Fri 16 May 16:00: TBA
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Tyler Corbett (Vienna U.)
- Friday 16 May 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: MR19 (Potter Room, Pavilion B), CMS.
- Series: HEP phenomenology joint Cavendish-DAMTP seminar; organiser: Nico Gubernari.
Fri 02 May 16:00: TBA
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Jaco ter Hoeve (University of Edinburgh)
- Friday 02 May 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: MR19 (Potter Room, Pavilion B), CMS.
- Series: HEP phenomenology joint Cavendish-DAMTP seminar; organiser: Nico Gubernari.
Fri 16 May 08:45: Leishmaniasis in Colombia: A Host-Pathogen Interaction Perspective.
Speaker Bio: Julieth is a researcher studying macrophage biology in both sterile and infectious contexts. She completed her PhD in Colombia, focusing on Macrophage-Leishmania interactions using omics approaches, which sparked her interest in developing resources for omics analysis in infectious diseases. At the EBI , she contributed to creating the first repository of pathways relevant to Leishmaniasis. Currently, she is working with Professor Bryant on macrophage involvement in inflammation under sterile conditions and in response to canonical activators of Toll-like receptors. She employs transcriptomics, ATAC -seq data, and graph theory to study these systems in native and perturbed conditions.
Chaired by Julian Parkhill
- Speaker: Julieth Murillo Silva, Department of Veterinary Medicine
- Friday 16 May 2025, 08:45-10:00
- Venue: LT2.
- Series: Friday Morning Seminars, Dept of Veterinary Medicine; organiser: Fiona Roby.
Fri 16 May 08:45: Mapping germinal center responses after monovalent vaccination in individuals with distinct dengue immune histories
Kelsey Lowman is an NIH -Cambridge Scholar pursing her PhD under the co-mentorship of Dr. Leah Katzelnick at the United States’ National Institutes of Health and Prof. Jonathan Heeney here in the department. Kelsey holds both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Biology from the University of Alabama. Her PhD research focuses on the activity, selection, and maturation of B cell protection in sequential dengue virus infection. Today she will be sharing preliminary results from her ongoing work mapping germinal center responses after monovalent vaccination in individuals with distinct dengue immune histories.
Chaired by Julian Parkhill
- Speaker: Kelsey Lowman, Department of Veterinary Medicine
- Friday 16 May 2025, 08:45-10:00
- Venue: LT2.
- Series: Friday Morning Seminars, Dept of Veterinary Medicine; organiser: Fiona Roby.
Thu 10 Apr 13:00: "Dendritic cells control the formation, maintenance, and function of tertiary lymphoid structures in cancer." Raphael Mattiuz, Mount Sinai
This Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar will take place on Thursday 4 April 2025, starting at 1:00-2:00pm
Speaker: Raphael Mattiuz, Post-doctoral Fellow in Immunobiology, Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai Hess Center for Science and Medicine
Title: “Dendritic cells control the formation, maintenance, and function of tertiary lymphoid structures in cancer.”
Host: Menna Clatworthy, CITIID , Cambridge
Refreshments will be available following the seminar.
- Speaker: Raphael Mattiuz, Post-doctoral Fellow in Immunobiology, Mount Sinai
- Thursday 10 April 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
- Series: Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar Series; organiser: Ruth Paton.
Tue 08 Apr 14:00: Relaxed Locally Decodable and Correctable Codes Do Not Need Adaptivity and Two-Sided Error
Relaxed locally decodable codes (RLDCs) are error-correcting codes in which individual bits of the message can be recovered by querying only a few bits from a noisy codeword.
For uncorrupted codewords, and for every bit, the decoder must decode the bit correctly with high probability. However, for a noisy codeword, a relaxed local decoder is allowed to output a ``rejection’’ symbol, indicating that the decoding failed.
