Archived Complete Visits

Professor Michael Biehl, University of Groningen (1 April - 15 June 2014)

Professor Biehl is Professor of Computing Science at the University of Groningen. He will be with us 1 April - 15 June 2014 and will be hosted by Professor Wiebke Arlt from Centre for Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism (CEDAM).

Michael Biehl is an internationally leading expert in the fields of Scientific Computing and Machine Learning. His current research focuses on the design of efficient similarity-based methods for classification, clustering and visualization of complex and high-dimensional data sets, systems science approaches to biomedical large scale data.

Professor Jeff McMahan, Rutgers University (3 May - 2 June 2014)

Professor McMahan has been proposed by Professor Heather Widdows, Department of Philosophy, as part of the IAS Saving Humans Theme and will visit Birmingham 3 May – 2 June 2014. We are currently finalising activities and events and will update colleagues and students in the New Year.

Jeff McMahan studied at Oxford and Cambridge and works in normative and applied ethics, political philosophy, and legal theory. Published work includes The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Killing in War (Oxford University Press, 2009). He has several other books forthcoming from Oxford University Press, including a collection of essays called The Values of Lives, a book on war intended for both academic and nonacademic readers called The Right Way to Fight, and a sequel to his 2002 book called The Ethics of Killing: Self-Defense, War, and Punishment.

Dr Elizabeth Gardiner, Monash University (6 May - 5 June 2014)

Professor Jeff Boore, University of California Berkeley (16 May - 12 July 2014)

Professor Jeffrey Boore will be visiting the University of Birmingham 16 May – 12 July 2014, hosted by Professor John Colbourne.

Professor Boore is a world recognized genome biologist returning full time to academia, after many years at the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab). Jeffrey is also Founder, Owner, and Chief Executive Officer of Genome Project Solutions, Inc.

He holds a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Michigan and a B.S. in Biology from Penn State University. He retired at the rank of Lt Colonel after more than 20 years in the US Air Force and Air National Guard.

At JGI, he was instrumental in guiding the transition from human genome sequencing to being a comparative genomics facility and in establishing the "Community Sequencing Program", which allocates $20 million per year to genomics projects. Jeffrey has led 22 grant-funded projects totalling over $12 million, overseen numerous whole genome sequencing projects, authored over 100 scientific publications, delivered over 230 scientific presentations, and served on numerous advisory boards and panels, including those to the National Science Foundation, US Department of Agriculture, National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, and National Institutes of Health.

Dr Russell Death, Massey University (14 July - 14 November 2014)

Dr Death is an Associate Professor at Massey University and will be visiting the University of Birmingham 14 July - 14 November 2014 hosted by Dr Mark Ledger and Professor David Hannah from Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences. 

Climate change is expected to increase the future occurrence of extreme hydrological events, such as severe droughts with potentially devastating effects on ecosystems, yet to date most ecological research effort has centered on the impacts of gradually shifting ‘average’ conditions, not extremes. Droughts are difficult to study in natural systems because they are, by definition, infrequent. Experiments have been advocated recently as useful tools to explore the ecological impact of climate extremes, and research at the University of Birmingham is at the leading edge of this new trend. We have recently published a body of work in high impact journals which characterises drought effects at higher levels of biological organisation (i.e. food web patterns and processes; e.g. Ledger et al., 2011, 2012, 2013) and we are now beginning new NERC-funded research projects to explore underlying causative mechanisms (e.g. habitat loss, sedimentation, thermal stress etc.), including in our new ECOLAB facility on campus. UoB is also at the leading edge of hydrological research on drought and hydrohazards (as evidenced by the recent IAS workshop and UNESCO-International Hydrology Programme activities), and we are thus ideally situated to bring together hydrology and ecology at cutting edge of research to understand the environmental impacts of extreme events. Two immediate challenges arising from recent work are: 1) to better understand how shifts in food web structure and functioning caused by disturbances (floods, droughts) affect network stability in order to predict long-term responses of ecosystems to climate change, and 2) to upscale the work from patch-scale experiments and move towards prediction by developing modelling approaches which operate at spatial scales and timeframes relevant to managers and policy makers. 

Collaboration with Dr Death a world leading ecohydrologist, will allow significant advances in these key areas. Russell is a senior figure in the field of disturbance ecology with high-level expertise in the artificial intelligence modelling approaches that would allow us to make the leap to a more predictive science.

Full details of the plans for the visit will be available soon but will include work on the submission of manuscripts to internationally peer-reviewed journals, a workshop on the use of artificial intelligence modelling techniques for communicating complex science to managers, a public seminar ‘ Water management issues in the colonies: what can the UK learn from ‘down under’ and a workshop on using Netica and WEKA (both freeware) for statistical modelling in geography and ecology.

