Spires 2024 - Welcome & Schedule

It is a great pleasure to announce the 4th annual Centre for Topological Data Analysis conference, which will be held Wednesday 7 August - Friday 9 August 2024,  in Lecture Room 2 at the Mathematical Institute,  Andrew Wiles Building, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG, UK.

This international conference will bring together leading researchers and young talent in the field of topological data analysis and cognate areas.   Applications  of TDA will be discussed and the future of the field reflected upon.

Schedule

You can also find the program here

Departmental Colloquium Friday 9 Aug 4pm

Prof. Gunnar Carlsson

Topology and the Curse of Dimensionality

The "curse of dimensionality" refers to the host of difficulties that occur when we attempt to extend our intuition about what happens in low dimensions (i.e. when there are only a few features or variables)  to very high dimensions (when there are hundreds or thousands of features, such as in genomics or imaging).  With very high-dimensional data, there is often an intuition that although the data is nominally very high dimensional, it is typically concentrated around a much lower dimensional, although non-linear set. There are many approaches to identifying and representing these subsets.  We will discuss topological approaches, which represent non-linear sets with graphs and simplicial complexes, and permit the "measuring of the shape of the data" as a tool for identifying useful lower dimensional representations. 

Registration

Please register here by 8 July 2024. If you require conference accommodation please register by 6 May 2024.

Travel and Accommodation

60 ensuite rooms with wifi and breakfast have been reserved at St Catherine's College. These will be available for free on application. Applications for accommodation close on 6 May. Otherwise, please make your own arrangements.

Please make your own travel arrangements. See here for more information. 

Social Events

The conference dinner will be held on Thursday 8 August in Magdalen College. Drinks will be served at 6:45pm before dinner at 7.30pm in The Hall. 

 A reception will be held after the departmental Colloquium on Friday 9 August at 5pm.

Organisers

Heather Harrington, Vidit Nanda and Ulrike Tillmann

Conference office

Nicola Kirkham

@email

Funding

The conference is funded by the EPSRC-supported Centre for Topological Data Analysis, a multi-million-pound project led by  Mathematical Institute (MI) and Department of Statistics of University of Oxford, with partners at the Materials Innovation Factory (MIF) at the University of Liverpool and the Computational Foundry at Swansea University.