̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Statistical Laboratory

Four Cambridge researchers awarded consolidator grants from the European Research Council

cg605 — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 12:54:39 +0000

̽��ֱ��grants are part of the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme. They are given to excellent scientists and scholars at the career stage to support them to pursue their most promising scientific ideas.

Cambridge scientists, Professor Chiara Ciccarelli, Professor Rosana Collepardo-Guevara, Professor Jason Miller, and Dr Jenny Zhang have been named as awardees of ERC consolidator grants.

Professor Chiara Ciccarelli

Chiara Ciccarelli is Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at the Department of Physics. She is a Royal Society ̽��ֱ�� Research Fellow and a Fellow and Director of Studies at St Catharine's College. She said: “Our group studies magnets and seeks ways to write and read their magnetic state as fast and as energy-efficiently as possible. This is because magnets remain the best way, that we know of, to store digital data for a long time.

“Our ERC project, PICaSSO, explores new ways to ‘write’ magnets at low temperature by interfacing them with superconductors. Although this research is still at an early stage, it would allow the development of ultra-energy-efficient cryogenic memories, a necessary requirement for the realistic scaling of quantum computers.

“I am absolutely delighted to have been awarded a consolidator grant. It is an incredible opportunity to do great science and an important recognition of the work of my amazing team.”

Professor Rosana Collepardo-Guevara

Rosana Collepardo-Guevara is Professor of Computational and Molecular Biophysics at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry and the Department of Genetics. She is a Winton Advanced Research Fellow in physics, a director of postgraduate education for chemistry and a Fellow of Clare College. She said: “My group investigates the connection between genome structure and function by developing computer models and algorithms that can bridge scales, from atoms to genes, while considering the extensive chemical diversity of the genome.

“We will investigate the transformative hypothesis of phase transitions in genome organisation, which suggests that our genes are organised inside functionally diverse liquid drops. We will develop new computer models to probe how the physical properties of these droplets are regulated, and how this may contribute to the tight regulation of our genes.

“I am truly delighted and proud of my team. This success is owed to the exceptional students and postdocs that I’ve had the privilege to supervise over the years, and also to the support of my mentors, collaborators, and family. This grant will give us the opportunity to keep exploring radical ideas.”

Professor Jason Miller

Jason Miller is a professor in the Statistics Laboratory and a Fellow of Trinity College. He said: “My research is at the interface of probability theory with complex analysis, combinatorics, and geometry. ̽��ֱ��questions I study arise from models in statistical physics which are exactly at a critical point between a phase transition.

“My ERC project will be investigating critical random media in two dimensions, including models of how fluid flows through a porous medium and how the spins organise themselves in a magnet. ̽��ֱ��focus will be the study of their fractal structure and diffusion properties.

“I am very pleased to have received the grant. With the support that it provides, I will be able to form a research group to tackle longstanding questions in the area.”

Dr Jenny Zhang

Dr Jenny Zhang is a BBSRC David Phillips Research Fellow at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry. She is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. She said: “My team focuses on creating toolsets for rewiring the electrochemical pathways associated with living systems, particularly photosynthetic organisms. We do this to better understand fundamental bioenergetics and to manipulate them for various applications, such as in renewable energy generation.

“This ERC project develops an exciting new approach for accelerating the creation of synergistic interactions between biological and non-biological materials for highly efficient and robust energy exchange. ̽��ֱ��ultimate aim is to generate high performing biohybrid materials for clean energy generation.

“I am absolutely thrilled to be awarded this unique grant, which recognises all the key ingredients needed for innovation. This wonderful result was a cumulation of a lot of hard work, but also the generous support of my wonderful team and colleagues. I could not be more grateful for both the grant and the people I get to work with.”

Scientists at UK institutions have won the second greatest number of grants in Europe. Across Europe, the number of women receiving grants has increased for the third year running.

“I extend my heartfelt congratulations to all the brilliant researchers who have been selected for ERC Consolidator Grants,” said Iliana Ivanova, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth. “I'm especially thrilled to note the significant increase in the representation of women among the winners for the third consecutive year in this prestigious grant competition. This positive trend not only reflects the outstanding contributions of women researchers but also highlights the strides we are making towards a more inclusive and diverse scientific community.”

̽��ֱ��ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe.