We study the power of adaptivity and two-sided error for RLD Cs. Our main result is that if the underlying code is linear, adaptivity and two-sided error do not give any power to relaxed local decoding. We construct a reduction from adaptive, two-sided error relaxed local decoders to non-adaptive, one-sided error ones. That is, the reduction produces a relaxed local decoder that never errs or rejects if its input is a valid codeword and makes queries based on its internal randomness (and the requested index to decode), independently of the input. The reduction essentially maintains the query complexity, requiring at most one additional query. For any input, the decoder’s error probability increases at most two-fold. Furthermore, assuming the underlying code is in systematic form, where the original message is embedded as the first bits of its encoding, the reduction also conserves both the code itself and its rate and distance properties
We base the reduction on our new notion of additive promise problems. A promise problem is additive if the sum of any two YES -instances is a YES -instance and the sum of any NO-instance and a YES -instance is a NO-instance. This novel framework captures both linear RLD Cs and property testing (of linear properties), despite their significant differences.
We prove that in general, algorithms for any additive promise problem do not gain power from adaptivity or two-sided error, and obtain the result for RLD Cs as a special case. The result also holds for relaxed locally correctable codes (RLCCs), where a codeword bit should be recovered.
As an application, we improve the best known lower bound for linear adaptive RLD Cs. Specifically, we prove that such codes require block length of $n \geq k{1+\Omega(1/q2)}, where k denotes the message length and q denotes the number of queries.
- Speaker: Guy Goldberg (Weizmann Institute)
- Tuesday 08 April 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, Room SS03.
- Series: Algorithms and Complexity Seminar; organiser: Tom Gur.
Fri 11 Apr 15:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Dr Gunnar Lange (Oslo)
- Friday 11 April 2025, 15:00-16:30
- Venue: TCM Seminar Room.
- Series: Theory of Condensed Matter; organiser: Bo Peng.
Thu 22 May 15:00: A retelling of the Quantum Mechanics story
Typical accounts of Quantum Mechanics plot a path to the quantum world starting from a classical mechanics view point – ‘how do we translate momentum into an operator’ etc – , but this is fundamentally the wrong way round: it is impossible to derive an exact theory from an approximation so any attempt to do so results in a story with no coherence or substance in the way it is told. Here I propose an account that simply starts with the observations of how quantum systems behave, adding in special relativity, to develop the basic formalism and concepts of QM and show significant tracks of physics can be developed from just a few initial observations. A candidate is presented for the ‘simplest possible measurement’, proposing that there is no need for either an observer or a measurement device and suggesting that all quantum measurements are essentially an identical and remarkably simple, semi understandable, yet inexplicable, QM process. The basic premise of this approach is that if we are ever to extend our understanding of, for example, measurement and collapse, we need a clearer understanding of what we have in QM and on what it is based rather than ‘we make these unconnected guesses from classical mechanics, this is where we end up and, oh look, it works’, and whilst the author would not pretend to be delivering ‘the answer’, the hope is that this example of an attempt to do so will encourage others to consider developing more transparent explanations of the fundamentals of QM.
- Speaker: John Ellis, Surface Physics Group, Cavendish Laboratory
- Thursday 22 May 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Seminar Room West, Room A0.015, Ray Dolby Centre, Cavendish Laboratory.
- Series: Physics and Chemistry of Solids Group; organiser: Stephen Walley.
Thu 01 May 15:00: The mechanical properties of wood at high rates of strain
Due to its importance in the construction of ships, wood was one of the first substances to have the velocity dependence of its resistance to impact quantified. This was achieved in England and France early in the 19th century. Techniques for measuring the high-rate mechanical properties of wood were developed around the start of the 20th century. These studies involved drop-weight and pendulum machines to quantify the dynamic fracture toughness of timbers and were mostly performed by the US Forestry Service. It was not until 1977 that the first high-rate compression stress-strain curves of wood were obtained using the Kolsky bar, despite this device having been developed in Britain in the 1940s. It took until the mid-1990s and the desire to use wood to cushion the drop-impact of vessels used to transport dangerous waste that Kolsky bar studies of wood began in earnest in Britain, the Czech Republic and Russia. Even so, to date fewer than 100 such studies have been published compared to nearly 5,000 for metals. The seminar will summarize the effects of anisotropy, stress state, multiple repeat loading, moisture content, temperature, and density on the high-rate properties of a wide range of woods. The seminar will finish with suggestions for what needs doing in the future. A review paper on this topic has recently been published in ‘Journal of Dynamic Behavior of Materials’.
