DATA@Birmingham Newsletter, 26 March 2021

Welcome to the first DATA@Birmingham (Data science & Artificial intelligence and Turing Activities) newsletter, which brings the University’s Turing activities into the Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.

Events at the University of Birmingham

Data Science and Computational Statistics Seminar

The Data Science and Computational Statistics Seminar series is jointly between the School of Mathematics and the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. Seminars are scheduled for Tuesday afternoons. Upcoming seminars:

  • Tuesday 27 April 2021, 13:00-14:00, Franca Hoffmann (University of Bonn).
  • Tuesday 11 May 2021, 15:00-16:00,  Stochastic optimal control and importance sampling for diffusion processes , Han Cheng Lie (University of Potsdam).
  • Tuesday 08 June 2021, 15:00-16:00, Aretha Teckentrup (University of Edinburgh)
  • Tuesday 22 June 2021, 15:00-16:00, Yulong Lu (University of Massachusetts)

For more information and links to the talks, please visit the Seminar page on Talks@Bham.

Events at the Alan Turing Institute

The Turing is committed to working flexibly and staying connected. You can watch highlights of our past events at the video archive on YouTube.

The Turing Lectures: The changing role of national statistics offices in a data-driven future with Ian Diamond

On Wednesday 7 April (15:30 - 17:00), the Institute will be joined by The UK’s National Statistician, Professor Sir Ian Diamond, for this Turing Lecture hosted by Institute Director, Professor Sir Adrian Smith.

In this talk Ian, will set out his view of the role of National Statistics Offices in today’s world and how that contrasts with previous decades. He will explore how National Statistics Offices are responding and innovating, moving to new methods enabling robust statistics and analysis in real time and based on data collected from a range of sources, both traditional and novel.

Book your place now at April's Turing Lecture.

Data as an Instrument of Coloniality

Thursday 27 May, 15:30-17:00. Confronted with the new infrastructures of data colonialism, which perpetuate old racial, gender and class injustices, we must learn from past and present anti-colonial and anti-racist movements and thinkers. Decolonising our data in this context means developing new strategies for resisting the new extractivist order, and for re-imagining internet governance and the digital commons.

Find out more and register for Data as an Instrument of Coloniality.

Research Programme Showcases

Thank you to everyone who has so far attended sessions in our Research Programmes Showcase event series. The final sessions in the series will take place on Monday 12 April with the public policy programme and Thursday 15 April with the finance and economics programme. The events will:

  • Provide insight into how you can get involved
  • Offer the opportunity to learn more about the research ambitions, partners and key projects of each programme
  • Feature a presentation and panel discussion via an audience Q & A session
  • Include a networking session with key members of the programme

Register for the Public Policy Showcase here.

Register for the Finance & Economics Showcase here.

Turing Entrepreneurship Interest Group: Panel event with student entrepreneurs

Student entrepreneurs are often considered as exceptional outliers, but what are their secrets? Taking place on Wednesday the 31 March, 17.00 the Turing's Entrepreneurship Interest group are hosting a panel discussion and Q&A event with four students who have been involved in the founding and ideation of start-ups. Find out more about the Interest Group here.

Tools, Practices and Systems monthly seminar

The Tools, Practices and Systems monthly seminar brings together researchers, data scientists and software engineers across the Turing and beyond to connect and discover the latest in open research and infrastructure from a mix of internal and external speakers.

Wednesday 28 April, 12:30 - 14:00

Tools, Practices & Systems will be hosting the Open Science Team from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (Open Science - Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) who will be talking to us about their practical support for Essential Open Source Software for Science funding calls and why supporting new and existing open infrastructure is critical for driving forward innovation in biomedical sciences. Book your place on April's seminar here.

Wednesday 26 May, 12:30 - 14:00

Tools, Practices & Systems will be hosting Kaitlin Thaney, Executive Director of Invest in Open Infrastructure, an initiative dedicated to improving funding and resourcing for open technologies and systems supporting research and scholarship. She’ll be giving an overview of the work IOI is doing to support open, community-owned infrastructure. Book your place for May's seminar here.

Events in the Turing Network

New DCE Webinar series hosted by Cambridge University Press

The DCE Webinar series is a programme of monthly virtual events about data-centric engineering. It is hosted by the Data-Centric Engineering journal at Cambridge University Press – a peer-reviewed open access journal dedicated to the interface of data science and all engineering disciplines – with the support of the Turing and the Lloyd’s Register Foundation. The series will include talks from leading figures in academia, and those applying data-driven approaches in industry and other settings, as well as networking events for early career researchers and others new to this emerging field.

 The first webinar takes place on Wednesday 7 April 2021, 16:00 GMT, with George Em Karniadakis (Brown University) on ‘Approximating functions, functionals and operators using deep neural networks for diverse applications’. Register here for the DCE Webinar.

Job Opportunities at the Alan Turing Institute

Turing's AI for Science and Government ASG programme has launched new cross-theme research initiatives with some appointments already made. Below are a list of advertised PDRA roles related to these new and exciting research initiatives which you are invited to share with your networks.

  • Fleets and Supply Chains, deadline: 1st April 2021
  • Causal Inference and Causal Modelling in Complex Interconnected Systems, deadline: 28 March 2021
  • Agent Computing Models to Study Socio-Economic Shocks and Policy Interventions, deadline: 31 March 2021
  • Mathematical Modelling of Resilience in Complex Systems, deadline: 18 April 2021

You can apply online here.

 

Conferences

12 – 16 April 2021, NVIDIA GTC Spring 2021

Join NVIDIA for breakthroughs in AI, data centre, accelerated computing, healthcare, intelligent networking, game development, and more. Discover the advanced technologies that are transforming today’s industries. Visit the conference website for full details.

Register now for free access to over 1400 sessions during GTC, including Turing award-winners Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and Geoffrey Hinton.

21 - 25 June 2021, WebSci’21 | 13th ACM Web Science Conference

Hosted by the University of Southampton, UK, delivered online

The 13th ACM Web Science Conference  (WebSci’21) is an interdisciplinary conference where a multitude of research disciplines converge with the purpose of creating a greater insight into a complex global Web than the sum of their individual parts. We invite participation from diverse fields including computer and information sciences, communication, economics, informatics, law, linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology.

Visit the conference website for more details.

Royal Statistical Society 2021 Conference

This year’s Royal Statistical Society International Conference will take place from 6-9 September in Manchester. The conference welcomes all statisticians and data scientists, and regularly attracts around 600 participants from over 30 countries.

The organisers are currently seeking submissions for talks which can be on any topic related to statistics and data science. If you’ve been involved in projects, new developments, or research, why not share your work with the wider RSS community. The deadline is Tuesday 6 April.

Full details can be found on the conference website.

Virtual access to the Alan Turing Institute

You can also stay connected to the Turing via: Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

Thanks for your continued support.