http://talks.cam.ac.uk/show/rss/5408

Optical see-through Augmented Reality (OST-AR) is a developing technology that creates a mix of virtual and real using an optical combiner that blends images and graphics with the real-world environment. Because of its physical transparency, this novel display technology suffers from background bleed-through, which distorts color and contrast. However, displayed virtual content is usually easily understandable, thanks to perceptual scission, or the cognitive separation of foreground and background layers. Color appearance in OST -AR is strongly influenced by scission, which is influenced by transparency, depth, and parallax. This presentation will overview psychophysical research that has addressed perceived characteristics of color, material, and images in OST -AR. Results help both understand the visual mechanisms and improve tomorrow’s AR systems, which promise new human-computer interfaces in domains including education, medicine, and entertainment.

Michael J. Murdoch is an Associate Professor and Director of the Munsell Color Science Laboratory at the Rochester Institute of Technology with 25 years of research experience focused on color in advanced displays and LED lighting. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award. He holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from Cornell, MS in Computer Science from RIT , and PhD in Human-Technology Interaction from Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands.

• Speaker: Michael J. Murdoch Associate Professor and Director of the Munsell Color Science Laboratory at the Rochester Institute of Technology
• Thursday 11 September 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: SS03 - William Gates Building.
• Series: Rainbow Group Seminars; organiser: Yancheng Cai.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Join us for our Open Friday, titled MLIR (Un)School Meets Compiler Community, on Friday 12th of September. This public workshop is the final day of our MLIR (Un)School and offers an opportunity for our international MLIR (Un)School attendees to connect with the UK compiler community.

View the schedule for the day at: https://mlir-school.github.io/open-friday/

• Speaker: Alastair Reid @ Intel, Joel Wee @ Google DeepMind, Théo Degioanni & Lorenzo Chelini @ NVIDIA, Christophe Guillon @ INRIA
• Friday 12 September 2025, 09:30-17:00
• Venue: Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, LT1.
• Series: compiler socials; organiser: Emma Urquhart.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Abstract not available

Host – Kate Baker

• Speaker: Professor Benoit Marteyn from Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IBMC), University of Strasbourg
• Thursday 06 November 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: Biffen Lecture theatre and Zoom.
• Series: Genetics Seminar ; organiser: Caroline Newnham.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

In the past years, results based on a technique called convex integration have drawn lots of interest within the community of mathematical fluid mechanics. Among other fascinating results, this technique allows to prove existence of infinitely many solutions for the multi-dimensional compressible Euler equations. All these solutions satisfy the energy inequality which is commonly used in the literature to identify physically relevant solutions. On the other hand, intuitively at least some of the infinitely many solutions still seem to be non-physical. For this reason one has studied additional admissibility criteria like the maximal energy dissipation criterion or the least action criterion—to no avail: such criteria do not select the solution which is expected to be the physical one. In this talk we give an overview on the aforementioned non-uniqueness results, and we explain why maximal dissipation as well as the least action criterion fail to single out the solution which is presumably the physical solution.

• Speaker: Simon Markfelder
• Monday 13 October 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: Lecture Room 2 in the gatehouse at INI.
• Series: Partial Differential Equations seminar; organiser: Zoe Wyatt.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Join us for our Open Friday, titled MLIR (Un)School Meets Compiler Community, on Friday 12th of September. This public workshop is the final day of our MLIR (Un)School and offers an opportunity for our international MLIR (Un)School attendees to connect with the UK compiler community.

View the schedule for the day at: https://mlir-school.github.io/open-friday/

• Speaker: Alastair Reid @ Intel, Joel Wee @ Google DeepMind, Théo Degioanni & Lorenzo Chelini @ NVIDIA, Christophe Guillon @ INRIA
• Friday 12 September 2025, 10:15-17:00
• Venue: Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, LT1.
• Series: compiler socials; organiser: Emma Urquhart.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

There is growing interest in using scores, including polygenic scores, to guide individualized treatment selection as well as to avoid treatment toxicity. Many efforts have focused on prognostic scores for this purpose, though predictive scores are a compelling alternative. In this seminar, I will define and compare these two approaches and the implications of using each. Furthermore, comparisons of these two scoring modalities in real trial data are lacking. Given previous work that found a modification of the effect of finasteride on prostate cancer risk by genetic markers, it is important to understand how prognostic and predictive polygenic scores might be used to guide use of finasteride. I utilized data from the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial (PCPT), a large randomized study of finasteride for the prevention of prostate cancer, to compare the utility of these scores for guiding finasteride use. This analysis of nearly 8,000 PCPT participants found greater utility for the predictive scores. These results provide insights into the relationship between finasteride and prostate cancer risk, as well as an illustration of the potential benefits and challenges of developing polygenic scores for intervention selection. 

