• 18:00 - 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge Booking Recommended

One of the many outstanding achievements of G I Taylor was the discovery of relatively simple statistical laws that apply to highly complex turbulent flows.  The emergence of simple laws from complexity is well known in other branches of physics, for example the emergence of the laws of heat conduction from molecular dynamics.  Complexity can also arise at large scales, and the structural vibration of an aircraft or a car can be a surprisingly difficult phenomenon to analyse, partly because millions of degrees of freedom may be involved, and partly because the vibration can be extremely sensitive to small changes or imperfections in the system. In this talk it is shown that the prediction of vibration levels can be much simplified by the derivation and exploitation of emergent laws, analogous to some extent to the heat conduction equations, but with an added statistical aspect, as in turbulent flow. The emergent laws are discussed and their application to the design of aerospace, marine, and automotive structures is described.  As an aside it will be shown that the same emergent theory can be applied to a range of problems involving electromagnetic fields. 

• 18:00 - 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

Today, the world is captivated by cognitive AI applications such as large language models. But what will it take to bring the benefits of AI into the messy, diverse and safety-critical physical world? Robotics and autonomous systems must deal with open-ended environments, irreversible physical actions, and deployment economics that look very different from pure software.

In this talk, I will outline the frontier challenges and opportunities in embodying AI in the real world, drawing on our journey building Wayve. Originating from research on deep learning for scene understanding at the University of Cambridge, Wayve has spent the last decade developing Embodied Intelligence for autonomous driving. Our technology has been demonstrated across more than 500 cities in Europe, North America and Asia, and will soon be deployed with major automakers such as Nissan and fleet partners like Uber.

I will share the key technical ideas, system-level lessons, and open problems that must be solved to make Embodied AI a safe, scalable and economically viable reality.

• 18:00 - 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge Booking Recommended

Behavioural Ecology, the study of the adaptive significance of animal behaviour, has empowered zoologists to tackle some of the fundamental issues of evolutionary biology.  Insects, although not always easy to study as individuals in the field, have provided excellent model systems for this area of research.  

In this talk, I will outline some of the research done by myself and colleagues on the behavioural ecology of insects. I will discuss what a saltmarsh beetle can tell us about the evolution of parental care; what marine water-striders can tell us about selfish group behaviour; what the behaviour of gall-living aphids reveals about the altruism of housework, house-maintenance, and the slaughter of intruders; and how extended parental care by solitary digger wasps shows us the  first faltering steps along the route to highly complex social behaviour. Along the way we will visit a saltmarsh in North Norfolk, a mangrove swamp in the Galapagos, the playing fields of Cambridge, a Hill Station in Malaya, and a heathland near Godalming. And we will learn about The Trafalgar Effect, Crozier’s Paradox, and the menopausal aphid glue-bomb. 

• 18:00 - 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge Booking Recommended

We have many forms of identity, whether socially constructed (kinship, personas, relationships), or issued via organisations (employers, banks, clubs, government). These identities can be partly stored as a digital twin (e.g. by recording biometric information plus some identifier/number, and then possibly linked to other information credentials or entitlements - e.g. citizenship, age, health, finance, educational records and so on).

These digital ecosystems can be designed to allow us to control (access to) such data, or they can be part of state and commercial surveillance. The trustworthiness of such ecosystems is highly questionable. I'll walk through alternative designs and give examples of benefits and disadvantages, including threats (fake id, denial of service etc).

In this talk, I'll also outline challenges, including future problems like the mutability of allegedly unique and persistent biometrics like iris or even DNA, and speculate about the possibility of reflecting social structures properly in designs to create more fair and resilient systems that might be more acceptable than many deployed or proposed today. 
 

• 18:00 - 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge Booking Recommended

Research evaluation is a familiar element of modern science, and peer review is one of the favoured ways of doing it. But peer review has not always been so central to academic reputations; nor has it always functioned as it now does. This lecture will draw upon my team’s research in the archives of the Royal Society of London to explore how evaluation has changed over the last 250 years, to explain the present crisis and to discuss options for the future.

The Royal Society has published scientific journals since 1665. It was one of the first institutions to develop written refereeing processes, which began to be used at the Philosophical Transactions in the 1830s and later at the Proceedings and other journals. The Society’s unrivalled archives shed light onhow decisions were made – and by whom, and why – before and after the introduction of written refereeing.

During the twentieth century, ‘peer-reviewed publications’ acquired a privileged status. The increasing importance assigned to refereeing accompanied professionalisation and increased competition. The growth of science, demographic changes and internationalization have also posed challenges for our ongoing use of an evaluation practice that originally developed in the context of a closed, gentlemanly community. What should the future of peer review look like?