̽��ֱ��European Research Council (ERC) has awarded grants worth a total of €627 million to 308 researchers across Europe, of whom four are at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

This grant will give us the opportunity to keep exploring radical ideas.

Professor Rosana Collepardo-Guevara

Jenny Zhang - Nathan Pitt, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Left to right: Professor Chiara Ciccarelli, Professor Jason Miller, Professor Rosana Collepardo-Guevara, and Dr Jenny Zhang

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

KPMG and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge unveil new partnership to reimagine the world of work, starting with mental wellbeing

skbf2 — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 08:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and KPMG have today unveiled a new partnership to understand how the world of work is changing, starting with what really works when it comes to supporting employees’ mental wellbeing.

̽��ֱ��partnership is a global first and sees the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge bring together researchers from different disciplines to better understand the factors that affect mental wellbeing at work. It will show how different kinds of supports can boost individual mental wellbeing, enhance productivity and promote a healthy workforce for the future.

KPMG will open its doors to Cambridge researchers, who will assess the effectiveness of the mental wellbeing initiatives the firm currently offers to its circa 16,000 UK employees. This will develop an evidence base of what works, and how new support measures can be developed and evaluated to meet employees’ future needs. ̽��ֱ��firm will use these insights to invest in and evolve its package of mental wellbeing support.

̽��ֱ��firm will also share its research with the wider business community, to help them support their own workforce and reduce attrition and wellbeing related absence. It also aims to provide empirical evidence clearly demonstrating the link between employee mental wellbeing and improved productivity.

Jon Holt, Chief Executive of KPMG UK, said: “Mental wellbeing is a global issue and a leading concern on the minds of the business leaders I speak to. Businesses need research and data to help them invest in the right areas to support their staff through a huge period of change, as we emerge from the pandemic and introduce new ways of working.

“But mental wellbeing at work is an under researched area and it is hard to access empirical data evidencing clear links between mental wellbeing policies and better employee health.

“This partnership with the very best academics in their field seeks to address this and provide real answers on what works. It aims to help leaders support their people to thrive at work, which in turn will lift productivity and deliver wider benefits to the economy.”

Professor Gordon Harold, who is leading the mental wellbeing programme for the partnership, said: "Mental health is the bedrock of a healthy, productive and positive society. By 2030 depression will be a leading cause of mortality and morbidity globally, with significant implications for individuals, society and the future of work. Promoting positive mental health and supporting those who experience or are at risk of mental ill health is now a national and global priority.”

Professor Andy Neely, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Enterprise and Business Relations at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge said: “Work – what we do, how and where we do it and what it means for individuals, organisations and wider society – is changing. This ambitious partnership will bring together Cambridge researchers from a wide range of disciplines to reimagine the world of work and to co-create with KPMG effective strategies and interventions that will benefit both its workforce and those of organisations worldwide.

“Finding the best ways to support mental wellbeing at work is an urgent and important task, and the starting point for this partnership which will explore more broadly how can we enable meaningful work that addresses society’s needs.”

̽��ֱ��announcement is part of KPMG’s £300m three-year strategy to transform and grow its business, as it invests in new insight and services to support its clients and its people.

It also forms part of a wider partnership between KPMG and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, which aims to examine the big issues affecting work and society, such as the impact of digital technologies, the global distribution of work and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), and to provide evidence-based, actionable insights. In September last year, the firm unveiled a training programme with Cambridge Judge Business School, which will deliver ESG training to KPMG’s 227,000 global workforce.

New five-year partnership on the ‘Future of Work’ will examine the big issues affecting the modern workforce and offer practical, research-backed solutions to employers

Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Good work?

skbf2 — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 07:05:59 +0000

What do we want from work - and how can we get it? Jennifer Howard-Grenville introduces the ̽��ֱ��'s new partnership with KPMG on the future of work, which will start by addressing mental wellbeing in the workplace.

̽��ֱ��Royal Society announces election of new Fellows 2021

cg605 — Thu, 06 May 2021 10:48:11 +0000

Over 60 outstanding scientists from all over the globe have joined the Royal Society as Fellows and Foreign Members. ̽��ֱ��distinguished group of scientists consists of 52 Fellows, 10 Foreign Members and one Honorary Fellow and were all selected for their exceptional contributions to science.

