Scientific

Alan Turing, the Politics of Sexual Science, and the Making of a Gay Icon

Speaker: 
Chris Waters
Date: 
Tue, Nov 6, 2012
Location: 
University of Calgary
Conference: 
Alan Turing Year
Abstract: 

In the 1940s Alan Turing’s homosexuality was an open secret amongst his co-workers at Bletchley Park. In 1952 the secret became widely known when Turing was arrested on charges of “gross indecency” under the same 1885 law that had led to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde over half a century earlier. Opting for chemical “treatment” of his “condition” rather than imprisonment, Turing was one of many well-known casualties of a heightened drive against homosexuality in a postwar Britain that drew the line between the normal and the deviant more sharply than ever before. In his talk, Chris Waters will discuss Turing’s sexual proclivities and their meanings in the context of his times, focusing in particular on his arrest and subsequent fate in the context of the sexual politics of the first half of the 1950s. In addition, he will discuss the shaping of Turing’s posthumous reputation, beginning with the attempts made by the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s to render Turing the gay icon he has become today.

Class: 

Turing and Intelligent Machines

Speaker: 
Nicole Wyatt
Date: 
Tue, Dec 4, 2012
Location: 
University of Calgary
Conference: 
Alan Turing Year
Abstract: 

Turing's interest in the possibility of machine intelligence is probably most familiar in the form of the 'Turing Test', a version of which has been instantiated since 1991 as the Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence. To this date the Loebner Gold Medal has not been won. But should any future winner of the prize count themselves as having created a computer that thinks? Turing's 1950 Mind paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', gives a sustained defence of the claim that a machine able to pass the test, which Turing called the Imitation Game, would indeed qualify as thinking. This lecture will explain the Turing Test as well as Turing's more general views concerning the prospects for artificial intelligence and examine both the criticisms of the test and Turing's rebuttals

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Pumps, Maps and Pea Soup: Spatio-temporal methods in environmental epidemiology

Speaker: 
Gavin Shaddick
Date: 
Fri, Jan 4, 2013
Location: 
Room 2012 Earth Sciences Building
Conference: 
Constance van Eeden Invited Speaker, UBC Statistics Department
Abstract: 

Further information about the Constance van Eeden Invited Speaker Program

This talk provides an introduction to epidemiological analysis where the distribution of health outcomes and related exposures are measured over both space and time. Developments in this field have been driven by public interest in the effects of environmental pollution, increased availability of data and increases in computing power. These factors, together with recent advances in the field of spatio-temporal statistics, have led to the development of models which can consider relationships between adverse health outcomes and environmental exposures over both time and space simultaneously.

Using illustrative examples, from outbreaks of cholera in London in the 1850s, episodes of smog in the 1950s to present day epidemiological studies, we discuss a variety of issues commonly associated with analyses of this type including modelling auto-correlation, preferential sampling of exposures and ecological bias. The precise choice of statistical model may be based on whether we are explicitly interested in the spatio-temporal pattern of disease incidence, e.g. disease mapping and cluster detection, or whether clustering is a nuisance quantity that we need to acknowledge, e.g. spatio-temporal regression. Throughout we consider the practical implementation of models with specific focus on inference within a Bayesian framework using computational methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo and Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations.

The talk also serves as a precursor to a graduate level course on spatio-temporal methods in epidemiology. This course will cover the basic concepts of epidemiology, methods for temporal and spatial analysis and the practical application of such methods using commonly available computer packages. It will have an applied focus with both lectures and practical computer sessions in which participants will be guided through analyses of epidemiological data.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION: The Statistics Department, with the support of the Constance van Eeden Fund, is honoured to host Dr Gavin Shaddick during term 2 2012-13. Dr Shaddick, a Reader in Statistics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath, has achieved international prominence for his contributions to the theory and application of Bayesian statistics to the areas of spatial epidemiology, environmental health risk and the modelling of spatio-temporal fields of environmental hazards.

Dr Shaddick will begin his visit to the Department, by giving the 2012-13 van Eeden lecture. That lecture will inaugurate a one term special topics graduate course in statistics, which the Department of Statistics is offering next term. It will be given by Dr Shaddick and Dr James Zidek (Statistics, UBC) on the subject of spatial epidemiology. This course, which is aimed primarily at a statistical audience, will provide an introduction to environmental epidemiology and spatio-temporal process modeling, as it applies to the assessment of risk to human health and welfare due to random fields of hazards such as air pollution. Please see the course outline for more information.

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An Octahedral Gem Hidden in Newton's Three Body Problem (2012 Marsden Memorial Lecture)

Speaker: 
Richard Montgomery
Date: 
Wed, Jul 25, 2012
Location: 
Fields Institute
Conference: 
Focus Program on Geometry, Mechanics and Dynamics
Marsden Memorial Lecture
Abstract: 

Richard Montgomery, University of California, Santa Cruz will deliver a talk entitled, "An Octahedral Gem Hidden in Newton's Three Body Problem." The lecture will take place on July 25, 2012 at the Fields Institute, as part of the conference on "Geometry, Symmetry, Dynamics, and Control: The Legacy of Jerry Marsden."

Richard Montgomery received undergraduate degrees in both mathematics and physics from Sonoma State in Northern California. He completed his PhD under Jerry Marsden at Berkeley in 1986, after which he held a Moore Instructorship at MIT for two years, followed by two years of postdoctoral studies at University of California, Berkeley.

