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

Misogyny and domestic abuse are old problems, but tech companies have enabled these harms to grow and proliferate on their platforms in new forms, such as social media harassment, cyberstalking, and deepfake intimate image abuse. This talk will summarise my work to build better systems for survivors of online gender-based violence across academia, advocacy, and policy. In my DPhil,  I argued that due to its engineering focus on defending networks and information, cybersecurity neglects the human element, and particularly differences in power and relationships between humans that produce (in)security. I developed a new method, participatory threat modelling, which brings marginalised people and civil society groups into the process of systematically assessing digital security threats. As a part of the work, I co-founded a research collective named re:configure, which ran feminist digital security workshops with groups such as survivors of intimate image abuse, environmental activists, and migrant domestic workers. After my PhD, I worked at the online safety charity Glitch, I managed the delivery of and co-authored a quantitative research study on digital misogynoir (hate directed at Black women) across multiple tech platforms, including Meta, X/Twitter, and 4chan. I am now working as Senior Associate at Ofcom, the regulator in charge of implementing the UK’s Online Safety Act, to put this evidence into guidance for industry on online violence against women and girls.

Zoom link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/87951267899?pwd=96gCfOc00Q3OqG6MiDpl6pPQ9hhiwk.1

• Speaker: Dr Julia Slupska, Ofcom
• Tuesday 03 June 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: Webinar (via Zoom online).
• Series: Computer Laboratory Security Seminar; organiser: Anna Talas.

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It is possible to affect a wide variety of gradients into additively manufactured components, including bulk structures and lattice structures. This talk will briefly describe how multiple gradients can be achieved, and some technical advances in the modeling associated with achieving sufficiently precise gradients. However, while demonstrating that it is possible to create precise gradients is a critical initial step towards a future where complex gradients are part of parts and components used in service, it is necessary to develop the predictive tools necessary for design engineers to incorporate spatially varying properties. In this work, we present an effort to predict the processing-materials state-properties-performance relationships in Ti-based gradient structures where both composition and aging temperatures are spatially controlled. Finally, recognizing that qualification (including post-manufacture nondestructive evaluation (NDE)) will be a challenging problem, we present a new concept where we extend the concepts of feasibility diagrams for processing to feasibility diagrams of inspectability.

Peter C. Collins joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University in July, 2015. Dr. Pete Collins received his undergraduate degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla, and his MS and PhD from The Ohio State University in Materials Science and Engineering. Prior to joining ISU , Dr. Collins served as a faculty member and undergraduate coordinator in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas. Dr. Collins has also spent time standing-up a not-for-profit 501-3© manufacturing laboratory, and regularly engages with both industry and the government. His experiences and interests involve the practical and theoretical treatments of microstructure-property relationship, with an extension into composition-microstructure-property relationships derived for complex multi-phase, multi-component engineering alloys. He has extensive experience in participating in large industrial programs, has conducted studies into novel metal matrix composites, and has significant research experience with additive manufacturing techniques, and combinatorial materials science. Dr. Collins is an active member of TMS , past chairman of the ICME committee, member of the Titanium committee, and a member of the Materials Processing and Manufacturing Division. In recent years, Collins and his group have been actively involved in developing and building new types of instrumentation and experiments. These include developing the first 3D SRAS (spatially resolved acoustic spectroscopy) microscope, bicombinatorial techniques, reduced-cost wire-fed metal AM systems, and other techniques aimed at characterizing defects in additive manufactured materials.

• Speaker: Dr Peter C. Collins, Iowa State University
• Friday 13 June 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: Oatley 1 Meeting Room, Department of Engineering.
• Series: Engineering - Mechanics and Materials Seminar Series; organiser: div-c.

