Wed 15 Oct 16:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Erik Clarke; Dmitry Nashchekin
- Wednesday 15 October 2025, 16:00-17:30
- Venue: in person at Gurdon Institute.
- Series: Cambridge Fly Meetings; organiser: Jia CHEN.
Thu 25 Sep 10:00: Proximity Gaps for Multilinear Interactive Oracle Proofs
A set displays a (delta, gamma)-proximity gap to a linear code, C, if either all elements are delta-close in relative Hamming distance to a codeword in C or only gamma of them are. Proximity gaps of the set A_{v,u} := {v + r u : r in F }, for fixed vectors v,u, are fundamental to the security and efficiency of an extremely efficient family of Interactive Oracle Proofs (IOPs) from FRI (ICALP 2018), where larger delta implies more efficient verifiers and smaller gamma implies more efficient provers.
Building on FRI , the authors of BaseFold (Crypto 2024) introduced a new family of IOPs with concretely faster provers. However, BaseFold additionally requires that if all elements of A_{v,u} are close to the code, then they all agree with their respective nearest codewords in a fixed, shared set of locations.
We prove this to be true for all linear codes when delta < 1 – (1 – Delta + epsilon)^{1/3} – eta and gamma < 1/(epsilon eta) (where Delta is the relative minimum distance of the code). This improves the previous bound of delta < 1 – (1 – Delta/3) – eta from BaseFold, and it recovers the original proximity gaps result for linear codes, which is proven to be tight in DEEP -FRI (ITCS 2020).
link to paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1843.pdf
- Speaker: Hadas Zeilberger (Yale)
- Thursday 25 September 2025, 10:00-11:00
- Venue: Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, Room SS03.
- Series: Algorithms and Complexity Seminar; organiser: Tom Gur.
Fri 03 Oct 14:00: On Solution Discovery via Reconfiguration
The dynamics of real-world applications and systems require efficient methods for improving infeasible solutions or restoring corrupted ones by making modifications to the current state of a system in a restricted way. We propose a new framework of solution discovery via reconfiguration for constructing a feasible solution for a given problem by executing a sequence of small modifications starting from a given state. Our framework integrates different aspects of classical local search, reoptimization, and combinatorial reconfiguration. We exemplify our framework on a multitude of fundamental combinatorial problems. We study the classical as well as the parameterized complexity of the solution discovery variants of those problems and explore the boundary between tractable and intractable instances.
- Speaker: Sebastian Siebertz
- Friday 03 October 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: SS03, Computer Laboratory.
- Series: Logic and Semantics Seminar (Computer Laboratory); organiser: Anuj Dawar.
Wed 15 Oct 13:00: Bradford Hill Seminar – The politics of epidemiology and public health in the UK - Professor Danny Dorling
All are invited to the hybrid Bradford Hill Seminar ‘The politics of epidemiology and public health in the UK’ with Professor Danny Dorling of the University of Oxford.
Attend in person or register to attend online at https://mrc-epid.zoom.us/meeting/register/Xt6c2C_hR7a2xOFqlKb5Dg
We like to present epidemiology as politically neutral, and public health as the science of supporting the health of the population as a whole. This is not necessarily so.
There are always choices to be made. Different academic disciplines have implicit biases and underlying beliefs, which can change over time and differ greatly between contexts. Some of the most obvious examples are between people who prefer individualistic explanations and those who see this as victim blaming.
A lack of attention to certain topics is another form of political bias. Why, for instance, are we in the UK not more concerned about how many people choose and can afford to use private health care and dentistry? Why are we not talking about how life expectancy fell in the UK after 2014? And, to what extent is our epidemiology and public health in the UK in the 2020s a reflection of UK politics?
About Professor Dorling: Danny Dorling works at the University of Oxford. His most recent three books are: “Seven Children”, “Peak Injustice”, and “The Next Crisis”. He works with road crash charity RoadPeace, Heeley City Farm in Sheffield, and the educational campaign group Comprehensive Future.
- Speaker: Professor Danny Dorling, University of Oxford
- Wednesday 15 October 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Large Seminar Room, East Forvie Building, Forvie Site Robinson Way Cambridge CB2 0SR..
