Back in October, for the first time, we filmed an actual student lecture, Vicky Neale's lecture on 'Complex Numbers.' We wanted to show what studying at Oxford is really like, how it is not so different to school while at the same time taking things to a more rigorous level. Since we made the film available, over 375,000 people have watched some of it.
Persistence of Random Structures
Abstract
This talk will cover the connections of persistence with the topology of random structures. This includes an overview of various results from stochastic topology as well as the role persistence ideas play in the analysis. This will include results on the maximally persistent classes and minimum spanning acycles/generalised trees.
Chasing memories
Abstract
Short- and long-term memories are distinguished by their forgettability. Most of what we perceive and store is lost rather quickly to noise, as new sensations replace older ones, while some memories last for as long as we live. Synaptic dynamics is key to the process of memory storage; in this talk I will discuss a few approaches we have taken to this problem, culminating in a model of synaptic networks containing both cooperative and competitive dynamics. It turns out that the competitionbetween synapses is key to the natural emergence of long-term memory in this model, as in reality.
References
Mehta, Anita. "Storing and retrieving long-term memories: cooperation and competition in synaptic dynamics." Advances in Physics: X 3.1 (2018): 1480415.