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We are at a moment of extreme pessimism about data with news stories implicating social media and mobile phones in cyberespionage. To many this is a worrying state of affairs but are we worrying too much? In this talk I will argue that data openness and data-drive advertising are good things and are misunderstood. In particular data-driven advertising is not about controlling behaviour but involves targeting groups of people which brings economic benefits. Internet search data has been used to meet public health challenges such as providing insights into Zika and Ebola. I will argue we should be targeting the distribution of digital power rather than concerning ourselves with business models of particular companies.

• Speaker: Sam Gilbert, Bennett Institute for Public Policy
• Monday 03 November 2025, 19:00-21:00
• Venue: The Statistical Laboratory,Centre for Mathematical Sciences,Wilberforce Road, Cambridge, CB3 0WB.
• Series: Cambridge Statistics Discussion Group (CSDG); organiser: Peter Watson.

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From classical mechanics, we know that mathematical descriptions of dynamical systems are deeply rooted in topological spaces defined by non-Euclidean geometry. In this talk we will investigate how these structure-rich, geometric representations could be key to improving generalization and parsimony when using machine learning to model physical systems from data.

• Speaker: Dr Zack X Conti, Alan Turing Institute
• Friday 13 June 2025, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: JDB Seminar Room, CUED.
• Series: Engineering - Dynamics and Vibration Tea Time Talks; organiser: div-c.

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Like many social psychologists, I began my career thinking about the individual; how worldviews, ideologies, and belief systems shape people’s responses to climate change. Most of this work has been rooted in the Global North, where political ideology and education are often central. But climate change (in)action is not easily explained at the level of the individual. Rather, it’s a global phenomenon shaped by national histories, economies, and political systems. In this talk, I shift focus from the individual to the national level, drawing on international datasets, social media data, and machine learning to explore how country-level factors — such as GDP , fossil fuel dependence, and democracy — shape climate concern, scepticism, and activism. The findings underscore calls for a globally informed approach to climate psychology, one that takes seriously the political, economic, and structural context in which beliefs are formed. Finally, the talk turns to the dual role of artificial intelligence in this space, both as a vector for amplifying climate-related misinformation and as a tool for enhancing trust and promoting accurate scientific communication. I explore recent work testing AI-facilitated interventions to reduce conspiracy theories and misinformation about climate science and renewable energy, interventions that are potentially scalable to international contexts.

• 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.

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Cambridge Infectious Diseases and Cambridge Immunology Network ECR Symposium 2025

Methodologies in Infection and Immunity

Date & Time: Thursday 19th June, 2.00-5.00pm

Location: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, JCBC , Cambridge Biomedical Campus

Programme includes: Rachel Jackson (CIMR): Pushing resolution limits of microscopy for intracellular bacteria

Daniel Nash (Pathology): Using reactive biotin to investigate herpes simplex mediated alterations to the plasma membrane proteome in human cortical neurones

Antonia Netzl (Zoology): Antigenic cartography as a tool to visualise virus evolution

Mahrukh Shameem (Babraham Institute): Unveiling the role of interleukins in respiratory infections and inflammation using ex vivo lung slices

Leonie Lorenz (EMBL-EBI): Methods for mathematical modelling of pathogen evolution: Model fitting with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and model comparison via likelihood-ratio tests

Sebastian Bruchmann (Medicine): Towards automated, high-throughput infection assays: Developing an affordable imaging platform for the honeycomb moth infection model

Any questions please contact: Maria Bargues-Ribera, Cambridge Infectious Diseases IRC  Manager email: mb2464@cam.ac.uk

• Speaker: Various (see programme)
• Thursday 19 June 2025, 14:00-17:00
• Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
• Series: Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar Series; organiser: Ruth Paton.

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I’ll discuss some generalizations of the well-known fact that there are non non-zero modular forms of negative weight, even when working in characteristic p. In particular, for Hilbert modular forms associated to a totally real field of degree d, the weight is a d-tuple, all components of which are non-negative, if working in characteristic zero. But there are mod p Hilbert modular forms, called partial Hasse invariants, whose weight in some component is negative. I’ll explain joint work with Kassaei (from 2017/2020) that shows the possible weights of non-zero Hilbert modular forms in characteristic p lie in the cone generated by the weights of these partial Hasse invariants. In fact we prove a stronger result (motivated by the relation with Galois representations) which asserts that any form whose weight lies outside a certain minimal cone is divisible by a partial Hasse invariant. I’ll also discuss a recent generalization of these results to forms on Goren-Oort strata of Hilbert modular varieties.

