SIAM Annual Conference 2018

We are very excited to invite you to the annual Imperial College London SIAM Student Conference! You can look forward to a full day of student talks as well as exciting keynote speakers in many different fields of mathematics (PROGRAMME HERE!!!).

We have great keynote talks:

Martins Bruveris (Brunel University London):

Riemannian Metrics on Shape Spaces – Theory and Applications

The word ‘shape’ denotes the external form, contour or outline of something. Shape is a basic physical property of objects and plays an important role in applications such as evolutionary biology or automated image understanding. Mathematically one can define a shape to be an embedded submanifold in an ambient space. The shape space is the collection of all shapes. To perform statistical inferences it is necessary to equip the shape space with additional structure, for example a distance function or a Riemannian metric. In this talk I will describe a class of Riemannian metrics that are used in shape analysis. By doing so we will see how functional analysis and differential geometry interact in infinite dimensions and that the infinite-dimensional landscape can be full of traps for the careless traveller

David Ham (Imperial College London):

Firedrake: using symbolic computation to overcome the productivity crisis in numerical computing

Simulation based on numerically solving PDEs is a core challenge in computational mathematics. This is the only field in which entire top 50 supercomputers are procured for a single class of problem. However, the productivity of simulation software creation is spectacularly poor, with the combination of application, equations, numerics, and various levels of performance engineering creating a code so complex that advances become prohibitive. PhD students frequently spend the majority of their research time re-implementing known techniques in huge legacy programmes just to reach the starting point for their research contribution. The Firedrake project tackles this productivity crisis by taking a radically different approach to simulation software creation. Scientists and engineers create simulations by writing the finite element form of the PDE in high level mathematical code, similar to Mathematica or Maple. Firedrake then uses specialised compilers to apply a sequence of mathematical transformations to this code, each one applying some part of the discretisation and performance optimisation pipeline. The result is a system which is both highly productive and which facilitates the application of optimisations which would be intractable to apply by hand. In this talk I will lay out how the Firedrake system works, and show some of its mathematical capabilities.

Georg Ostrovski (Google Deepmind):

Curiosity-Based Exploration in Deep Reinforcement Learning 

In recent years, the use of deep neural networks in Reinforcement Learning has allowed significant empirical progress, enabling generic learning algorithms with little domain-specific prior knowledge to solve a wide variety of previously challenging tasks. Examples are reinforcement learning agents that learn to play video games exceeding human-level performance, or beat the world’s strongest players at board games such as Go or Chess. Despite these practical successes, the problem of effective exploration in high-dimensional domains, recognized as one of the key ingredients for more competent and generally applicable AI, remains a great challenge and is an active area of empirical research. In this talk I will introduce basic ideas from Deep Learning and its use in Reinforcement Learning and show some of their applications. I will then zoom in on the exploration problem, and present some of the recent algorithmic approaches to create ‘curious’ reinforcement learning agents.

We will also have prizes for the best speaker and the best poster.

If your abstract for a talk is accepted we will reimburse travel expenses up to £50, with expenses for poster presenters covered subject to availability.

Date:
11th of June, 9am – 5pm

Location:
CDT Space,
4th Floor Sherfield Building,
South Kensington Campus,
Imperial College London,
SW7 2AZ

Prizes (Amazon Vouchers):
• Best talk: £70
• Best poster: £50
• Early bird raffle (submit your abstract before 18th May for entry into a prize draw): £30
Free food: morning coffee, pastries, lunch and afternoon snacks!
Programme: TO BE CONFIRMED SHORTLY.
Please register and submit your abstracts & posters here

We look forward to seeing you there!

Best wishes and maths love,
The Imperial College SIAM Student Chapter