Entries in "seminars"
February 14, 2007
Eberhart E. Fetz - Recurrent brain-computer interfaces
The third of last Thursday's talks was at the UW bioengineering department. Eberhart E. Fetz of the Washington National Primate Research Center presented current work on implantable brain-computer interfaces.
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February 12, 2007
Fawwaz Ulaby - How Radar Connects to Carbon Economics
Last Thursday I went to a Electrical Engineering colloquium at the UW. The speaker was Fawwaz Ulaby of the University of Michigan, and he presented a project based on using radar satellites to audit carbon sinks.
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February 08, 2007
Raghu Ramakrishnan - The World Online
Today felt like being back in taught courses, with three seminars at UW in one day. Once again this is very convenient, but I'll be spreading the write-ups out so as not to take up too long a block of time with them.
The CSE department had Raghu Ramakrishnan of Yahoo! Research talking about the social, participatory web, which as far is can tell is Yahoo!'s prime focus these days. He gave several examples of relatively well-known participatory sites, some of which Yahoo! owns (Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Groups), and some of which it probably wishes it did (Freecycle and YouTube), to illustrate the general area he's working in, and then spoke about some of the challenges and benefits of sites that are heavily based on user-supplied content.
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February 05, 2007
Farren Isaacs - Design, Synthesis and Control of Genetic and Genomic Systems
Thursday's other talk was in the Bioengineering department at the UW. I feel rather stupid for having taken this long to discover this department and its seminar series, since they have quite a few interesting talks each semester. Anyway, the presenter was a faculty candidate from the Center for Computational Genomics at Harvard, giving an overview talk about his work on engineering biological systems; for me this was probably an appropriate first talk to go to in the series.
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February 01, 2007
Martin Tompa - What can we do with lots of genome sequences?
I went to two seminars at the UW today—very considerate of them to start clumping the talks I'm most interested in together—and I'll write about one today and one later.
Martin Tompa of the UW Genome Sciences and Computer Science & Engineering departments, gave a talk about computational genomics, focussing mainly on how comparing data across many species is useful.
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January 18, 2007
Saul Greenberg: Enhancing Creativity Through Toolkits
[note: I'm probably going to start writing rather more concise talk summaries, but more of them, because I need to be more thorough to satisfy course requirements in absentia]
Today I went to a CSE talk at the University of Washington: Saul Greenberg on Enhancing Creativity through Toolkits
.
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October 19, 2006
UW Biology - Faculty mini-symposium
The University of Washington Biology Department kicked off the new academic year's seminar series with a Faculty mini-symposium
. This consisted of 4 departmental faculty taking 15 minutes each to present their current research; four talks for the price of one, in a sense, and I even got bonus free hand cramps because I think I took about as many notes for each as I do in a lot of hour-long presentations.
I'll write a separate post about each presentation, and then edit this post to link to all of them (and probably change the timestamp so it appears on top).
Update: writing all that up took me longer than intended because there was a trip to Bloomington in the middle and I had things I wanted to finish before going. It's now done, and these were the talks:
- Jennifer Nemhauser - Quite contrary models of how gardens grow
- Christian Sidor - New fossils from the center of Pangea
- Janneke Hille Ris Landers - The response of plant communities to climate change
- Benjamin Kerr - A Migratory Solution to a Tragedy of the Commons in a host-pathogen metapopulation
Benjamin Kerr - A Migratory Solution to a Tragedy of the Commons in a host-pathogen metapopulation
The last of the mini-symposium talks was by Benjamin Kerr, who presented a study that combined modelling and 'wet-lab' experiments to understand how a pathogen's population is regulated.
October 18, 2006
Janneke Hille Ris Landers - The response of plant communities to climate change
Talk #3 of the faculty mini-symposium was Janneke Hille Ris Lambers, on The response of plant communities to climate change
. She talked about the prevailing theory of how climate change will affect the range of a given species, and work she has done using a highly detailed corpus of data from the Kansas prairie to test the theory.
