Department of Computer Science
- Computer Science
- News and events
- Events
- Pre-2015
- Public lectures
- Roundhouse lectures
The Roundhouse public lecture series
The Department of Computer Science has instituted a new public lecture series, which began in 2011. The series is named after the remains of two Iron Age roundhouses found on the site of the Heslington East campus expansion. The speakers include academics from the Department of Computer Science, and external, influential speakers.
The 2016 series
Wednesday 20 April 2016, 18.30, Ron Cooke Hub
Quantum Communication Technologies
Professor Timothy P Spiller Director, EPSRC Quantum Communications Hub and Director, York Centre for Quantum Technologies
The lecture gives a general introduction to quantum technologies and the quantum physics concepts that underpin these new technologies. Quantum communications technologies are then discussed in a little more detail. Finally, the speaker gives a brief overview of the new EPSRC Quantum Communications Hub, led by the University of York.
The 2015 series
Wednesday 11 November 2015, 18.30, Ron Cooke Hub
Pioneers of Computer Science
Sir Tony Hoare FRS FREng
Microsoft Research (Cambridge)
In the fifteen years of this century, computer application has expanded dramatically from day to day, both in outreach and in sophistication. However, the origins of computer science itself date back several millennia, to the teachings of the most famous philosophers of the ancient world. I refer first to Aristotle, the recognised founding father of biology and of logic. Then I turn to Euclid, whose Elements of geometry have been taught in schools right up to modern times; his concepts have been implemented in graphics packages running on billions of computers today. Inspired by these origins, the ideas and culture of computer science have been advanced by philosophers, logicians and mathematicians, right up to the present day. The last of my pioneers is Alan Turing, who adapted the ideas of the ancient philosophers to the modern practice of programming. In conclusion, I claim that Computer Science is worthy of recognition as part of the ever expanding intellectual heritage of the human race.
Wednesday 20 May 2015, 18.30, Ron Cooke Hub
Let us play: Artificial and human intelligence in games
Professor Peter Cowling and Dr Paul Cairns
Department of Computer Science, University of York
Digital games are socially, culturally and economically important - bigger than film or music - with a UK industry valued at over £3 billion. The UK government and the games industry have over £30 million invested currently for research into games and digital creativity led by the University of York, in the NEMOG and IGGI projects.
We will talk about:
- how we have used search approaches based on random simulations (so called Monte Carlo approaches) to make better Artificial Intelligence (AI) for games;
- work done at York to investigate immersive and social experiences that players have while playing, using the tools of human-computer interaction (HCI);
- a glimpse of the future of games research at York and the tantalising prospects of games as a tool to understand and help people, do science, provide new cultural experiences, and provide economic prosperity through working with the games industry.
White Board to White Coats: some adventures in taking image analysis research from the laboratory to clinical practice
Professor Sir Michael Brady FRS, FMedSci, FREng
Professor of Oncological Imaging, University of Oxford
Wednesday 23 January 2015 in The Ron Cooke Hub, Heslington East, University of York
I present some of our experiences in developing image analysis systems designed for clinical applications from the Laboratory right through to clinical practice. These include breast cancer (mammographic density and CAD), image fusion (e.g. CT/MRI/PET), and fatty liver disease. The talk is aimed at a broad audience (Computer Science, Physics, Engineering, Clinical Medicine) but will also provide a number of details that may interest researchers in image analysis. I also describe our recent work aimed at Cloud deployment of the software we have developed. The research draws upon the Oxford Cancer Imaging Centre, and my companies featured in this talk are Volpara, Mirada Medical, Perspectum Diagnostics, and ScreenPoint.
Professor Sir Michael Brady was given an honorary degree from the Department of Computer Science at the January 2015 graduation ceremonies.
Biography of Professor Sir Michael Brady FRS, FMedSci, FREng:
Professor Sir Michael Brady was recently appointed half-time as Professor of Oncological Imaging in the Department of Oncology at the University of Oxford, having retired from his Professorship in Information Engineering after 25 years (1985-2010). Prior to joining Oxford, he was Senior Research Scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was one of the founders of the Robotics Laboratory. Professor Brady has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and Fellow of the British Computer Society. He was awarded the IEE Faraday Medal for 2000, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal for the UK, the Henry Dale Prize (for “outstanding work on a biological topic by means of an original multidisciplinary approach”) by the Royal Institution in 2005, and the Whittle Medal by the Royal Academy of Engineering 2010. Professor Brady has also been awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Essex, Manchester, Liverpool, Southampton, Oxford Brookes, and Paul Sabatier (Toulouse, France), and has been appointed an Honorary Professor at the Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications and Chongsha's South China University. He was knighted in the New Year’s honours list for 2003.