̽��ֱ��Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship made up of the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and the Commonwealth. Its Foreign Members are drawn from the rest of the world.

̽��ֱ��Society’s fundamental purpose is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.

“ ̽��ֱ��global pandemic has demonstrated the continuing importance of scientific thinking and collaboration across borders,” said President of the Royal Society, Sir Adrian Smith.

“Each Fellow and Foreign Member bring their area of scientific expertise to the Royal Society and when combined, this expertise supports the use of science for the benefit of humanity.

“Our new Fellows and Foreign Members are all at the forefronts of their fields from molecular genetics and cancer research to tropical open ecosystems and radar technology. It is an absolute pleasure and honour to have them join us.”

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge:

Professor Julie Ahringer FMedSci FRS

Director and a Senior Group Leader of the Gurdon Institute

Professor Ahringer has made wide-ranging contributions to molecular genetics through her work on the nematode C. elegans. She carried out the first systematic inactivation of all the genes in any animal, which pioneered genome-wide reverse genetic screening.

Her research has illuminated our understanding of the processes underlying cell polarity and gene expression. This includes showing that spindle positioning is controlled by heterotrimeric G protein signalling, discovering a connection between chromatin marking and mRNA splicing, and most recently revealing mechanisms and principles of genome organisation and gene expression regulation.

“I am honoured to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society,” said Ahringer. “Much of science today is done in teams, and this reflects the tremendous contributions of my past and present lab members.”

Professor Sadaf Farooqi FRCP FMedSci FRS

Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Metabolism and Medicine, Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science

Professor Farooqi is distinguished for her discoveries of fundamental mechanisms that control human energy homeostasis and their disruption in obesity. Farooqi discovered that the leptin-melanocortin system regulates appetite and weight in people and that genetic mutations affecting this pathway cause severe obesity. Findings by her team have directly led to diagnostic testing for genetic obesity syndromes world-wide and enabled life-saving treatment for some people with severe obesity.

Farooqi said: “As a clinician scientist, I am absolutely delighted to be elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society. This prestigious honour recognises the work of many team members past and present, our network of collaborators across the world and the patients and their families who have contributed to our research.”

Professor Usha Goswami CBE FBA FRS

Professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, and Director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education

Professor Goswami has pioneered the application of neuroscience to education. Her research investigates the sensory and neural basis of childhood disorders of language and literacy, which are heritable and found across languages. Goswami's research shows a shared sensory and neural basis in auditory rhythmic processing. ̽��ֱ��acoustic ‘landmarks’ for speech rhythm provide automatic triggers for aligning speech rhythms and brain rhythms, and Goswami has shown that this automatic process can be disrupted, thereby disrupting speech encoding for these children.

“It is a huge honour to be elected to the Royal Society and a wonderful acknowledgement of our research in the Centre for Neuroscience in Education,” said Goswami. “I have been interested in children's reading and language development since training as a primary school teacher, and we have used neuroscientific insights to understand the mechanisms underpinning developmental language disorders. It is fantastically rewarding for our work to be recognised in this way.”

Professor Rebecca Kilner FRS

Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Director of the ̽��ֱ�� Museum of Zoology

Professor Kilner researches the evolution of animal behaviour, and how this behaviour then affects the pace and scope of subsequent evolutionary change. Using experimental evolution, her current work investigates how quickly populations can adapt when environmental conditions change.

Kilner discovered novel ways in which social behaviour drives evolutionary change. She used elegant cross-fostering experiments in birds and insects to expose how family members exert selection on each other, and discovered hidden evolutionary conflicts between parents and their offspring, and among adults caring together for offspring.

Kilner said: “I’m astonished, honoured and delighted to be elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society. This honour is shared with everyone I have ever worked with. Science is a team effort and I’ve been incredibly lucky to collaborate with brilliant colleagues throughout my career.”

Professor David Rowitch FMedSci FRS

Professor and Head of the Department of Paediatrics, Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator

Professor Rowitch’s basic and translational research on glial cells, comprising 90% of cells in the human brain, has been transformative. Rowitch’s established how embryonic central nervous patterning specifies myelinating oligodendrocytes through essential functions of Olig2, a study that helped initiate genetic methodologies in glial biology, and how astrocyte functional diversification is critical for support of neural circuits in the spinal cord. He has applied a developmental neuroscience perspective to better understand human neonatal brain development and white matter injury in premature infants, multiple sclerosis and leukodystrophy.