- Series: Bradford Hill Seminars; organiser: Paul Browne.
Thu 25 Sep 13:00: TBC Note unusual time
Hosted by Professor Ravi Gupta, Professor of Clinical Microbiology, CITIID , Department of Medicine
Note unusual time
- Speaker: Professor Arne Akbar, Professor of Immunology Aging, Rheumatology and Regenerative Medicine, University College London
- Thursday 25 September 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
- Series: Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar Series; organiser: Liat Churley.
Thu 25 Sep 13:00: TBC
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Professor Arne Akbar, Professor of Immunology Aging, Rheumatology and Regenerative Medicine, University College London
- Thursday 25 September 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
- Series: Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar Series; organiser: Liat Churley.
Thu 26 Feb 14:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Prof. Julia Wiktor (Chalmers)
- Thursday 26 February 2026, 14:00-15:30
- Venue: Seminar Room 3, RDC.
- Series: Theory of Condensed Matter; organiser: Bo Peng.
Thu 20 Nov 15:00: Challenges and opportunities in understanding the dynamic behaviour of engineering materials under complex loading paths
In the automotive and transportation sectors, engineering materials are frequently subjected to impulsive loading during collision events. Understanding their behaviour under such conditions is essential for designing safer, more impact-resilient structures. However, current research often overlooks critical factors, such as the combined influence of complex loading paths, strain rate, and environmental conditions.
This seminar will explore two key areas: (i) state-of-the-art experimental techniques for investigating the behaviour of lightweight materials under complex loading and environmental conditions; and (ii) the potential of controlling stress wave synchronisation and timing, alongside data-driven modelling approaches.
- Speaker: Antonio Pellegrino, Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Bath
- Thursday 20 November 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Seminar Room North, Room A0.019, Ray Dolby Centre, Cavendish Laboratory.
- Series: Physics and Chemistry of Solids Group; organiser: Stephen Walley.
Wed 01 Oct 14:00: Efficient gradient coding for mitigating stragglers within distributed machine learning
Please note that the room is different from the usual one.
Large scale distributed learning is the workhorse of modern-day machine learning algorithms. A typical scenario consists of minimizing a loss function (depending on the dataset) with respect to high-dimensional parameter. Workers typically compute gradients on their assigned dataset chunks and send them to the parameter server (PS), which aggregates them to compute either an exact or approximate version of the overall gradient of the relevant loss function. However, in large-scale clusters, many workers are prone to straggling (are slower than their promised speed or even failure-prone). A gradient coding solution introduces redundancy within the assignment of chunks to the workers and uses coding theoretic ideas to allow the PS to recover the overall gradient (exactly or approximately), even in the presence of stragglers. Unfortunately, most existing gradient coding protocols are inefficient from a computation perspective as they coarsely classify workers as operational or failed; the potentially valuable work performed by slow workers (partial stragglers) is ignored.
In this talk we will give an overview of some of our recent work in this area that addresses these limitations. Specifically, we will present novel gradient coding protocols that judiciously leverage the work performed by partial stragglers. Our protocols are simultaneously efficient from both a computation and communication perspective and numerically stable. For an important class of chunk assignments, we present efficient algorithms for optimizing the relative ordering of chunks within the workers; this ordering affects the overall execution time. For exact gradient reconstruction, our protocol is around 2x faster than the original class of protocols and for approximate gradient reconstruction, the mean-squared-error of our reconstructed gradient is several orders of magnitude better.
Bio: Aditya Ramamoorthy is the John Ryder Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and (by courtesy) of Mathematics at Iowa State University. He received his B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research interests are in the areas of classical/quantum information theory and coding techniques with applications to distributed computation, content distribution networks and machine learning.
Dr. Ramamoorthy currently serves as an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (previous term from 2016—2019) and the IEEE Transactions on Communications from 2011—2015. He is the recipient of the Northrop Grumman professorship (2022-24), the 2020 Mid-Career Achievement in Research Award, the 2019 Boast-Nilsson Educational Impact Award and the 2012 Early Career Engineering Faculty Research Award from Iowa State University, the 2012 NSF CAREER award, and the Harpole-Pentair professorship in 2009-2010.
