Place and Time: Abingdon, Thursday 19 Oct 2017  from 19:00 for 19:30

Barn Room, Crown and Thistle (18 Bridge St, Abingdon OX14 3HS)

TITLE: Volcanoes and Global Change

Since the 1990s there have been significant advances in our understanding of the ways in which volcanism interacts with Earth’s surface environment. This talk will explore some of these advances and explore the ways in which volcanism might have lead to long-term global change during geological history.

Speaker: Tamsin Mather

Tamsin Mather is a professor of Earth Science at the University of Oxford. Her main research interests center on the science behind volcanoes and volcanic behavior. My motivation is to understand volcanoes as (a) natural hazards, (b) a key planetary scale process throughout geological time, vital for maintaining habitability and (c) natural resources (e.g., geothermal power and the development of ore deposits).

Place and Time: Abingdon, Thursday 21 Sep 2017 from 19:00 for 19:30

Barn Room, Crown and Thistle (18 Bridge St, Abingdon OX14 3HS)

TITLE: Are you afraid of the dark? The Interplay of Galaxies and Dark Matter

Galaxies are huge clusters of hundreds of billions of stars – the Milky Way is our galaxy, itself just one of many billions more. But even these are diminutive compared with the sea in which they swim, dark matter, an unknown substance we cannot see with our telescopes because it doesn’t give off light.

Nonetheless, astronomers have developed several techniques to indirectly study dark matter. In this talk I will describe how powerful telescopes in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa help us look back in time over the history of the Universe to see how the creation and development of galaxies is linked to dark matter, hopefully helping us learn more about the galaxies we see today and potentially even something about the mysterious nature of dark matter itself.

I will discuss the current research being done in Oxford using the VISTA telescope in Chile, as well as what the future holds for cosmology and galaxy evolution, in particular the Square Kilometre Array, a radio telescope being built in South Africa, and the planned Euclid space telescope – each of which will observe billions of galaxies from the current day back to the beginning of time.

Speaker: Peter Hatfield

Peter is a postdoctoral researcher in the Physics Department at the University of Oxford working on problems in high energy density physics and astrophysics, working with Professor Steven Rose.

He completed his D.Phil. at Lincoln College, University of Oxford earlier this year working with Professor Matt Jarvis. Before this he completed a BA in Mathematics and a MSci in Astrophysics at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. He has also spent time working on research projects in California and South Africa.

He is also Chair of the Student Advisory Board for the Institute for Research in Schools, a new UK-wide charitable foundation that supports secondary school students doing real scientific research.

Place and Time: Abingdon, Thursday 17 August 2017  from 19:00 for 19:30

Barn Room, Crown and Thistle (18 Bridge St, Abingdon OX14 3HS)

TITLE: How to train your computer to have a cup of tea and a chit-chat

Recent years has seen the explosion of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based technologies, along with buzz words like “machine learning”, “computer vision” and “self-driving cars”.

These leaps and bounds can largely be attributed to the neural network, an algorithmic structure which takes inspiration from the human brain, a biological tissue which functions through the synchronous and asynchronous activity of networks of elementary units or neurons. In this talk I will step through how computer vision scientists are using neural networks to teach computers to automatically understand images and videos. The goal of my PhD, however, is not just to get a computer to understand images, but to enable it to converse with a human, and for this, the computer must also have a grasp of language.

I will demonstrate how neural networks are being used to parse questions and produce meaningful and correct answers based on the images that the computer “sees”. My ultimate application is to use these advances to develop a smart AI-based chatbot with computer vision “eyes” that will make the lives of visually-impaired people easier: from navigating them around cities and new environments, to guiding them around their homes, helping them make a cup of tea and engaging with them in some chit-chat.

Speaker: Daniela Massiceti

Place and Time: Abingdon, Thursday 20 July 2017  from 19:00 for 19:30

Barn Room, Crown and Thistle (18 Bridge St, Abingdon OX14 3HS)

TITLE: Imaging Fast Phenomena: the world of high speed photography

Just as a microscope opens up the world of small distances, high speed photography opens the world of short times.  Since the advent of photography itself, people have attempted to visualise events that are too fast for the human eye.  This talk will give an overview of both early and modern techniques used to build cameras capable of thousands, and now millions, of frames per second and explore some applications of high speed imaging in science and engineering.

Speaker: Clive Siviour

Clive Siviour is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science, Oxford University.  His research focusses on the development of experimental techniques for measuring the behaviour of materials and structures under impact.  He has a particular interest in the use of high speed photography to visualise and quantify this behaviour.

Place and Time: Abingdon, Thursday 15 June 2017  from 19:00 for 19:30

Barn Room, Crown and Thistle (18 Bridge St, Abingdon OX14 3HS)

TITLE: Deep Underground Science

The surface of our planet is continuously bombarded by high energy cosmic rays from outer space, creating a deafening noise in sensitive particle detectors and making precision measurements impossible. In search of the ultimate quiet, physicists have travelled underground and set up labs deep within the Earth’s crust. Here we run experiments studying elusive particles like neutrinos, and searching for signs of dark matter, the mysterious substance thought to make up the majority of the mass of the galaxy.

Yet a kilometre or so below the surface is also the place to study a range of natural phenomena, such as the enigmatic movement of groundwater, possible earthquake warning signals, and the exotic microbial life in deep rock layers. Away from the electromagnetic noise on the surface, precision magnetic measurements let us monitor the space weather going on high above our heads.

I will tell my story of working at the Gran Sasso laboratory beneath the mountains of central Italy, the Rustrel laboratory in a former nuclear command centre in the South of France, and the Boulby Underground Laboratory in a North Yorkshire salt mine. This talk will explain why the deep underground frontier is one of the most interesting environments to do science.

Speaker: Sam Henry

Sam Henry is a Detector Development Scientist at the University of Oxford, working on instrumentation for the next generation of particle physics experiments. He also likes to dabble in geophysics and science outreach.