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

We must limit climate change to avoid severe consequences. This talk will address the question “How?”. Of course this is one of humanity’s grand challenges, and a complete answer may be elusive. Nevertheless, thinking clearly about the problem enables us to identify certain properties that a successful solution must have. These include a strong framework of cooperation and pricing of carbon. I’ll discuss the nature of the problem, cooperation, the ethical basis, and the relation to the Paris Agreement. If time permits, I’ll discuss a concrete proposal, which I call the “Equitable Atmosphere Climate Cooperative” (EACC).

• Speaker: Carl Edward Rasmussen
• Thursday 30 January 2025, 13:00-14:00
• Venue: Richard King room, Darwin College.
• Series: Darwin College Science Seminars; organiser: Alexander R Epstein.

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Abstract not available

• Speaker: Maria Grazia Spillantini, University of Cambridge, Dept of Clinical Neurosciences
• Monday 10 February 2025, 11:00-12:00
• Venue: In person in the Max Perutz Lecture Theatre (CB2 0QH) and via Zoom link https://mrc-lmb-cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/98728840077?pwd=Z0MZ2xWLsyUC6fI31cIklaUbSYALwy.1.
• Series: MRC LMB Seminar Series; organiser: Scientific Meetings Co-ordinator.

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This Cambridge Immunology and Medicine Seminar will take place on Thursday 30 January 2025, starting at 4:00pm, in the Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre (JCBC)

Title: ‘Pattern Recognition Receptor signalling in infection and sterile inflammation’

Speaker: Clare Bryant, Professor of Innate Immunity in the Departments of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, Cambridge.

Clare is a Fellow of the British Pharmacology Society in 2018, Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2023 and Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2023.

Host: Virginia Pedicord, CITIID , Cambridge

Refreshments will be available following the Seminar.

• Speaker: Clare Bryant, Professor of Innate Immunity, Cambridge
• Thursday 30 January 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 to be confirmed

Some catering will be provided

• Speaker: Speaker to be confirmed
• Monday 17 March 2025, 13:05-13:55
• Venue: FW26, William Gates Building.
• Series: Technical Talks - Department of Computer Science and Technology ; organiser: Ben Karniely.

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In this lecture I will illustrate some examples of complex and reactive interfaces that remain poorly defined at the atomic scale, which are simulated using two standard approaches in quantum chemistry, i.e. static DFT in vacuum and DFT -MD in water to explicitly treat the solvent. In nanoscience and UHV , atomic force microscopes are increasingly using molecular tips, such as the CO molecule. I’ll describe a recent example studied in collaboration with J. Kröger’s team at Ilmenau (Germany), where the CO tip becomes an active probe that interacts differentially with phthalocyanines before and after metallization and/or dehydrogenation. Another example of complex interfaces is the case of 2D materials such as graphene and also its ‘commercial’ counterpart – graphene oxide (GO) – immersed in an aqueous solvent for applications in water filtration and remediation. In both cases, realistic modeling of these interfaces has revealed unexpected chemical reactivities, enabling us to recover certain properties measured in nanofluidics.

• Speaker: Professor Marie-Laure Bocquet, Ecole Normale Supérieure
• Wednesday 12 February 2025, 14:30-15:30
• Venue: Unilever Lecture Theatre, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry.
• Series: Theory - Chemistry Research Interest Group; organiser: Lisa Masters.

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TBC

• Speaker: Charles Senecal, University of Cambridge
• Wednesday 05 March 2025, 16:30-17:30
• Venue: MR12.
• Series: Algebra and Representation Theory Seminar; organiser: Adam Jones.

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TBC

• Speaker: Zachary Feng, University of Oxford
• Wednesday 12 February 2025, 16:30-17:30
• Venue: MR12.
• Series: Algebra and Representation Theory Seminar; organiser: Adam Jones.

