Wolfson College Science Society

Perceived injustice in the context of chronic pain has been operationally defined as an appraisal of the severity and irreparability of pain-related loss, unfairness, and blame.

A discussion of the present situation in the NHS.

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is a multi-disciplinary field investigating the boundary between man and machine. With the advent of electronic interactive technologies during past decade, the field turns ever more relevant and important. This talk will present HCI issues for a few special cases where conventional interactive devices and user interfaces do not work. The use cases will include people with severe physical impairment, farmers in India and pilots of Eurofighter Typhoon combat aircraft. The talk will introduce a concept called user modelling, that helps to personalize user interfaces for people with different range of abilities and contexts of use. The personalization feature is further augmented with intelligent interactive systems where users can control electronic interfaces simply by looking, gesturing and talking to it. The talk will conclude with a few demonstration videos of our recent multi-modal adaptive systems.

Black holes are one of the most fascinating objects in Nature, so much so that they often feature in science fiction movies! But, why is that we find them so interesting? In this talk I will explain what is our current understanding of black holes in General Relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity. As we shall see, black holes are extremely simple objects and yet they encode some of the greatest mysteries of gravity. Their “blackness” makes them very hard to see, but as I will explain, in the near future we may be able to “hear” them. It turns out that the interest in black holes goes beyond their traditional playground in astrophysics. According to recent developments, black holes encode properties of theories of particles, fluids (and turbulence) and superconductors!

An aggressive contagious cancer has emerged in the Tasmanian devil, a carnivorous marsupial endemic to the island of Tasmania. Known as Devil Facial Tumour Disease or DFTD , the disease is characterised by the rapid growth of large and disfiguring tumours around the face and neck of host devils, causing close to 100% mortality and rapid decline of the Tasmanian devil population. Naturally occurring contagious cancers, where tumour cells pass between individuals, are rare as the vertebrate immune system is very good at detecting and destroying foreign cells, just as it detects pathogens. We have been investigating how DFTD cells so successfully evade the host devil immune system, allowing the tumour cells to pass between devils and quickly establish new tumours. Based on these studies we are developing a vaccine that could rescue the Tasmanian devil in the wild and our findings may also have implications for understanding other advanced, drug and immunotherapy resistant tumours.

The existence of dark matter solves some mysteries in astronomical observations, and fits in with the measurements of the afterglow of the big bang. Otherwise, it is hypothetical stuff for which there is currently no direct evidence. In this talk, we shall go on a journey to the unimaginably huge and the incredibly tiny, from back to a blink in an eye after the big bang to the present day. Along the way, I shall describe one of the main reasons that we believe in dark matter, and describe how the Large Hadron Collider might feasibly produce enough of it to study. We shall also visit the discovery of the Higgs boson, and explore why it is important.

We will describe the modern picture of the expanding universe and the astronomical evidence for it. The inflationary universe theory will be described in simple terms together with the evidence for it and how this theory leads to the concept of the multiverse.

In the UK the school education system is experiencing radical reform. This is particularly the case with computing. There’s momentum to separate ICT from Computer Science and to place specific emphasis on the teaching of Computational Thinking. In broad terms, we shouldn’t just be teaching our children office skills such as formatting Word documents – we should be teaching them how to code and create their own software. This talk introduces Sonic Pi, a music language and environment running on the Raspberry Pi specifically focussed on introducing core Computer Science concepts for KS3 students. Sonic Pi emphasises the importance of creativity in pedagogic contexts enabling learners to exhibit self-agency through the application of the taught ideas in musical works they create and own. Sonic Pi is currently being trialled by schools. We will discuss some early observations and initial success stories of using music and composition as a means for both introducing technical concepts and improving engagement and interest.

It is not generally known that the world’s first practical ‘stored program electronic digital computer” was designed and built in Cambridge by a team at the University’s Mathematical Laboratory between 1947 and 1949. Building on wartime expertise in radar electronics, the Cambridge team, led by M.V. Wilkes, designed a machine that embodied all the elements we expect to find in a modern computer. Of course EDDSAC was on a different scale: built using thermionic valves, it filled a large room; it’s memory was tiny, just 512 words; and its processor puny, running at a pedestrian 500KHz. But, in comparison to the hand calculators and other mechanical computers it replaced, EDSAC was a 1,500-fold speed up – perhaps the largest single leap in computing power ever seen. EDSAC ran for 10 years, helping 3 Cambridge scientists secure their Nobel prizes and starting many famous computer scientists on their careers. Scrapped after 10 years to make room for the next machine, very little of EDSAC survived beyond a few electronics racks, an album of photographs and a handful of technical reports. The speaker is leading a project based The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park to construct an replica of EDSAC as a working exhibit to sit alongside the Museum’s recreation of Colossus, the wartime code-breaking “computer” and WITCH the world’s oldest surviving original computer, dating from 1952. After introducing EDSAC and explaining it’s importance in the history of computers, the speaker will describe how you go about reinventing 70-year old technology and progress on the project to date.

Mankind has stood on, viewed and photographed only one other world beyond the Earth – the Moon – but has explored others out to the planet Saturn by proxy, with landed cameras, some on mobile robots able to venture into dramatic places. Yet other planetary explorations have been by remote mapping from orbiting satellites that produce files of scientific data that can be viewed as pictures. This effort has built up into a large number of little-known but stunning planetary landscape pictures that represent what you would see if, as a space tourist, you visited these alien worlds. In this talk I explore the scientific reality in this extraterrestrial scenery. In parallel I consider how the presentation of that reality in these extraterrestrial landscapes has been formed by the way space scientists and spacecraft controllers have viewed, been influenced by and remembered pictures of terrestrial scenery created by the landscape painters of art history.

The advent of cheap genomic sequencing will undoubtedly have an impact in translational research. This will involve many different sectors, including medicine, environmental studies, food security and biofuels. Because it is so generic and potentially sensitive as a method, it is possible to envisage sequencing as the method of choice not only in clinical genetics, but also in diagnosis in many diseases in the future, moving towards stratified medicine and matching the therapy to the patient for some diseases and treatments. In agriculture this information is already valuable for speeding up breeding programmes and for tracking biodiversity. Combining genomic and phenotypic data, including the microbiome, will reveal much about how we as humans function. However for this to happen there needs to be a good biological informatics infrastructure to handle the data, to archive the data securely as appropriate and most importantly to help to analyse the sequence to understand its significance. None of these is easy to achieve. For example, the informatics is an integral part of genomic medicine, and in fact is probably the conduit by which genomic discoveries will be translated into improved treatments in the clinic. In this presentation I shall consider the current status of genomic data in translational research in the UK and beyond, the potential scale of the data for the future and some of the informatics challenges involved. It is necessary to be proactive in seeking solutions to these challenges, so that the benefits of this revolution in sequencing technology can be efficiently and speedily harnessed to translate into global benefits.

We have made tremendous progress toward understanding the genetics of tumours in the past four decades, but it is only recently that the importance of the microenvironment, has been appreciated. Communication between the cancer cells and the surrounding ‘stromal’ cells is vital for tumour progression. Enzymes that can cut the proteins of the tumour matrix and of interactive signal pathways are key to processes such as growth and metastasis. Evaluating the specific roles of individual proteinase enzymes, including their potential as therapeutic targets, has been a surprising challenge and has helped dissect the complex ecology of tumours.

The inside story of how Kinect – Microsoft’s 3D human pose recognition technology – was developed. How it happened, how it works, and how Microsoft Research Cambridge developed an essential part of the Kinect technology. The talk includes a technical description of Kinect from a scientific point of view, and also covers the benefits (and fun!) of being a part of computer science research.