• Speaker: Fred Diamond (KCL)
• Tuesday 03 June 2025, 13:00-14:00
• Venue: MR12.
• Series: Number Theory Seminar; organiser: Jef Laga.

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I will introduce the All-atom Diffusion Transformer (ADiT), a unified generative modelling architecture capable of jointly modelling both periodic crystals and non-periodic molecular systems. ADiT is a latent diffusion model that embeds 3D atomic systems into a shared latent space, where it learns to sample new latents and map them to valid structures. ADiT achieves state-of-the-art performance for generative modelling across both molecules and materials, outperforming specialized system-specific methods while being significantly more scalable. I will show that scaling ADiT’s model parameters predictably improves performance, towards the goal of a unified foundation model for molecular design.

Link to paper: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2503.03965

Bio: Chaitanya is a final year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Prof. Pietro Liò. His research is about deep learning foundations for molecular modelling and design. He has previously interned at Prescient Design, Genentech and at FAIR Chemistry, Meta AI on the same.

In-person and virtual (link coming soon) - and will be recorded.

• Speaker: Chaitanya Joshi
• Tuesday 10 June 2025, 13:00-14:00
• Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building.
• Series: Artificial Intelligence Research Group Talks (Computer Laboratory); organiser: Pietro Lio.

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This Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar will take place on Thursday 3 July 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: ‘Unpicking the biology of healthy human nasal microbiome’

Host: Patrycja Kozik, MRC -LMB, Cambridge

Refreshments will be available following the seminar.

• Speaker: Dr Ewan Harrison, Wellcome Sanger Institute
• Thursday 03 July 2025, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
• Series: Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar Series; organiser: Ruth Paton.

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Abstract not available

CANCELLED

• Speaker: Michael Diamond-Hunter (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
• Wednesday 04 June 2025, 13:00-14:30
• Venue: Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
• Series: CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar; organiser: Miguel Ohnesorge.

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The main subject of this seminar is to understand the production of quarkonia in more detail, utilising their production in jets. Previous quarkonia in jets measurements from LHCb and CMS have shown discrepancies between data and current Pythia 8 MC predictions when measuring the normalised cross section vs. z(J/ψ) ≡ pT(J/ψ)/pT(jet) for prompt J/ψ’s. Pythia 8 predicts an isolated peak at z(J/ψ) ≃ 1 in comparison to data which is less isolated. First, new measurements performed by LHCb to try and understand this discrepancy will be discussed, namely normalised cross sections vs. z for different quarkonia (J/ψ, ψ(2S), Υ(1S), Υ(2S), Υ(3S) and X(3872)). Second, to address this discrepancy in Pythia 8 MC, the introduction of quarkonia fragmentation functions into the parton shower framework is discussed, which are calculations based on the effective field theory, non-relativistic QCD (NRQCD).

• Speaker: Naomi Cooke: University of Glasgow
• Tuesday 03 June 2025, 11:00-12:00
• Venue: Seminar Room -- RDC D2.002 .
• Series: Cavendish HEP Seminars; organiser: Dr Paul Swallow.

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Join us for the June Milner Seminar. Presentations will include time for Q&A and will be followed by refreshments and networking.

4:00pm

Sanjay Sinha, Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge – “Application of iPSC-based cardiovascular systems for disease modelling, drug discovery and genomic medicine”

4:30pm

Namshik Han, CardiaTec Biosciences and Milner Therapeutics Institute – “Integrating human-centric multi-omics and AI for cardiovascular therapeutics”

If you’d like to attend this event, please register at: https://milner.glueup.com/event/milner-seminars-focus-on-cardiovascular-research-139525/

• Speaker: Namshik Han, CardiaTec Biosciences and Milner Therapeutics Institute and Sanjay Sinha, Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge
• Wednesday 04 June 2025, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre.
• Series: Milner Seminar Series; organiser: Mary-Jane Roebuck.