Rowitch said: “It is a great honour to be elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, joining many of my esteemed Cambridge, and other scientific, colleagues.”

Professor Richard Samworth FRS

Professor of Statistical Science and Director of the Statistical Laboratory

Professor Samworth has made fundamental contributions to the development of modern statistical methodology and theory. His research concerns the development of statistical methods and theory to address contemporary data challenges, often posed by the large volumes of data that are routinely collected in today's Big Data era.

“I was incredibly honoured when I found out I'd been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society,” said Samworth. “It's a real thrill to become a small part of such a respected institution.”

Professor Benjamin Simons FRS

Royal Society EP Abraham Professor, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and Senior Group Leader of the Gurdon Institute

As a theorist, Professor Simons has contributed to a diverse range of fields, from quantum condensed matter physics to developmental and cancer biology. His research translates concepts and approaches from statistical physics to gain predictive insights in the collective dynamics of complex systems. In biology, his studies have revealed common mechanisms of stem cell regulation, and how these programmes become subverted during the early phase of tumour growth.

Simons said: “I am delighted to be elected to the Fellowship. I hope that my election may serve to emphasise the value of multidisciplinary research that stands at the interface between physics and the life sciences.”

Wellcome Sanger Institute:

Dr Peter Campbell FMedSci FRS, Head, Cancer, Ageing, and Somatic Mutations Programme, Wellcome Sanger Institute (and Wellcome-MRC Stem Cell Institute, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge).

MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology:

Dr Christopher Tate FRS, MRC Investigator, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Dr Sjors Scheres FRS, Group Leader, Structural Studies Division, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

British Antarctic Survey:

Professor Dame Jane Francis DCMG FRS, Director, British Antarctic Survey

Professor Richard Horne FRS, Head, Space Weather and Atmosphere, British Antarctic Survey

Cambridge scientists are among the new Fellows announced today by the Royal Society.

Our new Fellows and Foreign Members are all at the forefronts of their fields from molecular genetics and cancer research to tropical open ecosystems and radar technology.

Sir Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society

Yes

Cambridge researchers awarded European Research Council funding

cg605 — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 17:14:16 +0000

Three hundred and twenty-seven mid-career researchers were today awarded Consolidator Grants by the ERC, totalling €655 million. ̽��ֱ��UK has 50 grantees in this year’s funding round. ̽��ֱ��funding is part of the EU’s current research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020.

̽��ֱ��ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to outstanding researchers of any nationality and age, with at least seven and up to 12 years of experience after PhD, and a scientific track record showing great promise.

̽��ֱ��research projects proposed by the new grantees cover a wide range of topics in physical sciences and engineering, life sciences, as well as social sciences and humanities.

From the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the following researchers were named as grantees: Professor Vasco Carvalho, Professor Tuomas Knowles, Dr Neel Krishnaswami, Professor Silvia Vignolini and Dr Kaisey Mandel.

Vasco Carvalho, Professor of Macroeconomics and Director of Cambridge-INET, Faculty of Economics

Project title: Micro Structure and Macro Outcomes.

What is your research about?

“Research under the project MICRO2MACRO takes as a starting point the organisation of production around supply chain networks and, within these networks, the increasing dominance of very large and central firms. This renders a small number of firms and technologies systemic in that they can influence aggregate economic performance.

“Within this broad agenda, MICRO2MACRO explores issues surrounding, first, market power and pro-competitive policies and, second, innovation, productivity and the diffusion of new technologies. ̽��ֱ��project also partners with one global financial institution to unlock relevant real-time, highly granular data that is necessary to study some of these questions.”

How do you feel about being named a grantee?

“I'm ecstatic. First, because it recognises the combined effort of colleagues around the world in developing a new micro-to-macro research agenda and understanding macroeconomic developments via a new lens. Second, because it provides the opportunity to inject otherwise scarce resources into early career researchers and PhD students, thereby adding to the human capital in this research area. Third, because it further highlights a decade of collective efforts at the Faculty of Economics here at Cambridge and helps ensure its continued growth as a hub for the development of new approaches to decades old questions in economics.”

Professor Tuomas Knowles, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry

Project title: Digital Protein Biophysics of Aggregation.