This will be a free hybrid seminar. To register to attend virtually, please click here: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/2-jzYw6UQ0uzKp5LpplBhg

• Speaker: Allison Meisner, Assistant Professor, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
• Thursday 11 September 2025, 13:00-14:00
• Venue: Large Downstairs Teaching Room, East Forvie Building, Forvie Site Robinson Way Cambridge CB2 0SR..
• Series: MRC Biostatistics Unit Seminars; organiser: Alison Quenault.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Abstract not available

• Speaker: Gavril Farkas, HU Berlin
• Wednesday 11 February 2026, 14:15-15:15
• Venue: CMS MR13.
• Series: Algebraic Geometry Seminar; organiser: Dhruv Ranganathan.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Behavioural Ecology, the study of the adaptive significance of animal behaviour, has empowered zoologists to tackle some of the fundamental issues of evolutionary biology. Insects, although not always easy to study as individuals in the field, have provided excellent model systems for this area of research.

In this talk, I will outline some of the research done by myself and colleagues on the behavioural ecology of insects. I will discuss what marine water-striders can tell us about selfish group behaviour; what the mating behaviour of tiny aphids on poplar bark tells us about the evolution of the sex ratio; what the behaviour of gall-living aphids reveals about the altruism of housework, house-maintenance, and the slaughter of intruders; and how extended parental care by solitary digger wasps shows us the first faltering steps along the route to highly complex social behaviour. Along the way we will visit a saltmarsh in North Norfolk, a mangrove swamp in the Galapagos, the playing fields of Cambridge, a Hill Station in Malaya, and a heathland near Godalming. And we will learn about The Trafalgar Effect, The Constant Male Hypothesis, and the menopausal aphid glue-bomb.

• Speaker: Dr William Foster
• Monday 16 February 2026, 18:00-19:00
• Venue: Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry.
• Series: Cambridge Philosophical Society; organiser: Beverley Larner.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

The structural mechanics of shape-changing structures: from bending armadillos, self-deploying satellites, to roll-up displays.

Most structures, e.g. buildings & bridges, are designed to be near rigid when loaded: in view of high winds or heavy traffic, their movements are barely noticeable. Formally, they are stiff, strong and stable, in terms of their “structural mechanics” – the study of their loaded deformation. Large movements from material weakness, overloading, or bad design, typically portend failure & eventual collapse. Embracing large movements, i.e. deliberate changes in shape, can admit new behaviour if safe and reversible, to yield transformer-like technologies and simple explanations of biological morphology, for example. In this talk, I will describe several structural mechanics principles for making shape-changing structures, out of ordinary materials, complete with physical demonstrations.

• Speaker: Professor Keith Seffen. Cambridge University Engineering Department
• Monday 10 November 2025, 18:00-19:00
• Venue: Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry.
• Series: Cambridge Philosophical Society; organiser: Beverley Larner.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Volcanoes are hazardous and beautiful manifestations of the dynamic processes that have shaped our planet. Volcanoes impact our environment in numerous ways. Over geological time volcanic activity has resurfaced the Earth and provided life with a terrestrial substrate upon which to proliferate. Volcanic degassing has shaped our secondary atmosphere and as part of the process of plate tectonics, maintained just the right amount of water and carbon dioxide at the surface to produce a stable and equitable climate. Magma in the subsurface in volcanic environments today gives Society geothermal energy. The fluids degassed from magmas in the plumbing systems of volcanoes give rise to hydrothermal ore deposits, the source of much of our copper and other metals, critical to the energy transition. In this lecture I will describe the nature and importance of magma degassing for our atmosphere and oceans, as a source of both pollutants and nutrients, and in the formation of mineral deposits. I will describe my own research in carrying out measurements of volcanic gases (using a range of spectroscopic methods, from the ground and using drones), and analysis of erupted lavas, to understand the chemistry and physics of volcanic outgassing and its role in sustaining our planetary environment.

