2010 Turing Lecture

15 March 2010

Embracing Uncertainty: The New Machine Intelligence

Christopher Bishop
Microsoft Research Cambridge
5.00pm / 5.30pm Thursday 18 March 2010
Appleton Tower

Computers are traditionally viewed as logical machines which follow precise, deterministic instructions.

The real world in which they operate, however, is full of complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty. In this year’s Turing Lecture, Professor Chris Bishop discusses the field of machine learning, and shows how uncertainty can be modelled and quantified using probabilities.

He looks at the recent developments in probabilistic modelling which have greatly expanded the variety and scale of machine learning applications, and he explores the future potential for this technology.

In honour and recognition of Alan Turing’s contribution in the field of computing, the IET and the BCS established the Turing Lecture in 1999. It is a world leading event, presenting a topic from current research in computer science given by an acknowledged expert in the field.

Professor Bishop is Chief Research Scientist at the Microsoft Research Laboratory in Cambridge, and also holds a Chair in Computer Science in The University of Edinburgh School of Informatics. He presented the 2008 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures Hi-Tech Trek — The Quest for the Ultimate Computer.

He’s an excellent speaker, and this looks to be an interesting talk about recent advances in and applications of machine learning. There is a reception at 5pm, with the lecture at 5.30pm, and a ticket-only event afterwards. The lecture is free, but the IET ask for registration; which in turn means you need to create an account at the IET website; which means handing over address, phone number, eye colour, etc. Sorry about that.

Links: Registration; Video of this lecture in London; The British Computer Society on the Turing Lecture; The Institution of Engineering and Technology on the Turing Lecture.


CompSoc Open Learning Session

27 January 2010

LINQ: Language Integrated Query in .NET

Mike Borozdin

CompSoc Open Learning Session
1830–2000 Wednesday 27 January 2010

The CompSoc open learning session this Wednesday includes a talk on LINQ, a mechanism for integrating one kind of language (database querying) into another (general object-oriented programming). This is one of the topics coming up later in APL: it’s currently a very active area of programming language development, and could be an interesting talk.

It’s bracketed by two other sessions, on singularity theory and the git version control system.

I don’t know anything more about the speaker, or even where it’s happening, because I couldn’t find that on the CompSoc site. Clues welcome.

Link: Wednesday Open Learning


LFCS Seminar

13 January 2010

Programming Language Ideas Escape the Lab: A Declarative Data Description Language for Managing Ad Hoc Data

Kathleen Fisher
AT&T Labs Research
4pm Thursday, 14th January, 2009
Room 4.31/33, Informatics Forum

Links: Seminar abstract; LFCS Seminar series

This talk describes the PADS data description language, which allows existing ad-hoc data to be processed into well-behaved standardised formats like XML. There are even machine learning algorithms to automatically infer appropriate PADS descriptions from a body of sample data. The work described is based on a range of advances in the theory of programming languages and machine learning.

Kathleen Fisher is an excellent speaker, visiting Edinburgh from the US, and I recommend this seminar for those interested in the APL course.

You may need to sign in to enter the Forum, but state that you are attending a research seminar, following item 3 of the Forum access policy.


APL18: Guest Lecture

11 March 2009

Programming with Dependent Types

Bob Atkey

University of Edinburgh

9am Thursday March 12th 2009

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APL17: Guest Lecture

9 March 2009

Method Duplication

Alastair Donaldson

Codeplay Software Limited

9am Monday 9 March 2009

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