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October 17, 2006
Christian Sidor - New fossils from the center of Pangea
The second talk in the Faculty mini-symposium was by Christian Sidor of the UW and the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. He talked about paleontology at a particular site in Niger, focussing mainly on what makes this site interesting and how it has changed the accepted understanding of how the world's ecosystem looked at the time of Pangea.
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October 04, 2006
Jennifer Nemhauser - Quite contrary models of how gardens grow
Jennifer Nemhauser gave the first talk, about the work in her lab on the small molecule hormones that influence plant growth.
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June 21, 2006
Alan Kamil - Natural History and Cognition
There were quite a few seminars in the past few months that I didn't get around to writing summaries of. I probably won't for most of them—plenty of talks, while very interesting in their own right, are far enough from my research interests that I can't really justify taking an hour or two off other work to write them up—but there was one in particular that I do want to revisit because the work presented ties in interestingly with my own.
Alan Kamil of the University of Nebraska Center for Avian Cognition gave a talk at the UW titled Natural History and Cognition. Kamil presented his whole research career as a chronological overview, but rather than summarise the whole thing I'll just focus on two particularly relevant issues behind the cut:
- The relative adaptive value of a given behavioural strategy
- The impact of environmental niche on cognitive ability and specialisation
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May 23, 2006
Seminars I've been to this semester
This is just a list of titles because I need to keep the university posted to meet some course requirements. I'll describe one or two in more detail, but having had such a long blog hiatus I won't attempt to catch up on the whole lot
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January 16, 2006
David Baker: Computing structural biology
Last week I went to a talk by David Baker, in which he presented a major project of his lab: the Rosetta system for modelling and predicting protein folding.
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January 13, 2006
John Guttag: Shortening the Control Loop in the Management of Chronic Disease
Last week I went to a CSE colloquium at the University of Washington. The speaker was John Guttag, and he came to talk about treating chronic disease as a control problem (abstract), and why this approach helps with the management of many conditions. He started with a general description and justification of his approach, but most of the talk was taken up by two concrete examples—epileptic seizure management and heart failure prediction—which demonstrate the value of the approach in practice.
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October 11, 2005
Michael Shadlen: Turing's enigma solution and the neurobiology of decision making
I'm a little late writing this one up, but last Thursday I went to my first Computer Science department seminar at UW. It's a bit misleading to stress that though, because it was actually someone from the physiology and biophysics department giving a talk that was partly a neuroscience primer for computer science people. The main part of the talk was about modelling probabilistic decision making, and I'll describe that part below the cut.
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October 04, 2005
Martha Bosma - The reason for the rhythm: mechanisms for driving spontaneous activity in the developing mouse hindbrain
Today's field trip was to a biology department seminar at the UW. Martha Bosma presented some rather striking work on spontaneous neural activity in the mouse hindbrain; specifically an instance of it during fœtal development.
August 16, 2005
Barry Brumitt - Connecting Models with the Physical World
Although I tend to work from home anyway now that I have no classes to go to, it does still make a difference that I'm now a long way from my lab and academic department. For some things—like the weekly lab meetings—there is no substitute, but other things can be got around. While physically at Case there were various seminars each semester with invited speakers (and also a course requirement that I go to 5 of the department's seminars each semester), and they were a resource I found useful. Fortunately Seattle has several universities and private research institutions that hold open seminars, so it's not exactly difficult to make up for this. If anything, it's going to be easier now for me to cherry-pick talks that are more relevant to my own work, because instead of a requirement to go to 5 seminars from a specific series, I can go to any of interest.
I'm going to start writing up brief reports on talks I go to, partly to aid my own memory, partly for the edification of anyone else who might be interested, and partly because I am supposed to show that I've gone to enough here that it's a reasonable substitute for the ones I'm missing in Cleveland.
Today's was Barry Brumitt of Microsoft Research, talking at Intel's lab about Connecting Models with the Physical World
. The talk was anchored with two concrete examples from his own work, and behind the cut I'll write about both.
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