 2021, and IEEE ACCESS from 2018 to 2024.
- Speaker: Kai (Lukas) Li, CISTER research centre, Portugal
- Tuesday 16 July 2024, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Webinar & LT2, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building..
- Series: Computer Laboratory Security Seminar; organiser: Hridoy Sankar Dutta.
Mon 13 May 14:00: Quickest Change Detection Using Mismatched CUSUM
Click here for the abstract.
URL : http://sigproc.eng.cam.ac.uk/foswiki/pub/Main/RV285/SeanMeyn_seminar_abstract.pdf
- Speaker: Prof. Sean Meyn, University of Florida
- Monday 13 May 2024, 14:00-13:00
- Venue: LT6, Baker Building, CUED.
- Series: Signal Processing and Communications Lab Seminars; organiser: Prof. Ramji Venkataramanan.
Mon 13 May 14:00: Quickest Change Detection Using Mismatched CUSUM Note unusual day of the week and location
Click here for the abstract.
URL : http://sigproc.eng.cam.ac.uk/foswiki/pub/Main/RV285/SeanMeyn_seminar_abstract.pdf
Note unusual day of the week and location
- Speaker: Prof Sean Meyn, University of Florida
- Monday 13 May 2024, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: LT6, First floor Baker building, Dept. of Engineering, Trumpington Street, CB2 1PZ.
- Series: Information Theory Seminar; organiser: Dr Varun Jog.
Tue 14 May 14:00: Perfect Zero-Knowledge PCPs for #P
A probabilistically checkable proof (PCP) is a proof which can be verified by inspecting a small (usually constant) number of symbols from the proof. PCPs are fundamental objects in complexity theory, with deep connections to hardness of approximation. Informally, we say a PCP is zero-knowledge if no polynomial time algorithm with oracle access to the proof can learn anything more than the validity of the proof. Zero-knowledge proofs have been hugely influential in both cryptography and complexity theory.
We construct a perfect zero-knowledge PCP for the #P-complete language #SAT. Our construction is the first construction of a perfect zero-knowledge PCP for a language (believed to be) outside BPP . We achieve this result unconditionally, and don’t require any cryptographic assumptions.
Our construction relies on both algebraic and combinatorial techniques, including a version of the Reed-Muller code augmented with subcube sums and the combinatorial nullstellensatz. No background in zero knowledge will be assumed for the talk. (Joint work with Tom Gur and Nicholas Spooner: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.11941)
- Speaker: Jack O'Connor (University of Cambridge)
- Tuesday 14 May 2024, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, Room SS03.
- Series: Algorithms and Complexity Seminar; organiser: Tom Gur.
Wed 22 May 16:00: Homeomorphisms of contractible manifolds
A century ago, J. W. Alexander showed that the space of homeomorphisms of a disc (which are the identity near the boundary) is contractible, using an explicit radial deformation now known as the “Alexander trick”. I will explain recent joint work with Soren Galatius which shows that the same conclusion holds for all compact contractible manifolds of dimension at least 6. In this generality there can be no such explicit deformation, and the question must be approached more obliquely. Along the way, I will explain a new result on spaces of smooth embeddings of one-sided h-cobordisms into other manifolds.
- Speaker: Oscar Randal-Williams (Cambridge)
- Wednesday 22 May 2024, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: MR13.
- Series: Differential Geometry and Topology Seminar; organiser: Oscar Randal-Williams.
Wed 22 May 14:30: Finding the Needle in the Haystack: Machine Learning for Rare Event Simulations
The microscopic dynamics of many condensed matter systems occurring in nature and technology is dominated by rare but important barrier crossing events. Examples of such processes include nucleation at first order phase transitions, chemical reactions and the folding of biopolymers. The resulting wide ranges of time scales are a challenge for molecular simulation and numerous simulation methods have been developed to address this problem. Recently, machine learning methods have been proposed as a powerful way to further enhance such simulations. In my talk, I will discuss various machine learning approaches based on deep neural networks to sample rare reactive trajectories and identify the collective variable needed for the construction of low-dimensional models capturing the microscopic mechanism.
- Speaker: Professor Christoph Dellago, University of Vienna
- Wednesday 22 May 2024, 14:30-15:30
- Venue: Unilever Lecture Theatre, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry.
- Series: Theory - Chemistry Research Interest Group; organiser: Lisa Masters.
Wed 15 May 16:30: Affine invariants of finite group schemes
It was previously shown by Peter Symonds that when a finite group acts on a polynomial ring over a field of prime characteristic, the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of the invariant subring is at most zero. Further, Karagueuzian and Symonds have shown that, in the same context, only finitely many isomorphism classes of indecomposable representations occur as summands of the polynomial ring. In this talk I will discuss ongoing work, joint with Peter Symonds, that explores to what extent the above results can be generalised when the acting object is replaced by a finite group scheme and the object acted upon by a Noetherian affine scheme.
- Speaker: Kostas Karagiannis, University of Manchester
- Wednesday 15 May 2024, 16:30-17:30
- Venue: MR12.
- Series: Algebra and Representation Theory Seminar; organiser: Adam Jones.
Mon 07 Oct 12:30: The evolution of gene regulation, compensation and expression noise
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Assistant Professor Brian Metzger, Purdue University
- Monday 07 October 2024, 12:30-13:30
- Venue: CRUK CI Lecture Theatre.
- Series: Seminars on Quantitative Biology @ CRUK Cambridge Institute ; organiser: Kate Davenport.
Fri 17 May 14:00: PhD students' talks
14:00 – Welcome
14:05 – Emily Cook: Tensor viscosity models for complex fluids
14:20 – John Severn: Sarcomeres as porous media
14:35 – Shi-Wei Jian: The dynamics of low-latitude sub-surface oceanic jets
14:50 – Anand Srinivasan: Universality in random tessellations as exhibited by developing green algae
15:05 – Balázs Németh: Langevin Dynamics of Inclusions on Curved Surfaces
15:20 – Coffee break
15:50 – Marco Vona: Surface Scattering and Hydrodynamic Instabilities of Swimming Microorganisms: Two Stories
16:05 – Jago Strong-Wright: Tracer mixing and transport by flow through a giant kelp forest
16:20 – Xiao Ma: Hyperuniformity at Absorbing State Transitions
16:35 – Theo Lewy: The polymer diffusive instability in highly concentrated polymeric fluids
16:50 – Closing remarks
- Speaker: Speakers listed in abstract
- Friday 17 May 2024, 14:00-17:00
- Venue: MR2.
- Series: Fluid Mechanics (DAMTP); organiser: Professor Grae Worster.
Tue 14 May 11:00: Experimental status of exotic spectroscopy (and thoughts on the future)
I will discuss the current status of exotic spectroscopy (bound states that do not fit the simple meson-baryon picture), with a focus on candidates including charm quarks, starting with the every growing list of observed states. I will then talk in more detail about a few recent measurements from the LHCb collaboration before sharing a few thoughts of my own about possible future directions for the field to best understand the nature of these various puzzling states.
- Speaker: Mark Whitehead (Glasgow)
- Tuesday 14 May 2024, 11:00-12:00
- Venue: Ryle Seminar Room.
- Series: Cavendish HEP Seminars; organiser: Dr Steve Dennis.