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Abstract

Stay tuned!

Bio

Orlando is a second-year PhD student with the AI4ER CDT . Supervised by Oscar Branson (Earth Sciences), he is interested in the opportunities and limitations for modelling marine ecosystems – particularly coral reefs – posed by the data available today.

• Speaker: Orlando Timmerman, University of Cambridge
• Thursday 03 July 2025, 13:00-14:00
• Venue: Room GS15 at the William Gates Building and on Zoom: https://cl-cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/4361570789?pwd=Nkl2T3ZLaTZwRm05bzRTOUUxY3Q4QT09&from=addon .
• Series: Energy and Environment Group, Department of CST; organiser: lyr24.

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Abstract not available

• Speaker: Rafael Reiss (University of Cambridge)
• Thursday 05 June 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.

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Friday Morning Seminar Slot – CamVet Clinical Research Grants

• Speaker: Speaker to be confirmed
• Friday 26 September 2025, 08:45-10:00
• Venue: LT2.
• Series: Friday Morning Seminars, Dept of Veterinary Medicine; organiser: Fiona Roby.

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Abstract: Mobile computing technologies have advanced substantially over the last two decades. Today, the smart devices enabled by economies of scale, incorporate high-quality wireless sensors such as acoustic and RF sensors and the trend shows an increase in both the quantity and quality of these sensors. These sensors can be leveraged to enable a contactless passive monitoring of physiological signals of subjects and early diagnoses of various health conditions. In this talk, I will present a privacy aware wireless sensing technology to enable equitable, passive contactless monitoring of breathing and heart rate signals to detect opioid overdose in a timely manner.

Bio: Rajalakshmi Nandakumar is an Assistant Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in the Information Science department at Cornell University. She received her Ph.D. from University of Washington in Computer Science and Engineering in 2019. Her research focuses on developing wireless sensing technologies that enable novel applications in various domains including mobile health, user interfaces and IoT networks. She developed the first contactless smartphone-based sleep apnea diagnosis system that was licensed by ResMed Inc. and now used by millions of users for sleep staging. She was recognized with the UW Medicine Judy Su Clinical Research award, Paul Baran Young Scholar award by the Marconi Society and also named as the rising star in EECS by MIT .

Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/82442600092?pwd=DfDLE12p2Kmnh532rSMVB8mOn7uLDa.1

• Speaker: Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Cornell University
• Tuesday 03 June 2025, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: Online.
• Series: Mobile and Wearable Health Seminar Series; organiser: Cecilia Mascolo.

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Motivated by computational challenges in Bayesian models with indicator variables, such as probit/tobit regression, we study the computational complexity of drawing samples from a truncated log-concave measure. We discuss two problems. In the first part, using stochastic localization as a way to reduce the sampling problem to truncated Gaussians, we analyze the hit-and-run algorithm for sampling uniformly from an isotropic convex body in n dimensions and establish $n2$ mixing time. In the second part, building on interior point methods, we analyze the mixing time of regularized Dikin walks for sampling log-concave measures truncated on a polytope. For a logconcave and log-smooth distribution with condition number $\kappa$, truncated on a polytope in $Rn$ defined with $m$ linear constraints, we prove that the soft-threshold Dikin walk mixes in $O((m+\kappa)n)$ iterations from a warm initialization. It improves upon prior work which required the polytope to be bounded and involved a bound dependent on the radius of the bounded region. Here, stochastic localization allows us to extend the analysis to weakly log-concave measures. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.00297 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11303

• Speaker: Yuansi Chen (ETH Zurich)
• Friday 06 June 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: MR12, Centre for Mathematical Sciences.
• Series: Statistics; organiser: Qingyuan Zhao.

