Seminars, Journal Clubs, & Reading Groups

Information on seminars, journal clubs, and reading groups for the EPSRC CDT in Data Science.

The formal components of the CDT are supplemented with local journal clubs, tutorials, seminars, and other events relevant to your research. Because this is a new programme, you may have good ideas for events that we haven't thought of yet - if so, please let us know!

Contact us

Other CDT events are listed here:

Data Science: Events

Students are expected to participate in training and networking opportunities provided by the funding body.

Data Science research day

Data Science Research Day, an annual event, is designed to be a collaborative and networking event amongst the programme's supervisors, partners, and students studying related areas within the Schools of Informatics and Mathematics. The event gives CDT students the chance to meet with external partners, discuss research problems and data sets that might influence first-year projects, and (in later years) get practical feedback on ongoing research. Students will be asked to present their work, e.g. presentations or posters (including the MScR Summer Projects).

Data Science: Students

Data Science: Supervisors

Data Science: Partners

Data Science seminars

This series will include seminars hosted by the CDT in Data Science alongside seminars selected from existing programmes within the School of Informatics. Academic seminars will feature prestigious UK, European and international speakers, exposing students to leading research worldwide. Students will have the opportunity to meet individually with speakers in order to ask informal questions and discuss their own research. Data Science seminars will be announced via an email list, of which all CDT in Data Science students will be members.

School of Informatics seminar programmes

The institutes within the School of Informatics, as well as related departments, hold frequent events and seminars. These will likely be of interest to CDT in Data Science students and you are encouraged to attend these. Most of these seminars and events have mailing lists for which students can request membership. Even when the topic of a seminar is not situated directly within a student's field, the seminars should give students valuable opportunities to interact with academics and students from other research areas, other institutes and other universities, which will help in formulating ideas.

All institutes within the School of Informatics hold seminar programmes. For information please see the Talks and seminars page.

Talks and seminars

CDT Tea

The CDT Tea, which is led by students in the CDT in Data Science, is a fortnightly meeting for presenting on-going research. For further information, please contact datascience[a]inf.ed.ac.uk.

CDT Pizza Club

Another student-run event, held fortnightly, which provides a relaxed environment in which research interests can be communicated, talks heard from internal/external experts of your choice and discussions take place to help sweat out problem topics.  It also provides the opportunity to practice public speaking.  For further information, please contact datascience[a]inf.ed.ac.uk. 
 

School of Mathematics Seminar Programmes

The School of Mathematics also holds regular seminar programmes that may be of interest to you. The two most relevant seminar series are the Edinburgh Research Group in Optimization (ERGO) and theAll Hands Meetings on Big Data Optimization.

Edinburgh Research Group in Optimization

All Hands Meetings on Big Data Optimization

All School of Mathematics seminars are listed here: 

School of Maths: Events

School of Informatics Reading Groups

We have a large number of reading groups. These are smaller, more informal groups that discuss specific research papers of interest. Here is a partial list of reading groups that are relevant to CDT students. (More formal seminar series are listed above.)

Probabilistic Inference Group (PIGS) 

Probabilistic Inference Group (PGS)

The Probabilistic Inference Group (PIGS) is a paper discussion group that focuses on probabilistic and information theoretic approaches to machine learning problems.

Sign Up: PIGS-announce mailing list

PIGlets

PIGlets

The purpose of the session is for PhD students interested in machine learning to get to grips with advanced material sitting in difficulty above the taught courses here and below the discussions of cutting-edge material in the usual PIGS meetings.

For announcements, subscribe to PIGS-announce@inf (see above).

ML Brainstorm coffee

Brainstorm coffee

The point of this meeting is to present a self-contained (but open-ended) research problem for discussion.

For announcements, subscribe to PIGS-announce@inf (see above).

 

Three further reading groups exist (broadly mapping to Charles Sutton's group, Amos Storkey's, Chris Williams and Iain Murray's groups, as well as Guido Sanguinetti's group) with slightly different focuses:

Charles' Uncertain People (CUP) 

Charles' Uncertain People

We read textbooks, tutorial papers, survey papers etc., that provide a fundamental background for work in probabilistic machine learning.

Topics include: statistics, optimization, machine learning, and occasional forays into related areas. Everyone is welcome.

Probabilistic models of language group

EdinburghNLP

A weekly meeting of staff and students interested in probabilistic and statistical methods as used in both natural language processing systems and models of human language acquisition and processing.

Sign Up: ENLP-Meeting mailing list 

Machine learning for NLP reading group

 Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing (ML-for-NLP)

This reading group focuses on Machine Learning techniques that may be applied to the field of Natural Language Processing.

Sign Up: ML-for-NLP mailing list

Statistical Machine Translation group

Statistical Machine Translation Group: Weekly Meeting

The dream of automatically translating text or speech from one language into another is one of the oldest pursuits of artificial intelligence research. Now, armed with vast amounts of example translations and powerful computers, we are witnessing significant progress toward achieving that dream. Statistical analysis of bilingual parallel corpora, augmented to some degree with morphological, syntactic and/or semantic features, can support the automatic construction of machine translation systems, with increasing fluency and accuracy.

Ask Barry Haddow (bhaddow@inf.ed.ac.uk) or Lexi Birch (lexi.birch@gmail.com) to be added to email list.

Agents reading group 

Agents Group

For those interested in agents, multiagent systems and related topics to discuss topics in agent research, to improve our understanding of the state of the art, and to share different views and ideas on various related research issues.

Sign Up: agents-group mailing list

SynthSys seminar series

SynthSys: Events

Synthetic and Systems Biology Edinburgh. Roughly bi-weekly, almost entirely external speakers. Roughly 60% biologists/ 40% modellers.

Sign Up: SynthSys mailing list

CSTR weekly talk

CSTR: Informal Talks

A relatively informal presentation of recent or ongoing work by all members of CSTR (in rotation), including the PhD students.

Sign Up: CSTR-talks mailing list

Listen!

CSTR: Listen

CSTR's weekly meeting about automatic speech recognition, usually a discussion of a published paper which should be read in advance.

For announcements, subscribe to cstr-talks@inf (see above).

Speak!

CSTR: Speak! - Speech synthesis meeting

CSTR's weekly meeting about speech synthesis, either a discussion of a published paper which should be read in advance or an interactive discussion of ongoing research within CSTR.

For announcements, subscribe to cstr-talks@inf (see above).

Security and Privacy Group

Security and privacy

Seminars and announcements for those interested in security and privacy research in Informatics, including research on new foundations, methods and techniques and research on the application of security and privacy to other areas.  A reading group dedicated to the foundations of security and privacy concepts and techniques in Informatics.

Security and privacy: Contact

Security-Privacy mailing list: general announcements, seminars, and other events.

Sign Up: security-privacy mailing list

Security-Club mailing list: a club with informal meetings focusing on security and privacy concepts and techniques.

Sign Up: security-club mailing list