- Speaker: Stephen Walley, PCS Group, Cavendish Laboratory
- Thursday 01 May 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Seminar Room West, Room A0.015, Ray Dolby Centre, Cavendish Laboratory.
- Series: Physics and Chemistry of Solids Group; organiser: Stephen Walley.
Thu 22 May 15:00: A retelling of the Quantum Mechanics story
Abstract not available
- Speaker: John Ellis, Surface Physics Group, Cavendish Laboratory
- Thursday 22 May 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Seminar Room West, Room A0.015, Ray Dolby Centre, Cavendish Laboratory.
- Series: Physics and Chemistry of Solids Group; organiser: Stephen Walley.
Thu 15 May 15:00: Prediction and its application to mechanical properties
Virtual representation of material response is increasingly common in design of novel materials as well as in attempts to understand observed response. Mechanical properties outside the elastic region are driven by complex interactions between microstructure and fundamental material physics and prediction carries a higher burden of trust. The intent to replace empirical methods with simulation only exacerbates this burden. Prediction and predictive methods in modelling and simulation will be discussed in the light of this complex situation.
- Speaker: Peter Gould
- Thursday 15 May 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Seminar Room West, Room A0.015, Ray Dolby Centre, Cavendish Laboratory.
- Series: Physics and Chemistry of Solids Group; organiser: Stephen Walley.
Thu 08 May 15:00: Can we design fatigue-resistant alloys?
Better understanding of the origin and behaviour of fatigue cracks should lead to improved engineering design and alloying strategies for structural metals. The surface stresses caused by persistent slip bands, including a zone of infinite tensile stress at the edge of each band, seem an inevitable consequence of elastic non-linearity and hard to combat, except perhaps by the present expensive methods of shot-peening or surface removal. But the underlying process of jog movement to eliminate screw dislocation dipoles should be susceptible to control. It is important to understand better the main engineering problem: is design against persistent slip the metallurgist’s answer to crack-proof rotating machinery?
- Speaker: Mick Brown, Cavendish Laboratory
- Thursday 08 May 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Seminar Room West, Room A0.015, Ray Dolby Centre, Cavendish Laboratory.
- Series: Physics and Chemistry of Solids Group; organiser: Stephen Walley.
Thu 01 May 15:00: The mechanical properties of wood at high rates of strain
Due to its importance in the construction of ships, wood was one of the first substances to have the velocity dependence of its resistance to impact quantified. This was achieved in England and France early in the 19th century. Techniques for measuring the high-rate mechanical properties of wood were developed around the start of the 20th century. These studies involved drop-weight and pendulum machines to quantify the dynamic fracture toughness of timbers and were mostly performed by the US Forestry Service. It was not until 1977 that the first high-rate compression stress-strain curves of wood were obtained using the Kolsky bar, despite this device having been developed in Britain in the 1940s. It took until the mid-1990s and the desire to use wood to cushion the drop-impact of vessels used to transport dangerous waste that Kolsky bar studies of wood began in earnest in Britain, the Czech Republic and Russia. Even so, to date fewer than 100 such studies have been published compared to nearly 5,000 for metals. The seminar will summarize the effects of anisotropy, stress state, multiple repeat loading, moisture content, temperature, and density on the high-rate properties of a wide range of woods. The seminar will finish with suggestions for what needs doing in the future. A review paper on this topic has recently been accepted for publication in ‘Journal of Dynamic Behavior of Materials’.
- Speaker: Stephen Walley, PCS Group, Cavendish Laboratory
- Thursday 01 May 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Seminar Room West, Room A0.015, Ray Dolby Centre, Cavendish Laboratory.
- Series: Physics and Chemistry of Solids Group; organiser: Stephen Walley.
