Between 4th and 8th of April 2022 Compass CDT students are attending APTS Week 2 in Durham.
Academy for PhD Training in Statistics (APTS) organises, through a collaboration between major UK statistics research groups, four residential weeks of training each year for first-year PhD students in statistics and applied probability nationally. Compass students attend all four APTS courses hosted by prestigious UK Universities.
For their APTS Week in Durham Compass students will be attending the following modules:
Applied Stochastic Processes (Nicholas Georgiou and Matt Roberts): This module will introduce students to two important notions in stochastic processes — reversibility and martingales — identifying the basic ideas, outlining the main results and giving a flavour of some of the important ways in which these notions are used in statistics.
Statistical Modelling (Helen Ogden): The aim of this module is to introduce important aspects of statistical modelling, including model selection, various extensions to generalised linear models, and non-linear models.
As we start 2022, we look back at our Compass achievements over 2021…
Invited speakers and seminars
Over the course of the year we invited seminar speakers Ingmar Schuster on kernel methods, Nicolas Chopin offered a two-part lecture on sequential Monte Carlo samplers, Ioannis Kosmidis on reducing bias in estimation and a special two-part lecture from Barnett Award winning Jonty Rougier on Wilcoxon’s Two Sample Test.
Compass student launches PAI-Link
In May, Compass PhD student, Mauro Camara Escudero, set up PAI-Link: a nation-wide AI postgraduate seminar series.
We ran training sessions on themes such as interdisciplinary research, responsible innovation and a Hackathon run with Compass partners LV= General Insurance, which is recounted by Doug Corbin in his blog post. Compass held its first Science Focus Lab on multi-omics data and cancer treatment with colleagues from Bristol Integrative Epidemiology unit.
Five Compass students were recruited to internships with organisations such as Microsoft Research, Adarga, CheckRisk, Afiniti and Shell.
Michael Whitehouse contributed to a Sky News report on the potential impact of the pandemic on the Tokyo Olympics by modelling the rise of COVID-19 cases in Japan.
Access to Data Science
Compass ran its first Access to Data Science event – an immersive experience for prospective PhD students which aimed to increase diversity amongst data science researchers by encouraging participants such as women and members of the LGBTQ+ and BAME communities to join us.
Annie Gray presented her paper ‘Matrix factorisation and the interpretation of geodesic distance’ at NeurIPS 2021. Conor Newton gave a talk at a workshop in conjunction with ACM Sigmetrics 2021 and he and Dom Owens won the poster session of the Fry Statistics Conference. Jack Simons paper ‘Variational Likelihood-Free Gradient Descent’ was accepted at AABI 2022. Alex Modell’s paper ‘A Graph Embedding Approach to User Behavior Anomaly Detection’ was accepted to IEEE Big Data Conference 2021. Danny Williams and supervisor Song Liu were awarded an EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account for their project in collaboration with Adarga.
Hackathon run with Compass partners LV= General Insurance, which is recounted by Doug Corbin in his 