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The local Langlands correspondence (LLC) is a kaleidoscope of conjectures relating local Galois theory, complex Lie theory, and representations of p-adic groups. This talk will give an introduction to the part of the LLC involving unipotent representations. Reducing modulo p, we can move from representations of p-adic groups to representations of finite reductive groups, which have a rich structure developed by Deligne—Lusztig. I will talk about joint work with Anne-Marie Aubert and Dan Ciubotaru in which we lift some of this structure to p-adic groups. I will not assume previous familiarity with these topics; instead I’ll give an introduction to these ideas via examples.

• Speaker: Beth Romano, King's College London
• Wednesday 05 February 2025, 16:30-17:30
• Venue: MR12.
• Series: Algebra and Representation Theory Seminar; organiser: Adam Jones.

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Abstract not available

• Speaker: Dr Gill Barnett and Dr Christopher Jones, Cambridge University Hospital & Dept of Oncology
• Thursday 12 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.

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The concept of psychiatric (mental) disorder became widespread in the late 20th century, as a sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical, extension of the more general category of physical disease. It has facilitated medicalization of some psychological conditions, such as those listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM). At the same time, it has generated controversy about the scope and consequences of its applicability. ‘Psychiatric disorder’ has become a ‘hembig’ concept: one with normative (hegemonic) content, ambiguous meanings, and wide (big) scope. This has led to ongoing uncertainty and disagreement about what falls under the scope of psychiatric disorder. Many proposed definitions are circular. Practical consequences of these ‘hembig’ characteristics include inappropriate stigmatization, patient refusals of diagnoses, uncertain eligibility for healthcare and disability accommodations, concerns about overdiagnosis, and worries about elite capture of resources. I will argue that understanding the evolving meaning of ‘psychiatric disorder’ is helpful as a preliminary to recommendations about how to go forward with (or without) this concept.

• Speaker: Miriam Solomon (Temple University)
• Thursday 20 February 2025, 15:30-17:00
• Venue: Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site.
• Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science; organiser: Dr. Rosanna Dent.

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Abstract not available

• Speaker: Alice Hutchings (University of Cambridge)
• Tuesday 18 March 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: Webinar & LT2, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building..
• Series: Computer Laboratory Security Seminar; organiser: Tina Marjanov.

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Abstract not available

• Speaker: Prof Jamie Blundell
• Thursday 15 May 2025, 09:30-10:30
• Venue: William Harvey Lecture Theatre, School of Clinical Medicine.
• Series: Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre Lectures in Cancer Biology and Medicine; organiser: Justin Holt.

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Abstract not available

• Speaker: Professor Serena Nik-Zainal
• Thursday 03 April 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.

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Abstract not available

• Speaker: Dr Catherine Wilson, Dept of Pharmacology
• Thursday 10 April 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.

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Abstract not available

• Speaker: Dr Namshik Han, Milner Institute and Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine
• Thursday 27 March 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.

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Abstract not available

• Speaker: Prof John Doorbar, Department of Pathology
• Thursday 13 March 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.

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The storage ring proton electric dipole moment (EDM) experiment (pEDM) will be the first direct search for a proton EDM and will improve on the current (indirect) limit by 5 orders of magnitude. It will therefore surpass the current sensitivity (set by neutron EDM experiments) to QCD CP -violation by 3 orders of magnitude, making it potentially the most promising effort to solve the strong CP problem. This makes it manifestly one of the most important probes for the existence of axions (with important consequences for dark matter searches), CP-violation in the Higgs sector and the source of the universe’s matter-antimatter asymmetry. These, coupled with a new Physics reach of O(10^3) TeV and a construction cost of O(£100M), make it one of the low-cost/high-return proposals in particle physics today. The experiment will build upon the highly successful techniques of the Muon g-2 Experiment at Fermilab, which the UK has been a leading contributor to. In this talk, I will motivate and describe the pEDM experiment, and detail how the UK can play a leading role in making it a success by building upon its vast expertise and recent achievements.

