The SAMBa conference is an opportunity for students to showcase their work to people within the department, outside the department and at other Universities in a supportive environment.
The SAMBa conference is a celebration of all things SAMBa and an opportunity for students to showcase their work in a supportive environment. The work of SAMBa students covers the entire spectrum of statistical applied mathematics: including projects in statistics, probability, analysis, numerical analysis, mathematical biology, fluid dynamics, machine learning and high-performance computing. The conference is organised by students and contains talks by SAMBa students, external speakers, and students from other departments of the University of Bath.
Dr Richard Morey, University of Cardiff
Failures in forensic meta-analysis and the culture of science reform
Increased awareness the pernicious effects of publication bias and opportunistic data analysis over the past few decades have led scientists to question the statistical evidence in the published literature. Forensic meta-analysis methods are statistical methods designed to find problematic bodies of work. The ‘p-curve’ (Simonsohn, Nelson, Simmons, 2014; Simonsohn, Simmons, Nelson, 2015) is a suite of tests advertised as the ‘key to the file drawer’, supposedly assessing the ‘evidential value’ of a set of findings while accounting for selective publication. In the ten years since publication, the p-curve has simultaneously become extremely popular yet has never been evaluated from a formal statistical perspective. I evaluate these tests by traditional theoretical statistical criteria and find severe statistical problems: undue sensitivity, inadmissibility, nonmonotonicity, and inconsistency. The fact that such a method has escaped scrutiny for 10 years reveals that the scientific reform movement has problems that mirror the problems science at large, including incentives for novelty, peer review failures, and lack of skepticism.
Dr Sara Jabbari, University of Birmingham
Novel antimicrobial treatments and the importance of the host response
The global rise in antimicrobial resistance levels, coupled with the downturn in discovery of new antibiotics, has resulted in an urgent need for novel ways to tackle bacterial infections. Creative targets for such treatments include blocking resistance or virulence mechanisms employed by the bacteria. However, such approaches that do not directly kill the bacteria can rely heavily on an effective immune response. We demonstrate how mathematical modelling can be used to understand the consequences of this and to design effective treatment strategies.
Dr Audrey Repetti, Heriot-Watt University
Proximal Neural Networks for Computational Imaging
A common approach to solve inverse imaging problems relies on finding a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate of the original unknown image, by solving a minimization problem. In this context, iterative proximal algorithms are widely used, enabling to handle non-smooth functions and linear operators. These methods have the advantage of benefiting from strong theoretical guarantees, ensuring their asymptotic convergence to a solution to the problem of interest which is key for decision-making processes. Recently, these proximal algorithms have been paired with deep learning strategies, to further improve the estimate quality. Two main approaches have been investigated in the literature: Plug-and-play algorithms where some of the operators appearing in proximal algorithms are replaced by neural networks, and unfolded neural networks that are obtained by unrolling a proximal algorithm as for finding a MAP estimate, but over a fixed number of iterations, with learned linear operators and parameters. In this talk, we will explore these different methodological perspectives in computational imaging, and discuss their advantages and limitations.
Dr Waleed Ali and Addie Baker, University of Bath
Outreach In & Out of Higher Education
Outreach is an important aspect of higher education to encourage the younger generations to think about and appreciate STEM as a career and understand its importance in every day life. This talk will focus on two aspects of outreach: the first is outreach in the conventional sense, where members of the maths department would engage in public interest activities like science fairs or school visits. This part will focus on the efforts that members of the higher education community (staff, UG and PG students) engage with school students or the public in a much broader perspective. The second is outreach that is focussed internally within the department itself. This part will focus on the concerted efforts by staff and PG students to engage the UG cohorts to appreciate the research undergone by academics. These efforts include Behind the Research and PhD Your Way.
Wilfred Armfield – The Forward Loop-Erased Ant process and uniform spanning trees
Sebastian Quintanilla – Exploring genetic ancestry with Coalescent Trees
Beth Stokes – Should I stay, or should I go: Sex ratio response drives a diverse range of (anti-)correlated intra-species behaviours
Robert Johnson – A new algorithm for ptychography
Veronika Chronholm – Simplified proton transport models for treatment planning and uncertainty quantification
Elliot Butterworth – Lobsters and the evolution of complexity
Chiara Boetti – Network Time Series Models for Volatility Forecasting
Guannan Chen – Quantum algorithms for the exponential of Hamiltonian matrices
Charlie Cameron – Spatial regime conversion method
Paddy O’Toole – Clustering of multivariate tail dependence using conditional methods
Diana de Armas Bellon – Rough Mount Fuji accessibility percolation
Patrick Fahy – Greedy Learning to Optimise with convergence guarantees
Best poster – Chiara Boetti
Best presentations – Sebastian Quintanilla, Elliot Butterworth
All of our fantastic speakers
The fabulous conference organising committee: Amin Sabir, Bill Nunn, Caroline Purvis, Charlie Cameron, Paddy O’Toole
Our wonderful conference sponsors: Institute for Mathematical Innovation (IMI)
Everyone who attended!
On Thursday 11 December 2014, the University of Bath hosted the official launch of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Statistical Applied Mathematics.
48 PhD students, academics and industrialists gathered at Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution for the first SAMBa Integrative Think Tank.
SAMBa visited Mexico as part of a University delegation from 18-26 April.
For our second Integrative Think Tank (ITT) at the beginning of June, over 60 academics, students and industrialists came together for a week of collaboration.
The National University of Mongolia in Ulan Bator hosted the two week event on stochastic processes and applications.
Dr Alexandre Stauffer has been awarded an Early Career fellowship to develop mathematical tools to analyse random interacting systems.
Following a successful trip to Mexico in April, SAMBa staff have been awarded two grants to continue to build research links.
The first event in the BUC (Bath-UNAM-CIMAT) series took place in Guanajuato, Mexico during November and was a great success.
Lizabeth Peñaloza Velasco is joining the Department as a master’s student. She is the first Mexican exchange student to join the Department.
We hosted our biggest Integrative Think Tank (ITT3) yet in January with almost 90 people taking part.