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Myxozoans are a diverse clade of endoparasites with complex life cycles and are the causative agents of some devastating fish diseases. Their phylogenetic placement was long obscure due to extreme morphological simplification and rapid evolution, but they are now established as a radiation of endoparasitic cnidarians that exploit freshwater, marine and terrestrial hosts. I will review diversity, lifestyles, and morphological simplification that characterise these generally unfamiliar animals and then present insights on how myxozoans exploit their invertebrate hosts and disperse to colonise new freshwater environments. By so revealing the cryptic lives of myxozoans we can appreciate how particular cnidarian traits may have facilitated and promoted this remarkable endoparasitic radiation.

Host: Juliana Naldoni

• Speaker: Prof Beth Okamura, Natural History Museum
• Wednesday 11 June 2025, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: Lecture Theater, Department of Pathology, Tennis Court Road.
• Series: Parasitology Seminars; organiser: Ross Waller.

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Abstract

Satellite-based monitoring of smallholder agriculture is an important tool for food security but existing approaches are neither accessible nor effective for small plot field systems. To address these issues, crop type classification using representations generated by a global foundation model, TESSERA , is compared to best classification approaches in the literature. We present a novel approach to smallholder plots and compare representation based methods to raw data based methods for crop type classification in challenging environments. We find that our representation based approach offers a triple win: 1) consistent and statistically significant performance improvement over current methods, 2) greater simplicity due to the elimination of cloud masking and feature engineering, and 3) the reduction of computational cost. Our representation based approach achieves significantly higher F1 scores in the classification of 7 crop types for small fields in Austria for 5 classes (over 10% improvement in one case) and comparable F1 scores for two classes, and the best representation-based methods use 5% and 8% of compute compared to the best raw data method. These results indicate that representations are an effective approach for crop type classification tasks for small field systems.

Bio

Madeline Lisaius received BS and MS degrees in Earth Systems with a focus on environmental spatial statistics and remote sensing from Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA as well as MRes degree in Environmental Data Science from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. She is working towards the PhD in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. She is focused on topics of food security and environmental justice, remote sensing, and machine learning.

• Speaker: Madeline Lisaius, University of Cambridge
• Thursday 05 June 2025, 13:00-14:00
• Venue: Room GS15 at the William Gates Building and on Zoom: https://cl-cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/4361570789?pwd=Nkl2T3ZLaTZwRm05bzRTOUUxY3Q4QT09&from=addon .
• Series: Energy and Environment Group, Department of CST; organiser: lyr24.

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Multiphase flows are of central importance to a wide range of industrial applications and environmental settings. Examples of these include mixing in stirred vessels and static mixers, flows in micro-channels and microfluidics devices, falling films for CO2 capture, and aerosol formation via bubble bursting through interfaces in the oceans. Some of these flows feature the presence of surface-active agents (surfactants), present either by design or as contaminants. Furthermore, multiphase flows are often punctuated by topological transitions related to the coalescence of dispersed drops or bubbles, and the breakup of threads or ligaments. Here, we provide a few examples of interest to the JFM community but focus on drop impact on hydrophobic substrates in the presence of surfactants above the critical micelle concentration. Our model accounts for the spatio-temporal evolution of the surfactants along the interface and within the bulk; the bulk and interfacial species are fully-coupled via sorptive fluxes. Micellar formation and breakup are also accounted for, and the surfactant dynamics are coupled to the flow through the dependence of the surface tension on the local interfacial surfactant concentration. Our numerical procedure is based on the use of a hybrid interface-tracking/level-set approach. The results of our parametric study help identify the various physical mechanisms underlying the observed flow phenomena.

• Speaker: Prof Omar Matar, Imperial College London
• Friday 06 June 2025, 16:00-17:00
• Venue: https://cassyni.com/s/fmws.
• Series: Fluid Mechanics (DAMTP); organiser: Professor Grae Worster.

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