- Speaker: Prof. Aditya Ramamoorthy, Iowa State University
- Wednesday 01 October 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: MR9, CMS Pavilion B.
- Series: Information Theory Seminar; organiser: Prof. Ramji Venkataramanan.
Mon 01 Dec 16:15: Seeing in three dimensions: how the visual cortex uses motion to parse 3D scenes
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Petr Znamenskiy, The Francis Crick Institute London
- Monday 01 December 2025, 16:15-18:00
- Venue: Hodgkin-Huxley Seminar Room.
- Series: Adrian Seminars in Neuroscience; organiser: Sepiedeh Keshavarzi.
Mon 15 Dec 18:30: A fishy study: from ecology to cognition to brains (Adrian Christmas lecture)
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Redouan Bshary, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
- Monday 15 December 2025, 18:30-20:00
- Venue: Lightfoot Room, St John's College.
- Series: Adrian Seminars in Neuroscience; organiser: Prof. Wolfram Schultz.
Mon 24 Nov 16:15: Brainstem peptides: for better for worse, in sickness and in health
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Simon Luckman, University of Manchester
- Monday 24 November 2025, 16:15-18:00
- Venue: Hodgkin-Huxley Seminar Room.
- Series: Adrian Seminars in Neuroscience; organiser: Professor Allan Herbison.
Mon 27 Oct 16:15: Conscious visual perception, perceptual organization and how to restore it in blindness
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Pieter Roelfsema, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
- Monday 27 October 2025, 16:15-18:00
- Venue: Hodgkin-Huxley Seminar Room.
- Series: Adrian Seminars in Neuroscience; organiser: Keita Tamura.
Mon 20 Oct 16:15: Visual cortex gamma reflects stimulus experience and stimulus reward value
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Pascal Fries, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany
- Monday 20 October 2025, 16:15-18:00
- Venue: Hodgkin-Huxley Seminar Room.
- Series: Adrian Seminars in Neuroscience; organiser: Keita Tamura.
Mon 13 Oct 16:15: Plasticity of the Parental Brain
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Jonny Kohl, The Francis Crick Institute London
- Monday 13 October 2025, 16:15-18:00
- Venue: Hodgkin-Huxley Seminar Room.
- Series: Adrian Seminars in Neuroscience; organiser: Professor Allan Herbison.
Fri 07 Nov 16:00: Parton showers beyond leading colour
General purpose parton showers are based on classical branching algorithms. As a result, it is not possible to account for even the leading quantum interference effects in general scattering processes and this often limits the accuracy of these showers to the leading colour approximation. We have developed the CVolver Monte Carlo code, which is able to evolve a density matrix to a prescribed accuracy in colour. This means we are able to account for wide-angle, soft-gluon physics systematically in 1/N where N=3 is the number of colours. This is the first time such a systematic resummation has been performed for general processes and in this talk I will report on the latest results.
- Speaker: Jeffrey R. Forshaw (Manchester U.)
- Friday 07 November 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: MR19 (Potter Room, Pavilion B), CMS.
- Series: HEP phenomenology joint Cavendish-DAMTP seminar; organiser: Terry Generet.
Fri 24 Oct 16:00: TBA
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Luca Naterop (Zurich U.)
- Friday 24 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 16:00: TBA
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Joseph Tooby-Smith (Reykjavik University)
- Friday 17 October 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: MR19 (Potter Room, Pavilion B), CMS.
- Series: HEP phenomenology joint Cavendish-DAMTP seminar; organiser: Nico Gubernari.
Fri 10 Oct 16:00: TBA
Abstract not available
- 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 24 Oct 16:00: TBA
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Luca Naterop (Zurich U.)
- Friday 24 October 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: Ray Dolby Centre, Seminar Room - North (Floor: 0 A0.019).
- Series: HEP phenomenology joint Cavendish-DAMTP seminar; organiser: Nico Gubernari.