• Speaker: Alex Keshavarzi, University of Manchester
• Tuesday 04 February 2025, 11:00-12:00
• Venue: Ryle Seminar Room.
• Series: Cavendish HEP Seminars; organiser: Dr Paul Swallow.

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Datacenter systems and I/O devices now run at single-digit microsecond latencies, requiring nanosecond-scale operating systems. Traditional kernel-based operating systems impose an unaffordable overhead, so recent kernel-bypass OSes (e.g., Arrakis, Ix) and libraries (e.g., Caladan, eRPC) eliminate the OS kernel from the I/O datapath. However, these systems do not offer a general-purpose datapath OS replacement that meet the needs of microsecond-scale systems. As a result, while kernel-bypass hardware is widely available in the datacenter, it is not widely used.

This talk summarizes Demikernel, a flexible datapath OS and architecture designed for heterogenous kernel-bypass devices and microsecond-scale datacenter systems. Demikernel supports a variety of kernel-bypass hardware, including DPDK , RDMA, as well as software bypass solutions like io_uring. To support microsecond-scale operation, Demikernel includes a new nanosecond-scale TCP stack, written in Rust and proposes new memory management, CPU scheduling and network abstractions. Demikernel is currently used by Bing and will go into production with Azure services later this year.

Bio: Irene Zhang is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Her work focuses on datacenter operating systems and distributed systems, especially making new datacenter hardware technologies more widely usable by highly-demanding datacenter applications. Irene completed her PhD in 2017 at the University of Washington, where her PhD thesis focused on distributed systems that span mobile devices and cloud servers. Her thesis work received the ACM SIGOPS Dennis Ritchie doctoral dissertation award and the UW Allen School William Chan Memorial dissertation award. Before her PhD, Irene was a member of the virtual machine monitor group at VMware, where she worked on memory resource management and virtual machine checkpointing.

• Speaker: Irene Zhang, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research
• Monday 27 January 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: Computer Lab, FW11.
• Series: Computer Laboratory Systems Research Group Seminar; organiser: Richard Mortier.

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When people think of codes, coding, and computers, they often think of socially challenged nerds like me, writing “code” (whatever that might be) in a darkened basement, all soulless ones and zeros and glowing screens. But in fact computer science (the study of information, computation, and communication) gives us an enormously rich new lens through which to look at and explore the world. By encoding everything in the same, digital bits, we can mechanise the analysis and transformation of that information; we can explore it in ways that are simply inaccessible to manual techniques; we can engage our creativity to write programs whose complexity rivals the most sophisticated artefacts that human beings have produced—and yet fit on a USB drive; we can even learn from data in ways that have made “ChatGPT” into a verb practically overnight.

Given how closely digital technology is interwoven in our lives, having a visceral sense of how this stuff works, what it can do well, and how it can fail, is essential for us to survive and thrive, and should be part of every child’s education.

In my talk I will share some of the joy, beauty, and creativity of computer science. This is serious, because it impinges on our daily lives. But it is also rich, beautiful, and fun.

• Speaker: Professor Simon Peyton Jones, University of Cambridge
• Friday 24 January 2025, 17:30-18:30
• Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.
• Series: Darwin College Lecture Series; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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This talk supports the R255 Advanced Topics in Machine Learning module on Multimodal Learning and provides a bird’s eye view of the rapidly evolving text-audio landscape, with a focus on music as a primary example of audio data. I will first present types of tasks that exist in this space, then discuss data curation challenges and follow with an overview of some existing retrieval and generation methods, including a quick primer on diffusion models. Finally, I will describe current evaluation metrics and their limitations.

• Speaker: Catalina Cangea, Qube Research and Technology
• Tuesday 04 February 2025, 13:00-14:00
• Venue: Lecture Theatre 2, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building.
• Series: Artificial Intelligence Research Group Talks (Computer Laboratory); organiser: Mateja Jamnik.

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