Wondering what the University Counselling Service does for DPhil students? Reflecting on how best to manage your work/life balance for the forthcoming academic year? Worried about your wellbeing or mental health? Or just interested in finding out more about individual counselling, wellbeing workshops, or therapy groups? If so, you are very welcome to meet the Counselling Service in the Radcliffe Science Library Wellbeing Room. Tea, coffee, and biscuits provided. No booking necessary.
A reminder that the Common Room will be in use for a private event 13:30-17:00 on Tuesday 10th and 13:00-16:30 on Wednesday 11th September. The kitchenettes will remain accessible, but we ask that you please use Reception to move between North and South during those time slots. AV technicians may come into the space to do set up in the morning, but they will work around any other users of the space.
Old Bodleian Tour for Postdocs, 18th Sept 11:00 – 12:00
The Radcliffe Science Library (RSL) is offering a tour of the Old Bodleian Library to science postdocs. Escorted by a member of the RSL Subject Librarian Team, you will be shown some of our historic libraries including Duke Humfrey’s and the Radcliffe Camera. Spaces are limited and booking is essential.
Submissions are now open for the first year of the prize, which will be awarded in 2025.
The prize will recognise young researchers who apply techniques in artificial intelligence (AI) – such as machine learning, natural language processing, or computer vision – to help the life sciences research community solve important problems and accelerate their work.
Are numbers essential for counting? Probably, in a world where we don’t just want to know if something is good, but exactly how good. But it wasn’t always the case.
In this clip from his Vicky Neale Public Lecture, Tim Harford demonstrates that earlier cultures used alternate ways to keep track.
Who needs a residual when an approximation will do?
Abstract
The widespread need to solve large-scale linear systems has sparked a growing interest in randomized techniques. One such class of techniques is known as iterative random sketching methods (e.g., Randomized Block Kaczmarz and Randomized Block Coordinate Descent). These methods "sketch" the linear system to generate iterative, easy-to-compute updates to a solution. By working with sketches, these methods can often enable more efficient memory operations, potentially leading to faster performance for large-scale problems. Unfortunately, tracking the progress of these methods still requires computing the full residual of the linear system, an operation that undermines the benefits of the solvers. In practice, this cost is mitigated by occasionally computing the full residual, typically after an epoch. However, this approach sacrifices real-time progress tracking, resulting in wasted computations. In this talk, we use statistical techniques to develop a progress estimation procedure that provides inexpensive, accurate real-time progress estimates at the cost of a small amount of uncertainty that we effectively control.