An introductory talk of about twenty minutes, followed by Q&As, and an hour or so’s discussion. All welcome. No need to book.

Our monthly meetup includes
Alpha Go : How did Deep Mind beat the world champion and just how big an achievement is it?
Fun with Recurrent Neural Networks
The Latest AI news

The film, He Named Me Malala, is an intimate portrait of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai, who was targeted by the Taliban and severely wounded by a gunshot when returning home on her school bus in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. She miraculously survived and is now a leading campaigner for girls’ education globally as co-founder of the Malala Fund. Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman) shows us how Malala, her father Zia and her family are committed to fighting for education for all girls worldwide. The film gives us an inside glimpse into this extraordinary young girl’s life – from her close relationship with her father who inspired her love for education, to her impassioned speeches at the UN, to her everyday life with her parents and brothers. He Named Me Malala is courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures in association with Image Nation Abu Dhabi and Participant Media with National Geographic Channel and the Malala Fund.

“One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.” – Malala

Panel discussion and Q&A to follow. Seating is first come, first served. The film screening is free of charge, open to the public, and no ticket is necessary.

Oxford’s ‘Open Mic’ Film Networking Night – 2nd Thursday of month at 7.30pm

Open Screen (formerly ‘10:10’) is a friendly networking group that meets on the second Thursday of the month, to watch and discuss short films. It runs from 7.30pm-9.30pm at Film Oxford, Catherine St.

Southeast Asian Documentary Film Festival, taking place over the weekend of 15-17th April.

List of Documentaries

Feature Length

• 1987: Untracing the Conspiracy (60 min/Singapore/political freedom and exile)
• 40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy (96 min/ Indonesia/ Genocide)
• Across (60 min/Myanmar/sustainable development and local rights)
• I Love Malaya (45 min/Malaysia/political freedom and exile)
• Jalanan (107 min/Indonesia/Underclass)
• Lost in the Mists of Time (60 min/ Thailand/ Female authorship of a key Buddhist text)
• Michael’s (48 min/Myanmar/citizenship and identity)
• Nick and Chai (70 min/Philippines/natural disasters)
• The Last of the Elephant Men (86 min/Cambodia/local rights, sustainable development)
• The Third Eye (64 min/Thailand/natural disasters, sustainable development, local rights)
• To Singapore With Love  (70 min/Singapore/political freedom)
• Portraits of Mosquito Press (54min/Philippines/media freedom)
• Yanmagon (50min/Myanmar/Transition between dictatorship and the democracy)

Shorts

• Apa Kabar Potehi? (20 min/ Indonesia/ dying culture)
• Away from Ayah (13 min/ Singapore/ Children of prisoners)
• Living in the Drains (15 mins/ Malaysia/ Homelessness and statelessness)
• Memory as Resistance (20 min/ Malaysia/ cultural and housing rights)
• Sindiket (25 min/ Sabah/ identity and electoral fraud)
• Viral, Sial! (30 min/ Malaysia/ Social media)

For full details please visit the event website: https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/events/southeast-asian-documentary-film-festival

IN[SCI]TE is a new interdisciplinary science, technology, and engineering conference, which will take place on Monday and Tuesday of 0th Week Trinity Term 2016. IN[SCI]TE is run by undergrads, and the talks will be both delivered by and aimed at undergrads.

The aims for IN[SCI]TE are to broaden the knowledge and awareness of science undergrads outside their field of study, to provide a setting for undergrads to give a talk at a scientific conference during their degree, and to inspire future scientists to enter areas of work that cross the boundaries in science.

We are now accepting applications for speakers! Submit an application at inscite.co/speakers/, or send the facebook page a message if you have any questions.

To keep up to date with the conference, like us on facebook.com/insciteco, and follow us @insciteco.

A Talk by Konstantin Kudryavtsev, Head of Technical Relations at Ethcore
This will be about the Ethereum ecosystem and the blockchain

Prof. Daniel Wakelin and Anna Sander in conversation with Oxford MSt students about creating, using and sharing images of medieval manuscripts, during a lunchtime break in a hands-on MS handling and photography workshop day. What can’t digital images tell us? What metadata do we need? What can only be learned from the original manuscript? What information is only available from digital images? Do professional and amateur manuscript images have different uses? What practical considerations govern photography of ancient, irreplaceable books under reading room conditions? Lunchtime discussion is open to all.

This presentation focuses on the use a group of Brazilian Pentecostal migrant churches make of Facebook as a medium for language planning (LPP), i.e. the deliberate choice of language to be established as the one a group of speaker should adopt. More specifically, I explore the language choices made by a group of faith leaders in Portugal, Italy, the US and the UK when posting on their Facebook pages in contrast to the choices made by their followers. I argue that the linguistic positions adopted by faith leaders on Facebook impacts on the level of online interaction of their migrant members. I conclude by pointing out that the most successful migrant churches in engaging their followers online are the ones that adopt a flexible approach to LPP.

