Congratulations to Carl Rasmussen for being awarded the 4th Year Best Lecturer Award in the Engineering department for his teaching in the course “4F13: Machine Learning”. You can find details about the course on our homepage. The excellence in teaching award is voted on by 4th year students in the department.
Richard Turner has been appointed University Lectureship in Computer Vision and Machine Learning. His research programme spans computer perception, signal processing, machine learning, and neuroscience. He’ll strengthen connections between the Computational and Biological Learning Lab, the Machine Intelligence Lab and the Signal Processing Lab.
Richard Turner’s website: http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~turner/
Prof. John Cunningham’s article “Neural population dynamics during reaching”, work completed while a Post-Doc in the Machine Learning Group, is published in the journal Nature. From the abstract:
“Most theories of motor cortex have assumed that neural activity represents movement parameters. This view derives from what is known about primary visual cortex, where neural activity represents patterns of light. Yet it is unclear how well the analogy between motor and visual cortex holds. Single-neuron responses in motor cortex are complex, and there is marked disagreement regarding which movement parameters are represented. A better analogy might be with other motor systems, where a common principle is rhythmic neural activity. Here we find that motor cortex responses during reaching contain a brief but strong oscillatory component, something quite unexpected for a non-periodic behaviour. Oscillation amplitude and phase followed naturally from the preparatory state, suggesting a mechanistic role for preparatory neural activity. These results demonstrate an unexpected yet surprisingly simple structure in the population response. This underlying structure explains many of the confusing features of individual neural responses.”
The article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11129.html
Press articles: Department; The Atlantic.
Prof. John Cunningham’s website at Washington University in St. Louis: http://cunningham.wustl.edu/
PhD student Yarin Gal wins prestigious Google Europe Doctoral Fellowship in Machine Learning. This year 15 fellowships were awarded to new doctoral students across Europe. From the ‘Research at Google’ website:
“We introduced the Google Fellowship programme in 2009 in the United States to broaden our support of university research. Universities continue to be the source of some of the most innovative research in computer science, and in particular it is the students that they foster who are the future of our field. In 2010, we extended the fellowship programme to Universities in Europe.”
Press release: http://research.google.com/university/relations/fellowship_recipients.html
PhD student James Lloyd places third out of over 100 competitors in the Load Forecasting track of the Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2012 (GEFCom2012), sponsored by the IEEE Power & Energy Society. From the competition website:
“This competition will bring together the state-of-the-art techniques for energy forecasting, serve as the bridge to connect academic research and industry practice, promote analytics in power engineering education, and prepare the industry to overcome forecasting challenges in the smart grid world.”
Competition website and leaderboard: http://www.kaggle.com/c/global-energy-forecasting-competition-2012-load-forecasting
James Lloyd’s website: http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/lloyd/
Dan Roy‘s PhD dissertation, “Computability, inference and modeling in probabilistic programming”, has been selected as a winner of a MIT/EECS Sprowls Award, recognizing it as one of the best dissertations in Computer Science at MIT in 2011.
Simon Lacoste-Julien has been awarded a prestigious Research in Paris grant, and will take up further post-doctoral studies with Francis Bach in the SIERRA project team located in the joint INRIA/CNRS/Ecole Normale Superieure computer science laboratory, starting on September 1st 2011.
Andrew Gordon Wilson has won the Best Student Paper Award at UAI 2011 for his work on Generalised Wishart Processes. The Engineering Department’s news story can be found here.
Dan Roy awarded Newton International Fellowship, as well as a Fellowship at Emmanuel College.
Frederik Eaton has won a Notable Paper Award for his AISTATS 2011 paper on his approximation framework “A conditional game for comparing approximations“. A video of the associated talk is available on videolectures.net.