Category: Events

Student perspectives: Compass Annual Conference 2024

Posted on by ben.anson

A post by Compass students Ben Anson, Ollie Baker, Codie Wood and Rachel Wood.

Introduction

This October, we held our third annual Compass Conference. Unlike previous years, when the event was held in the University’s Fry Building, this time it took place at M Shed, offering scenic views of Bristol harbour. It was a great day for past and present Compass students, academics, and industry partners to come together and discuss this year’s theme: “The Future of Data Science”. With recent advances in machine learning and AI, it felt like a fitting time to learn from each other’s perspectives and to share ideas about how to move forward in this exciting space.

Panoramic view of Bristol harbour, as seen from M Shed

Student Research Talks

The morning started with four ten-minute research talks from Compass students. First was Rahil Morjaria‘s talk on “Group Testing” which explored current developments in the field, including algorithms and information-theoretic limits.

Following this, Kieran Morris presented “A Trip to Bregman Geometry and Applications”, considering advancements such as natural gradient methods, Bregman K-means clustering, and EM-projection algorithms that Bregman Geometry has enabled.

Ettore Fincato talked us through “Gradient-Free Optimisation via Integration”, focusing on a novel yet easy-to-implement algorithm for optimisation using Monte Carlo methods. Finally, Ed Milsom spoke about “Data Modalities and the Bias-Variance Decomposition”, taking us through a history of neural networks and speculating about why certain data types are so powerful, and why the future of general-purpose AI must be multi-modal.

Student Lightning Talks

The lightning talks challenged ten students to present on a topic in just three minutes. The ability to quickly convey a message in an engaging and understandable manner, to an audience with diverse backgrounds, is crucial in both academia and industry, and the students rose to the occasion.

Their talks captured the interest of the audience and inspired interesting questions that forced the students to think on their feet. Topics ranged from neural networks and large language models (LLMs), to making music using mathematics.

Compass Alumni Panel

This year’s conference panel, chaired by Compass CDT Director, Professor Nick Whiteley, offered an engaging look into the professional journeys of Compass alumni Dominic Owens, Jake Spiteri and Michael Whitehouse since  completing their PhDs. With shared experiences in finance, each panelist provided unique insights into the early career landscape and the skills that helped them succeed.

Jake delved into the details of his day-to-day work in the financial sector, while Dominic discussed the challenge and dedication required to secure a role through extensive networking and job applications. Michael shared details of his transition from finance to epidemiological research. Together, they sparked valuable discussions on what the future of data science might hold for upcoming Compass graduates.

Special Guest Lecture

The conference concluded with an enlightening special guest lecture by Professor Aline Villavicencio, Director of the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Exeter. Her talk, “Testing the Idiomatic Language Limits of Foundation Models: The Strange Case of the Idiomatic Eager Beaver in Cloud Nine,” offered a fascinating counterpoint to the current enthusiasm surrounding LLMs.

Drawing from her research in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Professor Villavicencio demonstrated how even today’s most advanced models struggle with aspects of language that humans master naturally – particularly idioms and multi-word expressions. She illustrated a persistent gap between machine and human linguistic capabilities, reminding us that the path to truly human-like language understanding remains long and complex.

She also shared her perspective on the cyclical nature of NLP research, noting how, throughout her career, there have been multiple predictions about NLP research becoming obsolete as models improve. Yet, as her work on datasets like SemEval (Semantic Evaluation) shows, there remain fundamental challenges in representing and understanding idiomatic language.

Concluding remarks

The successful day of talks, poster sessions and networking culminated with Professor Whiteley sharing his thoughts on what we learned throughout the event. He concluded that the future of our field is certain to be exciting and will encompass a huge range of different areas and ideas. This year’s conference embodied this by providing a platform for students, academics, and industry professionals to share new insights from many different sectors, and to form strong relationships to help forge a path to the future of data science.

 

Past conferences

Compass Away Day 2024

Posted on by sam.bowyer

A post by Sam Bowyer and Emma Ceccherini, PhD students on the Compass programme.

The annual Compass Away Day took place this past June at Folly Farm, a fully sustainable and eco-friendly venue that offered Compass students the opportunity to take some time away from their regular research and enjoy a variety of activities in the Somerset countryside. Over the course of three days, the students learnt—among other things—how to craft an effective CV as a machine learning researcher; how each of our research areas overlap in surprising ways; how to improve the execution time of Python programs; and how to throw an axe.

On arrival, the students first took part in a Responsible Innovation talk led by Henry Bourne, in which we explored the connections, biases, and gaps in and between our individual research areas. This took the form of a creative mind-mapping exercise in which the students eagerly relished the opportunity to don party hats (see picture below).

After a hearty lunch with plenty of coffee, the students next heard three short talks by their colleagues. First, Ed Davis treated them to a talk on the benefits of just-in-time compilation, with a live demonstration of how one line of code (‘@jit‘) can speed up your Python scripts by multiple orders of magnitude. Secondly, the students saw another live-coding demonstration given by Kieran Morris as he walked through a project of his which utilised command-line automation and LLM APIs to create a text-based simulation of a well-known sporting event (The Hunger Games, but with Compass PhD students appearing as competitors). Finally, Edward Milsom gave a tongue-in-cheek TED-style talk entitled ‘How to be an AI Bro’ advising all present in the audience to pick a side between Doomers and Zoomers (anti- and pro-AI); to use self-attention mechanisms (the basis of modern LLMs; see https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762) whenever possible; and, following that last piece of advice, to follow @edward_milsom on X (formerly known as Twitter).