Robin Dunbar (Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, University of Oxford), Lorna Hughes (Professor in Digital Humanities, University of Glasgow) and Max Saunders (Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research, Kings College London) explore whether life-writing can survive in the digital age. Chaired by David Robey (Arts and Humanities Consultant, Oxford e-Research Centre).
The discussion will be followed by a drinks reception. Free, all welcome. Please register using the link below to guarantee a seat.
This event is organised in collaboration between TORCH and the Oxford Centre for Life Writing.
Image: Faulkner’s Portable Typerwiter via Wikimedia Commons.

Various scholarly and popular accounts of the charismatic movement mention the role of American Episcopalian Jean Stone, the California-based Blessed Trinity Society, and Trinity magazine in the early development of the renewal movement. It was Stone who in 1960 persuaded Time and Newsweek to cover the story of the Revd Dennis Bennett and tongues speaking at St Marks’s, Van Nuys. Indeed it was she who with Harald Bredesen appears to have publically coined the term ‘charismatic renewal’. This paper offers an assessment of Stone’s ministry and the magazine she edited. It shows the ways in which Stone and Trinity narrated the spread of Baptism in the Spirit in the historic churches, and articulated the characteristics of the early renewal movement. It demonstrates the role, both nationally and transnationally, of this ministry in the early development and construction of charismatic renewal.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or “drones”) have been in consumer hands and newspaper headlines for several years now. While their much-touted potential to dramatically change modern existence is slowly beginning to emerge, it sometimes seems like their most notable success thus far has been in crashing into everything in sight.

This talk will take a brief look at the devices currently available for the everyday consumer and what to expect in the near future. It will then explore some exciting legitimate uses as well as the manifold creative misuses people have devised. Finally it will discuss the potential countermeasures that have been proposed to detect UAVs, disable or commandeer them, and trace misuse back to operators.

Richard Baker is a member of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity, within the Software and Systems Security group. His DPhil work focuses on the opportunities that UAVs provide as an inexpensive mobile platform, as well as technologies to help protect privacy despite their widespread use. Prior to studying in Oxford he was a software developer for a number of years, in the UK and Switzerland. He holds an MEng degree in Computer Science from Imperial College London.

The Bapsybanoo Marchioness of Winchester Lecture with Dr Neil MacGregor, Former Director of the British Museum and currently Chair of the Steering Committee for Humboldt Forum, Berlin.

Neil MacGregor explores the stories and representations of faith in material culture. Fire in particularly has been a powerful symbol for religious ideas. Exploring those representations, the talk will take the audience on a journey across times and religions, from the burning bush of the Exodus story to the flames representing the Spirit at Pentecost.

To reserve your seat, please visit http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/fire-faith
This event is organised by the Faculty of Theology and Religion.

Come along and meet other like-minded people and expand your love of filmmaking, get feedback on work in progress or find new ideas for your future film projects.

We are open to all filmmakers of any level, wanting to watch or show and discuss your work. It can be drama, doc, finished or unfinished.

Is crowdsourcing a viable tool for literary historians and critics to use in their research? How might the fruits of crowdsourced projects be used for both close and ‘distant’ reading in the humanities? This talk will provide an overview of ‘Shakespeare’s World’: a collaboration between the world-leading academic crowdsourcing group called Zooniverse.org (Oxford) the Folger Shakespeare Library which heads up the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) project, and the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Shakespeare’s World’ invites members of the public to transcribe manuscript material from the Folger collection. The outcomes will be incorporated into the Folger catalogue, and be made freely available for research. This talk will provide some early findings and visualizations of the resulting data.

Dr Victoria Van Hyning completed her doctoral work at the University of Sheffield, in the department of English Language and Literature, where she held a British Library co-doctoral award. Her work focused on English nuns in exile between 1550 and 1800, and their literary activities. Shortly after completing her doctoral studies she began work at Zooniverse, in Oxford, as the Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, and led the development of AnnoTate (with Tate Britain), Science Gossip (with the Biodiversity Heritage Library) and ‘Shakespeare’s World’. She now holds a three year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in the English Faculty at Oxford, is the Humanities PI of Zooniverse, and a JRF at Pembroke College.

As part of National Dementia Week and in partnership with the Ultimate Picture Palace, Science Oxford hosts a showing of Iris.

She wrote about the power of the unconscious – but it was memory that consumed her.

This award-winning, biographical film tells the story of a romance between two Oxford students – the wilful, philosophical novelist Iris Murdoch and her devoted husband, English scholar John Bayley. Starring Dame Judi Dench, Kate Winslet and Jim Broadbent, it charts Iris’ early life and tragic decline as Alzheimer’s disease took hold of this once brilliant woman. The film will be followed by a discussion (led by a dementia expert) which explores the role reversals, relationship strains and identity crises that can accompany Alzheimer’s disease.