• Speaker: Professor Marie Edmonds FRS. Department of Earth Sciences
• Monday 24 November 2025, 18:00-19:00
• Venue: Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry.
• Series: Cambridge Philosophical Society; organiser: Beverley Larner.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

One of the many outstanding achievements of G I Taylor was the discovery of relatively simple statistical laws that apply to highly complex turbulent flows. The emergence of simple laws from complexity is well known in other branches of physics, for example the emergence of the laws of heat conduction from molecular dynamics. Complexity can also arise at large scales, and the structural vibration of an aircraft or a car can be a surprisingly difficult phenomenon to analyse, partly because millions of degrees of freedom may be involved, and partly because the vibration can be extremely sensitive to small changes or imperfections in the system. In this talk it is shown that the prediction of vibration levels can be much simplified by the derivation and exploitation of emergent laws, analogous to some extent to the heat conduction equations, but with an added statistical aspect, as in turbulent flow. The emergent laws are discussed and their application to the design of aerospace, marine, and automotive structures is described. As an aside it will be shown that the same emergent theory can be applied to a range of problems involving electromagnetic fields.

• Speaker: Professor Robin Langley. Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge
• Monday 02 February 2026, 18:00-19:00
• Venue: Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry.
• Series: Cambridge Philosophical Society; organiser: Beverley Larner.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

We recently proposed a model able to describe both “thin films” and “thick films” [1] both in the context of large-scale geophysical flows and down to lubrication scales . In this presentation, I will give an overview of the principal properties of this multilayer, semi-discrete approximation of the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations with a free-surface and its theoretical and practical connections with previous classical film models.

[1] Popinet, S. (2020). A vertically-Lagrangian, non-hydrostatic, multilayer model for multiscale free-surface flows, Journal of Computational Physics, 418, 109609.

• Speaker: Stephane Popinet, Sorbonne University.
• Thursday 16 October 2025, 11:30-12:30
• Venue: Open Plan Area, Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows, Madingley Rise CB3 0EZ.
• Series: Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows (IEEF); organiser: Catherine Pearson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Abstract not available

• Speaker: Benoit Doucot, CNRS
• Thursday 30 October 2025, 14:00-15:30
• Venue: Seminar Room 3, RDC.
• Series: Theory of Condensed Matter; organiser: Gaurav.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Abstract not available

• Speaker: Prof. Emilio Artacho (Cambridge & Nanogune)
• Thursday 09 October 2025, 14:00-15:30
• Venue: Seminar Room 3, RDC.
• Series: Theory of Condensed Matter; organiser: Bo Peng.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Abstract not available

• Speaker: Yuan PING (University of Wisconsin - Madison)
• Friday 12 December 2025, 14:00-15:35
• Venue: Seminar Room 3, RDC.
• Series: Theory of Condensed Matter; organiser: Bo Peng.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

The discovery of functional materials is often hindered by vast compositional search spaces, complex structure-property relationships, and labour-intensive experimental workflows. In this talk, I present a data-driven framework that unites machine learning (ML), automated synthesis, and high-throughput characterisation to accelerate the exploration of disordered and dielectric perovskite materials for wireless communication and biosensing applications. At the core of this approach is a robotic materials discovery platform capable of ML-guided candidate selection, rapid sintering, and GHz-range dielectric property evaluation, reducing the experimental cycle from days to minutes. Complementing this experimental advance, we introduce a formula graph-based self-attention neural network that bridges stoichiometry-only and structure-informed descriptors for property prediction. This hybrid model exhibits strong generalizability, enabling the discovery of complex materials such as those with epsilon-near-zero behaviour. Furthermore, we explore unsupervised learning strategies to extract interpretable fingerprints of disorder, crystal symmetry, and perovskite formability directly from chemical composition. These embeddings underpin a scalable analogue-based recommendation engine that has successfully mined over 600,000 hypothetical compositions with a >90% hit rate.