Professor Brady has a continuing strong commitment to commercialisation of science, in particular to entrepreneurial activity and is currently Deputy Chairman of Oxford Instruments Plc and a founding Director of the start-up companies: Guidance - Chairman; Matakina mammographic image analysis; and Mirada Medical Ltd which develops medical image analysis software (installed in almost 2,000 hospitals worldwide). Professor Brady is also Chairman of Acuitas Medical Ltd which has developed novel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) pulse sequences for fine structure analysis (e.g. fibrosis); and he is a non-executive director of Colwiz. His most recent ventures are with Rehabox (Oxford, learning supervised motions, for example in physiotherapy or sports) and IRISS (a vision based technology for detecting childhood squint and related eye disorders). Until December 2011, he served for many years as a director of Isis Innovation, Oxford University’s intellectual property company.
The 2014 series
Can slime mould compute?
Professor Susan Stepney, Department of Computer Science, University of York
Wednesday 29 January 2014 at 6.30pm in The Ron Cooke Hub, Heslington East, University of York
If you have a PC, tablet, or smartphone, you have used a computer. But some people use billiard balls, beams of light, sticks of wood, chemicals, bacteria, slime moulds, spaghetti, even black holes, as computers (although some of these only in theory!). How can these things be computers? What can they do? Can they do things your smartphone can't? And why are these people using such peculiar things to compute with, anyway?
The 2013 series
Teleporting to the future
Professor Sam Braunstein, Department of Computer Science, University of York.
Wednesday 13 February 2013 at 7.00pm in the Law and Management Building, Heslington East, University of York
Teleportation is what we usually associate with the fuzzy disappearance and re-appearance of space voyagers such as Captain Kirk after the familiar command "Beam me up Scotty". Since its early use in science fiction, the term teleportation has since been used to refer to the process by which objects are transferred from one location to another, without actually making the journey along the way. The "disembodied" nature of teleportation raises some baffling questions. "What is actually sent?" Is it the original system that is reconstructed at the remote site or merely a copy?
As long as teleportation remains within the remit of science fiction, these questions may seem rather philosophical. But quantum teleportation, unlike its science fiction inspiration, is a fact. It has been achieved in laboratories the world over for the transfer of single photons, atoms and even beams of light. How might this new technology begin to affect our world and our lives? Is it possible to scale teleportation up so that one day we could teleport people? What might we learn from that, and to what use might teleportation be put by generations to come?
In this lecture, Professor Braunstein will explain what teleportation is all about, and explore how the science of teleportation might take us all to places where no man has gone before.
The 2012 series
The Cracks in Science
Professor Darrel Ince, Emertius Professor of Computing, The Open University.
Wednesday 7 November 2012, The Ron Cooke Hub, Heslington East, University of York. The lecture will begin at 7pm. Join us for free drinks reception at 6.30pm in the Ron Cooke Hub atrium before the lecture starts.
Over the last decade or so, scientific research in our universities has increasingly been subject to two pressures: one economic and the other technological; the latter arising from the hugely increased use of the computer and associated software by scientists.
In this talk, Professor Ince will examine some disturbing trends in scientific research. He will look at examples in a number of diverse areas: geological exploration, climate science, pre-clinical medicine, human behaviour and psychological science. The lecture will explore whether the evidence so far indicates whether the cracks in science are hairline or are more serious.
The lecture will finish with a description of a set of endpoints - admittedly Utopian - that we can judge progress by.
The Relentless March of the Microchip
Professor Steve Furber, ICL Professor of Computer Engineering, School of Computer Science, University of Manchester.
When: 23 May 2012, The Ron Cooke Hub, Heslington East, University of York
The first sixty years of computing have seen spectacular progress in the technology. Ever shrinking transistor dimensions have yielded increasingly complex and cost-effective microchips, a win-win scenario that has driven the explosion in the use of digital electronics and enabled computers to be embedded into a vast range of high-volume products.
