Short Bio:

Madhu Vankadari is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford’s Cyber Physical Systems group, under the supervision of Prof. Niki Trigoni and Prof. Andrew Markham. Prior to Oxford, he worked as a Machine Vision researcher at TCS Research in India. Madhu’s research revolves around using deep learning for SLAM-related challenges, such as improving depth estimation, camera pose accuracy, multi-motion scenarios, and visual place recognition. His work finds applications in robotics and computer vision, enhancing areas like autonomous navigation and augmented reality.



Abstract:

Understanding the world in 3D irrespective of the time of the day is crucial for applications such as autonomous navigation, and augmented and virtual reality. Amongst all the sensors through which this can be achieved, cameras have been cheap and ubiquitous. However, cameras can only capture the 2D projection of the 3D world. Extracting 3D information from one or more 2D images has been a long-standing problem in Computer Vision. Recently, the success of deep learning has made it possible to do the aforementioned by training a network on a large corpus of training data with their ground truth. Self-supervised learning made it possible to train a system to achieve the same objective without using any ground truth. In this talk, I am going to present some of the latest advances in self-supervised learning including my own research in this direction.



This is a hybrid event, please find the Teams link on XML webpage, https://oxfordxml.github.io

Brief Bio:

Dr Abhirup Banerjee is a Royal Society University Research Fellow (URF), Full Member of Faculty, and PI in the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford. He leads the Multimodal Medical Data Integration & Analysis (MultiMeDIA) Lab in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME), University of Oxford. Dr Banerjee received the BSc (Hons) and Master degrees in Statistics and the PhD degree in Computer Science in March 2017. He joined the University of Oxford as Postdoctoral Researcher in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine in August 2017, started as the URF and Faculty Member in the Department of Engineering Science in October 2022, and officially started the MultiMeDIA Lab in March 2023. His research interest spans Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and classical Statistics, focusing on a range of topics including Biomedical Image Analysis, Machine Learning, AI, Geometric Deep Learning, Image Processing, etc. Dr Banerjee received the Young Scientist Award from the Indian Science Congress Association in the year 2016-2017.



Abstract:

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one of the most important imaging modalities for the diagnosis and characterisation of cardiovascular diseases, due to its non-invasive identification of abnormalities in structure and function of the myocardium without ionising radiation. However, in current clinical practice, it is commonly acquired as a collection of separated and independent 2D image planes, thus limiting its accuracy in 3D analysis.



In order to generate patient-specific 3D heart meshes from the 2D MRI, we have developed completely end-to-end automated pipeline, correcting for the sparsity and misalignment due to motion artifacts between slices. Our development of novel geometric deep learning in particular point cloud-based approaches has enabled the 3D cardiac anatomy reconstruction in real-time and made possible the population-level analyses of anatomy and functions including virtual population cohorts generation for in silico trials, cardiac motion modelling, combined modelling of anatomy and electrophysiology, risk prediction, etc. The reconstructed high-resolution 3D cardiac meshes have been utilised for in silico experiments to simulate the activation patterns. The effectiveness of the novel geometric deep learning-based approaches has been extensively investigated over large (>10K) UK population and have opened up the possibility of large virtual in silico trials.



More information (Teams link): https://oxfordxml.github.io

Bio:

My name is Rainy Dong and I’m a third-year DPhil in Experimental Psychology, supervised by Prof Kate Nation and Prof Robert Hepach. My DPhil research is on children’s emotion and language development. Emotions play a pivotal role in human experiences and are closely intertwined with language structure and use in both adults and children (Lindquist, 2017). Understanding emotional language, such as the term "upset", is crucial for emotional comprehension during development (Grosse et al., 2021; Nook et al., 2020). Despite the acknowledged importance of language in emotional concept development, little research has explored the link between emotions and written language in particular. Compared to spoken language, written language is more decontextualised and linguistically more complex (Dawson et al., 2021). Written language might be instrumental in conveying nuanced emotional concepts. Hence, my DPhil research focuses on interplay between language and emotion and how this unfolds over development, with a particular focus on written language. I combined both corpus analysis to look at the emotional language in various children’s language corpora; and experimental approaches to look at the influence of emotional context on language learning.