Wed 09 Apr 11:00: User-extensible and Productive Programming of Specialized Hardware
As single-core performance has reached its limit, exploiting the peak performance of heterogeneous accelerators and specialized instructions has become crucial in many applications. Compilers struggle to keep pace with the diverse and rapidly evolving hardware targets, and automatic optimization often fails to guarantee state-of-the-art performance. Consequently, high-performance libraries are still commonly coded and optimized by hand, at great expense, in low-level C and assembly. User-schedulable languages (USLs) have been proposed to address this challenge by decoupling algorithms and scheduling. I will share our work on Exo, a USL based on the principle of exocompilation, which externalizes hardware-specific code generation and scheduling library implementation in the user code, decoupled from the compiler. Additionally, I will discuss other projects that borrow ideas from USLs and the lessons we have learned from the industry adoption of Exo.
- Speaker: Yuka Ikarashi (MIT CSAIL)
- Wednesday 09 April 2025, 11:00-12:00
- Venue: Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, LT2.
- Series: compiler socials; organiser: Emma Urquhart.
Thu 10 Apr 13:00: Raphael Mattiuz, Post-doctoral Fellow in Immunobiology, Mount Sinai Hess Center for Science and Medicine
This Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar will take place on Thursday 4 April 2025, starting at 1:00-2:00pm
Speaker: Raphael Mattiuz, Post-doctoral Fellow in Immunobiology, Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai Hess Center for Science and Medicine
Title: TBC
Host: Menna Clatworthy, CITIID , Cambridge
Refreshments will be available following the seminar.
- Speaker: Raphael Mattiuz, Post-doctoral Fellow in Immunobiology, Mount Sinai
- Thursday 10 April 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
- Series: Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar Series; organiser: Ruth Paton.
Thu 24 Jul 09:30: Patenting, translating & commercialising research
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Prof Rebecca Fitzgerald, Early Cancer Institute and Dept of Oncology
- Thursday 24 July 2025, 09:30-10:30
- Venue: Theo Chalmers Lecture Theatre (LT2) School of Clinical Medicine.
- Series: Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre Lectures in Cancer Biology and Medicine; organiser: Justin Holt.
Thu 03 Jul 09:30: The promise of proton therapy in Paediatric tumours
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Dr Thankamma Ajithkumar, Cambridge University Hospitals and Department of Oncology.
- Thursday 03 July 2025, 09:30-10:30
- Venue: Theo Chalmers Lecture Theatre (LT2) School of Clinical Medicine.
- Series: Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre Lectures in Cancer Biology and Medicine; organiser: Justin Holt.
Thu 10 Jul 09:30: Pancreatic cancer - the clinical challenge; Why the microenvironment matters during pancreatic cancer progression and treatment
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Dr Bristi Basu, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS FT and Dept of Oncology; Dr Gianluca Mucciolo CRUK Cambridge Institute (Biffi Lab)
- Thursday 10 July 2025, 09:30-10:30
- Venue: Theo Chalmers Lecture Theatre (LT2) School of Clinical Medicine.
- Series: Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre Lectures in Cancer Biology and Medicine; organiser: Justin Holt.
Thu 17 Jul 09:30: A scientists guide to the art of radiation therapy and Neurosurgery for the oncologist
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Dr Raj Jena and Mr Adel Helmy; Cambridge University Hospitals; Departments of Oncology/ Clinical Nuroscience
- Thursday 17 July 2025, 09:30-10:30
- Venue: Theo Chalmers Lecture Theatre (LT2) School of Clinical Medicine.
- Series: Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre Lectures in Cancer Biology and Medicine; organiser: Justin Holt.
Thu 26 Jun 09:30: Transmissable cancers
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Prof Elizabeth Murchison, Department of Veterinary Medicine.
- Thursday 26 June 2025, 09:30-10:30
- Venue: Theo Chalmers Lecture Theatre (LT2) School of Clinical Medicine.
- Series: Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre Lectures in Cancer Biology and Medicine; organiser: Justin Holt.