Montgomery's research fields are geometric mechanics, celestial mechanics, control theory and differential geometry and is perhaps best known for his rediscovery - with Alain Chenciner - of Cris Moore's figure eight solution to the three-body problem, which led to numerous new 'choreography' solutions. He also established the existence of the first-known abnormal minimizer in sub-Riemannian geometry, and is known for investigations using gauge-theoretic ideas of how a falling cat lands on its feet. He has written one book on sub-Riemannian geometry.

The PIMS Marsden Memorial Lecture Series is dedicated to the memory of Jerrold E Marsden (1942-2010), a world-renowned Canadian applied mathematician. Marsden was the Carl F Braun Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems at Caltech, and prior to that he was at the University of California, Berkeley, for many years. He did extensive research in the areas of geometric mechanics, dynamical systems and control theory. He was one of the original founders in the early 1970s of reduction theory for mechanical systems with symmetry, which remains an active and much studied area of research today.

The inaugural Marsden Memorial Lecture was given by Alan Weinstein (University of California, Berkeley) in July of 2011 at ICIAM in Vancouver.

Class: 

Numbers and Shapes

Speaker: 
Henri Darmon
Date: 
Thu, Nov 1, 2012
Location: 
PIMS, University of Calgary
Conference: 
Hugh C. Morris Lecture
Abstract: 

Number theory is concerned with Diophantine equations and their solutions, encoded in discrete structures involving integers, rational numbers or algebraic quantities. Topology studies the properties of shapes that are unchanged under continuous or smooth deformations, a technique of choice being the construction of appropriate homological invariants. It turns out--perhaps surprisingly to the uninitiated--that these invariants can be endowed with sufficient structure to capture a tremendous amount of arithmetic information. The powerful interplay between arithmetic and topological ideas underlies the most important breakthroughs in the study of Diophantine equations, such as Faltings’ proof of the Mordell Conjecture and Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. It is also at the heart of more recent and still very fragmentary attempts to construct algebraic points on elliptic curves when their existence is predicted by the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. This lecture will attempt to give a non-technical sampler of some of the rich, fascinating interactions between arithmetic questions and topological insights.

Class: 

Predicting Criminal Incidents Using Geographic, Demographic, and Twitter-derived Information

Speaker: 
Donald E. Brown
Date: 
Thu, Sep 20, 2012
Location: 
IRMACS Center, Simon Fraser University
Conference: 
Hot Topics in Computational Criminology
Abstract: 

Predictive policing seeks to anticipate the times and locations of crimes to better allocate law enforcement resources to combat these crimes. The key to predictive policing is modeling that
combines available data to forecast or estimate the areas most threatened by crimes at different times. We have developed models that integrate geographic, demographic, and social media information from a specific area of interest to produce the needed predictions. In this presentation, I describe our approach to this predictive modeling, which combines spatial-temporal generalized additive models (STGAM) with a new approach to text mining. We use the STGAM to predict the probability of criminal activity at a given location and time within the area of interest. Our new approach to text mining combines Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to identify and use key topics in social media relevant to criminal activity. We use social media since these data provide a rich, event-based context for criminal incidents. I present our application of this approach to actual criminal incidents in Charlottesville, Virginia. Our results indicate that this combined modeling approach outperforms models that only use geographic and demographic data.

Class: 

Population dynamics and cellular automata for the description of criminality

Speaker: 
M. Primicerio
Date: 
Thu, Sep 20, 2012
Location: 
IRMACS Center, Simon Fraser University
Conference: 
Hot Topics in Computational Criminology
Abstract: 

In this paper we study the dynamics of a population where the individuals can either be contributors (tax payers) or no contributors (tax evaders or cheaters). We introduce a 2D cellular automaton on which the probability of transition from one of the above states to the other is the sum of the local effect and of the global field effect. The model also includes the policy that allocates a fraction of the budget to fight tax evasion. This scheme allowed us to simulate the cases in which inhomogeneous strategies in contrasting tax evasion is applied in a region and the case in which cooperative policies are adopted by neighbor societies.

Point Process Methods for Crime Hotspots

Speaker: 
George Mohler
Date: 
Fri, Nov 2, 2012
Location: 
IRMACS Center, Simon Fraser University
Conference: 
Hot Topics in Computational Criminology
Abstract: 

This talk focuses on the application of point process methods to crime and security data. We will discuss semi- and non- parametric models, as well as their estimation using Expectation-Maximization algorithms. We conclude the talk with some results from a randomized controlled trial in Los Angeles where police patrols are determined each day using a semi-parametric self-exciting point process.

Crime hot-spots with or without Levi Flights

Speaker: 
Theodore Kolokolnikov
Date: 
Fri, Sep 21, 2012
Location: 
IRMACS Center, Simon Fraser University
Conference: 
Hot Topics in Computational Criminology
Abstract: 

In the first part of the talk, we consider the Short et.al. model of crime. This model exhibits hot-spots of crime -- localized areas of high criminal activity. In a certain asymptotic limit, we use singular perturbation theory to construct the profile of these hot-spots and then study their stability.
In the second part of the talk, we extend the original model to incorporate biased Levi Flights for the criminal's motion. Such motion is considered to be more realistic than the biased diffusion that was originally proposed. This generalization leads to fractional Laplacians. We then investigate the effect of introducing the Levi Flights on the formation of hot-spots using linear stability and full numerics.
Joint works with Jonah Breslau, Tum Chaturapruek, Daniel Yazdi, Scott McCalla, Michael Ward and Juncheng Wei.

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