Dr Josef Ruppenhofer, Universität Hildesheim (28 July - 29 August 2014)

Dr Josef Ruppenhofer will visit the University of Birmingham 28 July to 29 August 2014, hosted by Professor John Barnden and Dr Andrew Gargett within Computer Science, and Professors Susan Hunston and Jeannette Littlemore within English Language and Applied Linguistics.

Political conflict is a central, if regrettable, aspect of human experience. Discourse surrounding political conflict provides a window into how such conflict emerges, how it may be sustained or intensify, and even how it may attenuate and finally be resolved. Understanding the patterns of such discourse is, on the one hand, a key aim of academic disciplines such as linguistics and discourse studies, while, on the other hand, automatic discourse understanding is a key goal within Natural Language Processing (NLP).

An on-going collaboration between UoB's departments of Computer Science and English Language and Applied Linguistics aims to combine state-of-the-art technologies to build a corpus recording the syntactic and semantic features of political conflict discourse. To this end, researchers at UoB seek to combine Pattern Grammar (PG) with FrameNet (FN), the former modelling the syntax of individual lexical items, the  latter modelling their meaning. Stage 1 of this project saw the collection of a corpus of online forums involving political conflict discourse and the start of annotation of this corpus for patterns. Stage 2 aims to annotate the corpus for frames, and the results of both stages will yield a unique resource, enabling, for example, investigations of how metaphor and metonymy are used in political conflict discourse (a key research theme at UoB).

In order to achieve the FrameNet annotation, the UoB group is collaborating with Dr Josef Ruppenhofer, a leading FrameNet researcher in Europe. Dr Ruppenhofer is a researcher in the department of Information Science and Natural Language Processing at Hildesheim University, Germany. He works on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, with a special interest in the development of lexical resources. Beginning with his graduate studies at UC Berkeley, Dr Ruppenhofer has been intensely involved with the FrameNet project and Frame Semantics, a key theoretical cornerstone of FrameNet. More recently, he has focused on sentiment / subjectivity analysis with the goal of extending the FrameNet resource with information relevant for sentiment analysis.

The expertise of Dr Ruppenhofer's hosts at the University of Birmingham in the areas of metaphor and metonymy on the one hand, and evaluation on the other, points to key directions for joint research, such as an investigation of patterns of sentiment and figurative language in political discourse. Discourses of political conflict will constitute the focus of joint analysis efforts that are meant to interact with work on political conflict that is on-going in various units at the University of Birmingham, such as the UoB’s Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security.

Professor Sharon Robinson, University of Wollongong (16 October - 12 December 2014)

Professor Sharon Robinson is a plant ecophysiologist and climate change biologist. She will be visiting the University of Birmingham 16 October – 12 December 2014.

Her research examines how plants respond to climate change with an integrated systems approach using molecular to ecological techniques. Most recently this includes developing techniques to map plant health and productivity from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). After completing her PhD at University College London in 1990, she held postdoctoral positions at Duke University (USA) and the Australian National University before her appointment as a Lecturer at the University of Wollongong in 1996.

She is currently a member of the United Nations Environment Programme Environmental Effects Assessment Panel, the Australian Research Council College of Experts, the Australian Antarctic Science Advisory Committee and an Editor for the journal Global Change Biology. She first visited Antarctica in 1996 and has since been on 11 expeditions to Casey, Davis, King George Island and Macquarie Island. She is a custodian for the only Antarctic State of the Environment Indicator concerned with Antarctic vegetation and her research group has provided the first evidence that climate change is affecting East Antarctic terrestrial communities. 

Visit her personal website here and follow Sharon on Twitter: @Antarcticmoss

Dr Jennifer Clark,  Associate Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Jennifer Clark is Associate Professor at the School of Public Policy and Director of the Center for Urban Innovation in the Ivan Allen College at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on regional economic development, manufacturing, industry clusters and innovation. 

Dr. Clark writes, consults, and speaks on the subject of national and regional development policies related to innovation, intellectual property, and manufacturing. She has collaborated on manufacturing and innovation policy projects with a broad range of governments and non-governmental organizations including the OECD, the Canadian government, the UK government, and the US government. 

Dr. Clark publishes work on the development and diffusion of regional policies (including research centers) and their effect on cities and their economic competitiveness.

Her first book, Remaking Regional Economies: Power, Labor, and Firm Strategies in the Knowledge Economy (with Susan Christopherson) won the Best Book Award from the Regional Studies Association in 2009.  Her second book, Basic Methods of Policy Analysis and Planning (with Carl Patton and David Sawicki) was released in 2012 (Pearson) and has been widely adopted in policy and planning courses.  

Her newest book, Working Regions: Reconnecting Innovation and Production in the Knowledge Economy (Routledge, 2013) focuses on policy models aimed at rebuilding the links between innovation and manufacturing in the U.S. She is currently working on The Handbook of Manufacturing Industries in the World Economy (with co-editors John Bryson and Vida Vanchan) to be published by Edward Elgar (with co-editors John Bryson and Vida Vanchan) to be published by Edward Elgar.