Professor Yang Hao is the QinetiQ/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair at Queen Mary University of London. His work has been recognized both nationally and internationally through his books “Antennas and Radio Propagation for Body-Centric Wireless Communications” and “FDTD Modeling of Metamaterials: Theory and Applications” (Artech House, USA ), as well as through highly cited papers published in leading journals, including Nature Communications, Advanced Science, Physical Review Letters, Applied Physics Letters, IEEE Proceedings, and Transactions. His research on transformation optics and metamaterials has led to many tangible benefits for a range of industrial products. One example is metalens antenna designs for satellite communications. This technology has been fully scoped and is currently being commercialised by the startup Isotropic System Limited (All.Space). Prof. Hao has won many accolades, including the prestigious IEEE John Kraus Antenna Award, the European EurAAP Antenna Award, the AF Harvey Research Prize, the BAE Chairman’s Silver Award, and the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. He was an AdCom Member and currently serves as the Chair of the Publication Committee for the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society. Prof. Hao is an elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, IEEE , and IET .

• Speaker: Professor Yang Hao, Queen Mary University of London
• Friday 10 October 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: Department of Engineering - LR3.
• Series: Engineering - Mechanics Colloquia Research Seminars; organiser: div-c.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

The storage of renewably-generated energy as hydrogen via the electrolysis of water is a fundamental cornerstone of a sustainable hydrogen economy. Conventional electrolysers usually require stable power inputs in order to operate effectively and safely and so may be unsuited to harnessing renewable power, which is often intermittent and diffuse. Decoupled Electrolysis (see, for example: Nature Chem. 2013, 5, 403-409; Science, 2014, 345, 1326-1330; J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2016, 138, 6707–6710; Joule, 2018, 2, 1390-1395; Adv. Energy Mater. 2020, 2002453; Electrochim. Acta, 2020, 331, 135255) has the potential to overcome some of the challenges surrounding electrolysis using low and/or sporadic power inputs (especially those related to gas crossover) as the decoupling of the two half reactions of water splitting allows the oxygen and hydrogen evolution reactions to be performed at different times, in different places and at rates that are not linked to each other. In this talk, we shall give an overview of decoupled electrolysis using liquid redox mediators

• Speaker: Mark Symes, University of Glasgow
• Thursday 20 November 2025, 11:30-12:30
• Venue: Open Plan Area, Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows, Madingley Rise CB3 0EZ.
• Series: Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows (IEEF); organiser: Catherine Pearson.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

In the past years, results based on a technique called convex integration have drawn lots of interest within the community of mathematical fluid mechanics. Among other fascinating results, this technique allows to prove existence of infinitely many solutions for the multi-dimensional compressible Euler equations. All these solutions satisfy the energy inequality which is commonly used in the literature to identify physically relevant solutions. On the other hand, intuitively at least some of the infinitely many solutions still seem to be non-physical. For this reason one has studied additional admissibility criteria like the maximal energy dissipation criterion or the least action criterion—to no avail: such criteria do not select the solution which is expected to be the physical one. In this talk we give an overview on the aforementioned non-uniqueness results, and we explain why maximal dissipation as well as the least action criterion fail to single out the solution which is presumably the physical solution.

• Speaker: Simon Markfelder
• Monday 01 September 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: Lecture Room 2 in the gatehouse at INI.
• Series: Partial Differential Equations seminar; organiser: Zoe Wyatt.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

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: LR3A, Department of Engineering.
• Series: Engineering - Mechanics and Materials Seminar Series; organiser: div-c.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

The steady motion of a viscous incompressible fluid in a junction of unbounded channels with sources and sinks is modeled through the Navier-Stokes equations under inhomogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Under a general outflow constraint, we prove the existence of a solution with a uniformly bounded Dirichlet integral in every compact subset. The main novelties of our approach are the construction of a flux carrier satisfying a uniform Leray-Hopf inequality in rectangular sections and the proof of some properties of weak solutions to the stationary Euler equations in bounded planar domains, such as the regularity of the extension to the whole plane, of the related Bernoulli pressure and of the stream function. This regularity is used to obtain local Morse-Sard-type information and to generate a solution through the invading domains procedure. For small data of the problem, we also prove unique solvability and attainability of Couette-Poiseuille flows at infinity. Applications of the results to the stability of suspension bridges are also given.

• Speaker: Filippo Gazzola (Politecnico di Milano)
• Thursday 16 October 2025, 15:00-16:00
• Venue: Centre for Mathematical Sciences, MR14.
• Series: Applied and Computational Analysis; organiser: Georg Maierhofer.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list