The final session of the day was led by Emma Ceccherini and Sam Bowyer, in which the two Away Day student organisers presented on the topic of CVs and online presence. The presentation exceeded everyone’s expectations, in no small part thanks to Helen Mawdsley being present to answer questions from the audience.

Feeling refreshed and revitalised after a peaceful night’s sleep, the students awoke to sunshine and birdsong. But soon a competitive feeling came over the group; this next morning was devoted to sports: archery, axe-throwing and segwaying. We won’t dwell on the sports too much except to say that Sam Bowyer’s team won handily, and that one impressed student is reported to have said “[Sam] was a G at archery. Bosh.” (That same anonymous source, taking time out of her quantitative spatial science and networks research—located in the big Compass office somewhere between desks C and E—, is also reported to have said “Ed D[redacted for anonymity], snapping all those single-use poles, not impressive segwaying.” We, the editors, feel it would be improper for us to comment on this matter.)

The final activity on the schedule was a writing retreat, taking place over the afternoon of the second day and the entirety of the third and final day. Being in a peaceful location and setting time aside to work on a single specific task proved useful to the students present.

To summarise, Away Day 2024 went extremely well, having been organised expertly by Crina Radu, to whom the students are all incredibly grateful.

Student perspectives: Compass Annual Conference 2023

Posted on by dominic.broadbent

A post by Dominic Broadbent, PhD student on the Compass CDT, and Michael Whitehouse, PhD student of the Compass CDT (recently submitted thesis)

Introduction

September saw the second annual Compass Conference, hosted in the Fry Building, the home of the School of Mathematics. The event was particularly special as it is the first time that all five Compass cohorts were brought together, and it was a fantastic opportunity to celebrate the achievements and research of the Compass CDT with external partners.  This year the theme was “Communicating Research in Context“, focusing on how research can be better communicated, and the need to highlight the motivation and applications of mathematical research.

Research talks

The day began with four long form talks touching on the topic of communicating research. Starting with Alessio Zakaria’s talk which delved into Hypothesis tests, commenting on their criticial role as the defacto statistical tool across the sciences, and how p-hacking has led to a replication crisis that undermines public confidence in research. The next talk by Sam Stockman and Emerald Dilworth discussed the challenges they faced, and the key takeaways from their shared experience of communicating mathematics with researchers in the geographical sciences. Following this, Ed Davis’s interactive talk “The Universal Language of Visualisations” explored how effective visualisation techniques should differ by the intended audience, with examples from his research and activities outside of academia. The last talk by Dan Milner explored his research on understanding the effect of environmental factors on outcomes of smallholder farmers in Kenya. He took us through the process of collecting data on the ground, to modelling and communicating results to external partners.  After each talk there was an opportunity to ask questions, allowing for audience participation and the sparking of interesting discussions. The format mirrored that which is most frequently used in external academic conferences, giving the speakers a chance to practice their technique in front of friendly faces.

Lightning talks

After a short break, we jumped back into the fray with a series of 3-minute fast-paced lightning talks. A huge range of topics were covered, all the way from developing modelling techniques for the electric grid of the future, to predicting the incidence of Cerebral Vasospasm at the Southmead Hospital ICU. With such a short time to present, these talks were a great exercise in distilling research into just the essentials, knowing there is very limited time to garner the audience’s interest and convey an effective message.

Special guest lecture

After lunch, we reconvened to attend the special guest lecture. The talk, entitled Bridging the gap between research and industry, was delivered by Ruth Voisey, CEO of the Smith institute. It outlined Ruth’s journey from writing her PhD thesis ‘Multiple wave scattering by quasiperiodic structures’, to CEO of the Smith Institute – via an internship with the acoustic research team at Dyson. It was particularly refreshing to hear Ruth’s candid account of her ‘non-linear’ rise to CEO, accrediting her success to strong principles of clear research communication and ‘mathematical evangelicalism’.

As PhD students in the bubble of academia, the path to opportunities in the world of industry can often feel clouded – Ruth’s lecture painted a clear picture of how one can transition from university based research to a rewarding career outside of this bubble, applying such research to tangible problems in the real world. 

Panel discussion and poster session

The special guest lecture was followed by a discussion on communicating research in context, with panel members Ruth Voisey, David Greenwood, Helen Barugh, Oliver Johnson, plus Compass CDT students Ed Davis and Sam Stockman. The panel discussed the difficulty of communicating the nuances of research conclusions with the public, with a particular focus on handling these nuances when talking to journalists – stressing the importance of communicating the limitations of the research in question.

This was followed by a poster session, one enthusiastic student had the following comment “it was great to see of all the Compass students’ hard work being celebrated and shared with the wider data science community”.

Concluding remarks

To cap off the successful event, Compass students Hannah Sansford and Josh Givens delivered some concluding remarks which were drawn from comments made by students about what key points they’d taken from the day. These focused on the importance of clear communication of research throughout the whole pipeline, from inception in discussion with fellow academics to the dissemination of knowledge to the general population.

The day ended with a walk to Goldney Hall, where students, staff, and attendees enjoyed delicious food, wine, and access to the beautiful Orangery gardens.

Compass is funded by EPSRC
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