Abstract:

Emotion is closely associated with language, but we know very little about how children express emotion in their own writing. We used a large-scale, cross-sectional, and data-driven approach to investigate emotional expression via writing in children of different ages, and whether it varies for boys and girls. We first used a lexicon-based bag-of-words approach (after Hipson & Mohammad, 2020) to identify emotional content in a large corpus of stories (N>100,000) written by 7- to 13-year-old children. Generalized Additive Models were then used to model changes in sentiment across age and gender. Two additional approaches (BERT and TextBlob) validated and extended these analyses, converging on the finding that positive sentiments in children’s writing decrease with age. These findings echo reports from previous studies showing a decrease in mood and an increased use of negative emotion words with age. We also found that stories by girls contained more positive sentiments than stories by boys. Our study shows the utility of using large-scale data-driven approaches to reveal the content and nature of children’s writing. Future experimental work should build on these observations to understand the likely complex relationships between written language and emotion, and how these change over development.

Architect and Honorary Fellow Alan Berman, and writer and former Visiting Scholar Ian Hembrow, talk about the architectural partnership of Powell and Moya, who built Wolfson, and what kind of men they were. The families of both Powell and Moya plan to attend.

This talk will examine the emergence of two pre-Islamic Arabian theonyms, Allāh and Allāt, tracking their development across the epigraphic record spanning more than a millennium before the rise of Islam and across the Peninsula.

As a Lunch Table event, members of the AWRC are invited to join Ahmad for lunch in Hall at 12.30. The talk, beginning at 1.15 in the Levett Room, is catered with tea/coffee and cakes (all welcome).

The AWRC Maritime Day will include two 20-minute presentations: one by Linda Hulin, who will speak on 'The Practical Mariner Project', which uses landscape archaeology methods to explore the Bronze Age Mediterranean (ca. 1750-1500 BCE) from the point of view of the sailors, and one by Damian Robinson, who will speak on current underwater archaeology research in 'The Central Harbour of Thonis-Heracleion' project. Presentations in the Levett Room (catered with nibbles and soft drinks) will be followed by a punting expedition up the River Cherwell to the Victoria Arms. RSVP Christoph for punt reservations by 20th May ancient.world@wolfson.ox.ac.

Classical literature tells us the story of soldiers coming back from Alexander’s conquest of the Achaemenid Empire carrying a fortune in gold and gems. Examination of coin production and analyses of its metal can teach us more about where the gold of Alexander came from and where it travelled after the conquest.

As a Lunch Table event, members of the Cluster are invited to join Frédérique for lunch in Hall at 12.30. The talk, beginning at 1.15 in the Levett Room, is catered with tea/coffee and cakes (all welcome).

The four speakers in this event each have 5 slides and 5 minutes to talk about aspects of their research, with each talk followed by 15 minutes of conversation. The speakers are: Prerita Govil (Classical Indian Religion/Comparative Philosophy), Joel Bellviure Perez (Classical Archaeology), Ellen Sharman (History/Early Modern Reception), Alessia Zubani (History of Science/Late Antiquity).



The event is catered with wine, soft drinks and nibbles.

The Indo-European language family comprises ten primary branches (Anatolian, Tocharian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian). The academic study of these languages together as a group may be said to begin in 1816, and the method of linguistic reconstruction still in use crystallised in the second half of the 19th century. The 20th and early 21st centuries saw the discovery of the Tocharian and Anatolian branches, as well as a number of changes and refinements in theory. What is the situation of these studies today, and where are they (~should they be) going?



As a Lunch Table event, members of the Cluster are invited to join Tim for lunch in Hall at 12.30. The talk, beginning at 1.15 in the Levett Room, is catered with tea/coffee and cakes (all welcome).

The spectacular ‘Main Deposit’ excavated by James Quibell and Frederick Green at Hierakonpolis in 1897–98 included hundreds of fragments of human statuettes carved from hippopotamus and elephant ivory. The cache represents men, women and children in a variety of poses and costumes, ranging from complete examples to the detached heads, arms, legs, feet and bases of many others. Debate continues concerning the date of their manufacture and the reason for their deposition. I will present a new study of the corpus, relating the Hierakonpolis pieces to comparative material from deposits found at other sites across Egypt. I also challenge the standard interpretation of such deposits as discarded temple offerings and propose an alternative explanation of the contexts in which they should be understood.



As a Lunch Table event, members of the Cluster are invited to join Liam for lunch in Hall at 12.30. The talk, beginning at 1.15 in the Levett Room, is catered with tea/coffee and cakes (all welcome).