Hiding in Plain Sight: The promises and pitfalls of secret communication - Alastair Beresford (Professor of Computer Security and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge)
This term's Strachey Lecture is especially relevant to anyone who works on or has an interest in cryptography -- as it's by the architect of The Guardian's system that allows people to securely pass on news tips.
We are currently inviting applications for a Research Assistant in combinatorial 4-manifold topology to work with Professor Christopher Douglas at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. This is a full-time, fixed-term position for 10 months, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the grant “Computable Manifolds”. The successful candidate will be expected to start as soon as possible.
Just five places remain for the award-winning MPLS RisingWISE programme, designed for women postdocs working in STEMM disciplines.
We're particularly keen to increase applications from MPLS women postdocs as the programme is funded via the EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account. Don’t miss this opportunity to build leadership skills, expand your professional network, and connect with an inspiring cohort of women from across the division.
We are currently inviting applications for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Mathematical Modelling of Batteries to work with Professor Jon Chapman at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. This is a 41-month, fixed-term position, funded by the Faraday Institution. The successful candidate will be expected to be in post by 1 November 2026, or as soon as possible thereafter.
Learning PDE-based models from data: An analysis-driven perspective on identifiability, consistency, and interpretability
Abstract
Learning governing equations from data is a central problem in scientific machine learning. Given noisy and incomplete observations of a physical process, the goal is to recover the underlying law. This is often approached by fitting a neural network or a dictionary of candidate terms to the observed dynamics. A good fit, however, does not determine identifiability of the law, its approximability by what is computed, physical consistency, or interpretability as a formula. These depend largely on how the learning problem is posed.
This talk formulates the learning task as a regularized inverse problem in function space and studies how these properties can be established. Over a parameterized class of candidate laws, one minimizes a model residual, a data misfit, and a regularizer, with the class and the regularizer as the design choices. With a sufficiently expressive class and suitable regularization, one obtains a regularization-based notion of identifiability, under which the regularization-minimizing law consistent with the data is unique. As the approximation scale grows and the regularization parameters are chosen accordingly, minimizers of the parameterized problem converge to that law. For classes carrying the structural constraints of the underlying physical model, the learned models are physically consistent and well-posed by construction at every finite approximation scale. For symbolic networks built from rational building blocks, the recovered law is a readable formula. The emphasis of this talk is analytical, and first numerical experiments illustrate the recovery in practice.
Overall, the results show that identifiability, consistency, and interpretability are not competing objectives, but can be unified in one analysis-driven framework.
Bio:
Erion Morina is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Graz. He defended his PhD thesis in July 2026 under the supervision of Professor Martin Holler. His research focuses on scientific machine learning and inverse problems, with particular interests in differential equation-based model learning, neural network approximation theory, and parameter identification in medical applications.