However, there are limits to how small a transistor can be made, and we can no longer assume that smaller circuits will go faster, or be more power-efficient. On the desktop, technology changes have caused a switch from making computers faster by using higher processor clock speeds to putting ever more processors working in parallel on a single microchip, despite the fact that general-purpose parallel programming remains one of the great unsolved problems of computer science. If the cost-effectiveness of microchip technology is to continue to improve there are major challenges ahead in understanding how to build reliable systems on increasingly unreliable technology, and how to exploit parallelism more effectively.
Biological systems demonstrate many of the properties we aspire to incorporate into our engineered technology, so perhaps that suggests a possible source of ideas that we could seek to incorporate into future novel computation systems? Current research at Manchester aims to build a computer to accelerate our understanding of how the brain works and will provide a platform for the investigation of these important issues that face the microchip industry in the near future.
Did Twitter save Bletchley Park?
Dr Sue Black, Senior Research Associate, University College London and Simon Greenish, Director, Bletchley Park
When: 7 March 2012, The Ron Cooke Hub, Heslington East, University of York
Bletchley Park is the historic site of secret British codebreaking activities during World War II and birthplace of the modern computer. The work carried out there is said to have shortened WWII by two years, saving possibly 22 million lives.
The Park is now a museum, with a 26 acre site, many exhibitions and working rebuilds of machines such as the Colossus, a forerunner of today's computers, invented to mechanise codebreaking. The museum is staffed by a 75% volunteer workforce and is grossly underfunded compared to its historical importance.
Dr Sue Black visited Bletchley Park in July 2008, and she was so appalled at the state of decay of this important site that she started a campaign to get the true historic value of the site recognised and to save it from being lost to the nation. She sent a letter to the UK broadsheet newspaper The Times signed by 97 eminent UK computer scientists, which was published and highlighted in BBC television and radio news broadcasts.
Following traditional media coverage, a blog was established, and then social media (particularly Twitter) used to great effect to raise awareness and support for the campaign. Campaign efforts have received national coverage on television, on radio, and in the press and have contributed to the Park recently receiving £4.6 million funding from the UK Heritage Lottery Fund.
In this lecture, Simon Greenish, Director of Bletchley Park, will describe the history of Bletchley Park from the Domesday Book through to the present day and gives an insight into its fundamental contribution to the ending of World War Two.
Dr Sue Black will describe the campaign to save Bletchley Park, exploring the effectiveness of traditional vs. social media, highlighting how the use of social media has contributed greatly to campaign success. Since the Saving Bletchley Park campaign started, visitor numbers have increased, along with public awareness of the contribution of the site to world heritage and the history of the computer.
This public lecture was part of the Computer Science Athena Swan initiative to promote women in science.
Watch the recording of the lecture.
Can a robot have an immune system?
Professor Jon Timmis, Professor of Natural Computation, Department of Computer Science, University of York
When: 25 January 2012, The Ron Cooke Hub, Heslington East, University of York.
Animals and plants have an immune system to keep them healthy. Robots go wrong and become "unhealthy" very easily. What would it mean for a robot, or even a swarm of robots, to have an immune system? In this lecture, Jon explored immunity in the natural world, and how we might translate the idea of immunity into robotic systems to allow them to work even when things might go wrong. Along the way, he discussed some of the problems in getting such ideas to work in robots, and demonstrated a few of the robots we own here at York, including some of our flying robots!
Check out a video of the full lecture.
The 2011 series
Embracing Uncertainty: the future of Machine Intelligence
Professor Chris Bishop, Microsoft Research
When: Wednesday 11 May 2011, The Ron Cooke Hub, Heslington East, University of York
For over half a century, scientists have strived to create intelligent machines. In this dynamic and entertaining talk, Chris Bishop from Microsoft Research will use live demonstrations to illustrate some of the exciting new developments in machine intelligence, and to explore the future of this fascinating field.
Breaking the Code: from Enigma to your Cashpoint Card and many centuries back
Professor John Clark, Deputy Head of Department for Research, Department of Computer Science, University of York
When: 9 February 2011, The Ron Cooke Hub, Heslington East, University of York
The lecture will take you on a journey through some landmark events in the breaking of (fairly modern) cryptographic systems. We will look at the emergence of machine assisted cryptanalysis (largely connected with WWII, and Enigma in particular) and move to the present day and beyond. You might think that with the vast computer resources available to us breaking Enigma would now be a piece of cake. Not so!
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