The Compass Seminars will be starting next week with an exciting talk by Yuege Xie, a PhD student at UT Austin. You might wonder why we need another seminar series and how this will differ from the Data Science or Statistics Seminars. You can find out more below.
Short-Term Goals
To start off, the primary audience will be the two cohorts of PhD students in the Compass CDT, although anyone is welcome and, in fact, encouraged to attend. The aim is to take advantage of the current situation and attract speakers whose work is closely related to the students’ research areas. Each speaker will be encouraged not only to provide an exhaustive background on the talk but also to structure the talk as a tutorial, where possible. This practical and workshop-like approach differs from the other two seminars and it has been designed to keep PhD students engaged and allow them to explore different research areas in a more accessible way.
For the last month of TB1, one of the main goals will be to get the series up-and-running by establishing a line-up of speakers that has been suggested by the first cohort of Compass students, so keep an eye out on our calendar!
Long-Term Vision
As the series gains momentum, the vision that we have for this seminar series is to be a platform for PhD students in Statistics, Data Science and Machine Learning across the UK to network with fellow researchers, to get exposed to different research areas in an accessible way, and to participate in collaborative tasks and challenges such as Hackathons and Kaggle-like competitions. By building a strong national community of young data scientists we will be able to attract important industry speakers and professors from around the world.
At the moment, work is underway to expand the audience of this seminar series and we will surely keep you updated! Come join us next Thursday and get a Deliveroo voucher after completing a feedback survey at the end!
Mauro