’An intelligent, literate film with a sure sense of its world and honest, moving performances.’ Geoff Andrew, Time Out

Age 15+

The Technology and Management Centre for Development at the Oxford Department of International Development invites you to our upcoming research seminars.
These research seminars are intended to connect active researchers and students on the topics of innovation, technology and management for development. This is a chance to exchange ideas, learn and connect not just with TMCD staff, researchers and fellows but also the innovation research community at large at Oxford. These afternoons are a great opportunity to seek feedback and learn new viewpoints on our research interests.
Sandwiches and refreshments will be provided.
Open to students, lecturers, practitioners and researchers.

Film Oxford Production Group is for anyone who wants to be part of actually making a film. You can come in at any point in the process from the idea through to the final editing. Whilst the film production group offers the opportunity to get involved in hands-on production, you will still need some filmmaking skills to take part.

Join Mats Fridlund (Aalto University, Finland) at the Museum as he examines the power of terrorizing things and the containment of British emotions from the 19th century to the present day.
Doors open at 18:30.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter are hugely popular in modern life and bring many benefits. However they also risk ‘digital wildfires’ in which provocative content in the form of hate speech, misinformation or inflammatory posts etc. spreads rapidly and causes serious harm to individuals, groups and communities.

This talk describes current research on digital wildfires. The research examines how provocative content spreads on social media and the impacts that it has. It also seeks to identify ways to promote the responsible governance of social media – in which the harms caused by digital wildfires are prevented or limited but rights to freedom of speech are also protected.

Helena Webb is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. She works as part of the Human Centred Research group, which examines the inter-relationships between technology and social practices. She has worked on a variety of research projects and is interested in communication, organization and the use of technology in everyday work and interaction. Most recently she has been working on the ‘Digital Wildfire’ project.

TUE, 24 MAY AT 14:00, OXFORD
Strachey Lecture – Quantum Supremacy – Dr Scott Aaronson (MIT, UT Austin)

Quantum Supremacy
In the near future, it will likely become possible to perform special-purpose quantum computations that, while not immediately useful for anything, are plausibly hard to simulate using a classical computer. These “quantum supremacy experiments” would be a scientific milestone—decisively answering quantum computing skeptics, while casting doubt on one of the foundational tenets of computer science, the Extended Church-Turing Thesis. At the same time, these experiments also raise fascinating questions for computational complexity theorists: for example, on what grounds should we believe that a given quantum system really is hard to simulate classically?
Does classical simulation become easier as a quantum system becomes noisier? and how do we verify the results of such an experiment? In this lecture, I’ll discuss recent results and open problems about these questions, using three proposed “quantum supremacy experiments”
as examples: BosonSampling, IQP / commuting Hamiltonians, and random quantum circuits.
Based partly on joint work with Alex Arkhipov and with Lijie Chen.

Hosted by the University of Oxford’s Department of Computer Science. The Strachey Lectures are generously supported by OxFORD Asset Management.
The lecture will followed by refreshments. Doors open at 1.30 pm.

Many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are characterised by an acute shortage of trained doctors and nurses, and a strong reliance on community health workers. In this talk, drawing on recent research in urban and rural Kenya, we explore whether mobile technologies can help overcome barriers to health care training, leading to improved provision and delivery of health care services for marginalised populations. Analysing the barriers to care experienced by mothers of children with disabilities, we ask how technology can contribute to the more equitable provision of health care, the challenges of integrating mobiles into existing health care structures and implications for future research agendas.

An introductory talk of about twenty minutes, followed by Q&As and an hour or so’s discussion among the audience. You’re welcome to come along just to listen, or to take an active part in the discussion.

Data, long understood as essential evidence for scholarship, are now viewed as products to be shared, reused, and curated. Libraries, long understood to be responsible for curating the products of scholarship, are now assessing their roles in acquiring, managing, and sustaining access to research data. While libraries have adapted to the evolution of document technologies for centuries – from papyri to eReaders – accepting long-term obligations for research data may reposition the role of the library in the university. Publications, the traditional remit of libraries, play established roles in scholarship. Data are much different entities than publications. Rarely do they stand alone, separable from software, protocols, lab and field conditions, and other context. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. They are a lens to observe the rapidly changing landscape of scholarly work in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Inside the black box of data is a plethora of research, technology, and policy issues. Concerns for data sharing and open access raise questions about what data to keep, what to share, when, how, and with whom. The stakes and stakeholders in research data are many and varied, posing new challenges for scholars, librarians, policy makers, publishers, students, and their partners. This talk is drawn from Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2015), much of which was written at the University of Oxford when the author was an Oliver Smithies Fellow at Balliol College in 2012-2013.

Christine L. Borgman, Distinguished Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA, is the author of more than 250 publications in information studies, computer science, and communication. These include three books from MIT Press: Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (2015), winner of the 2015 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in Computing and Information Sciences; Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (2007); and From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World (2000). The latter two books won the Best Information Science Book of the Year award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Computing Machinery; a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center; U.S. Co-Chair of the CODATA-ICSTI Task Group on Data Citation and Attribution; and previously served on the U.S. National Academies’ Board on Research Data and Information and the U.S. National CODATA. She received the Paul Evan Peters Award from the Coalition for Networked Information, Association for Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE, and the Research in Information Science Award from ASIST. In 2004-2005 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Internet Institute; in 2012-2013, she was an Oliver Smithies Fellow at Balliol College and a Visiting Scholar at both the Oxford Internet Institute and the Oxford eResearch Centre, University of Oxford. Prof. Borgman directs the Center for Knowledge Infrastructures at UCLA with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

The Pembroke Film Masterclass Series turns to the dreams and hardships of migration with an event featuring award-winning director Aldo Iuliano and David di Donatello award-winning editor Marco Spoletini, joining us to discuss their new film, Penalty.

An exclusive prescreening at Oxford of Penalty, shot by Golden Osella laureate Daniele Ciprì and edited by David di Donatello Award-winner Spoletini, will be preceded by a brief introduction to the cinema of migration by Professor Guido Bonsaver. The prescreening will be followed by a talk with the film’s director and editor, and the screening of a making-of featurette, as well as a special message from the DoP, Ciprì.

An open-format discussion with the artists will conclude the masterclass. Do not miss the chance to be part of this important international event discussing the place of migration in society and contemporary European cinema. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required on the Eventbrite page: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-migrants-journey-penalty-tickets-25365915135 Find out more about Penalty on the Pembroke Film Masterclass website: http://www.pembrokefilmmasterclass.com/

Moisés Hernández-Fernandez from the Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain, University of Oxford, UK will present a seminar on the
1st of June 2016, (at 1pm) entitled

“White Matter Tractography and Human Brain
Connections Using GPUs”

Abstract

Understanding the human brain is one of the key scientific challenges of the 21st century. A key component for gaining insight into brain functional mechanisms is understanding the underlying anatomical and structural organisation and how functional subunits are interconnected at the global and local scale. Studying brain organisation (and its potential disruptions) is also a necessary first step for investigating the etiology, progression and pathology of neurological and psychiatric diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. Diffusion MRI (dMRI) uniquely allows us to study such organisation, reveal the wiring diagram of the brain, and provide estimates of tissue microstructure non-invasively and in-vivo. Despite its great potential and its wide use, the analysis includes the very time-consuming statistical modelling of four-dimensional datasets that restrict the potential and the clinical applicability of the technology. We present a novel parallel framework for analysis of dMRI data that exploits the immense computational power provided by modern GPUs and allows accelerations of up to two orders of magnitude when comparing GPU performance with a single-threaded CPU implementation.

This talk details the research that led to the NVIDIA 2016 GPU Centre of Excellence Achievement Award.

About the speaker

Moisés Hernández-Fernandez is a DPhil student at the Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain, University of Oxford. His research focuses on high performance computing applied to the analysis of diffusion MRI (dMRI) data. He is interested in how parallel computer architectures, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), can be used in scientific applications that require very high computational resources. His current work uses GPUs for resolving tissue microstructural patterns and for estimating long-range brain connectivity.

This seminar is open to all and will start at 1pm in the OeRc Conference Room
(Room 278)

****Lunch will be made available****

A free chance to see the 2015 film directed by Stephen Spielberg and based on a true story. Bridge of Spies stars Tom Hanks, who plays Jim Donovan, an American lawyer recruited by the CIA in 1957 to represent Rudolph Abel at trail, after the European artist, living in the US, was arrested for spying for the Russians.

Set during the Cold War, during a time of intense distrust and fear of nuclear capabilities, the move was to ensure Abel had a fair trail. That small act of fairness played out into a drama of complexities, as Donovan successfully pleads for Abel to get life imprisonment, rather than the death sentence. His argument was that Abel may be a fair future exchange for any US citizens imprisoned by the Russians.

An introductory talk of about twenty minutes, followed by Q&As and an hour or so’s discussion among the audience. You’re welcome to come along just to listen, or to take an active part in the discussion.

Phil Barry is the founder of Blokur and will be talking about how blockchain might be used to transform the music industry, including a demonstration of Ujo.

Phil’s work with Imogen Heap attracted major media attention
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/06/imogen-heap-saviour-of-music-industry
This promises to be a fascinating talk and a great example of how the potential of Ethereum is already being realised.