What is your research about?

“Our work is focused on understanding the basic molecular principles that govern the activity of proteins in health and disease. In particular we are interested in how proteins come together to form machinery and compartments that underpin the functions of a living cell, and what happens when these processes fail.

“ ̽��ֱ��ERC project is focused on understanding how proteins condense together to form functional liquid organelles, and how such compartments can gel and form irreversible protein aggregates associated with disease. Such problems have been challenging to study previously due to the very high heterogeneity of the structures that are formed which make observation by conventional bulk techniques challenging. We will be developing new single molecule approaches to study this phenomenon aggregate by aggregate and cell by cell, and in this way shed light on the connection between the physical and structural properties of protein assemblies and their biological activity.”

How do you feel about being named a grantee?

“I am truly delighted by this support of my research and that of my group, which will allow us to develop fundamentally new approaches for probing a process at the core of biological function and malfunction.”

Dr Neel Krishnaswami, Computer Laboratory

Project title: Foundations of Type Inference for Modern Programming Languages.

What is your research about?

“Many modern programming languages, whether industrial or academic, are typed. Each phrase in a program is classified by its type (for example, as strings or integers), and at compile-time programs are checked for consistent usage of types, in a process called type-checking. Thus, the expression ‘3 + 4’ will be accepted, since the + operator takes two numbers as arguments, but the expression ‘3 + ‘hello’’ will be rejected, as it makes no sense to add a number and a string. Though this is a simple idea, sophisticated type systems can track properties like algorithmic complexity and program correctness.

“In general, programmers must write annotations to tell computers which types to check. In theory, it is easy to demand enough annotations to trivialize type-checking, but this can easily make the annotation larger than the program itself! So, to transfer results from formal calculi to real programming languages, we need type inference algorithms, which reconstruct missing types from partially-annotated programs.

“In TypeFoundry, we will use recent developments in proof theory and formal semantics to identify the theoretical structure underpinning type inference.”

How do you feel about being named a grantee?

“Naturally, I am happy to find out that my research is valued in such concrete, material terms, and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to have the chance to support PhD students and postdocs working in this area. I also feel this shows off the best international character of science. I am an Indian-American researcher working in the UK, judged and funded by my European peers. Consequently, I keenly feel both the opportunity and responsibility to carry on the cosmopolitan tradition of scientific work.”

Professor Silvia Vignolini, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry

Project title: Sym-Bionic Matter: developing symbiotic relationships for light-matter interaction.

What is your research about?

“With this ERC grant I aim to develop new platforms and tools to study how different organisms build symbiotic interactions for light management and ‘evolve’ new symbiotic relationships, in which one of the organisms is replaced by an artificial material to generate a novel class of hybrid which I link to call ‘sym-BIonic matTEr’ – BiTe!”

How do you feel about being named a grantee?

“I was very excited to learn that I had been awarded an ERC grant and I look forward to starting the project. It’s an amazing opportunity for my team and me!

“When you receive the evaluation response, you get an email notification that invites you to log into the EU portal to see the outcome of the evaluation. In those few minutes that it takes to open the right form on the platform, I experienced pure panic! When I finally open the letter, I had to read it three times to convince myself that I had been awarded the grant! It was a great day!”

Dr Kaisey Mandel, Institute of Astronomy, Statistical Laboratory of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, Kavli Institute for Cosmology

Project title: Next-Generation Data-Driven Probabilistic Modelling of Type Ia Supernova SEDs in the Optical to Near-Infrared for Robust Cosmological Inference.

What is your research about?

“My research focuses on utilising exploding stars called Type Ia supernovae to measure cosmological distances for tracing the history of cosmic expansion.

“I lead a project to develop state-of-the-art statistical models and advanced, data-driven techniques for analysing observations of these supernovae in optical and near-infrared light to determine more precise and accurate distances.

“Applying these novel methods to supernova data from the Hubble Space Telescope, new ground-based surveys, and, in the near future, the Vera Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time, we will pursue new and improved constraints on the accelerating expansion of the Universe and the nature of dark energy.”

Five researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have won consolidator grants from the European Research Council (ERC), Europe’s premiere funding organisation for frontier research.

iStock.com/ BarrySheene

Yes

Cambridge statistician appointed as Home Office’s Chief Scientific Adviser

cjb250 — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 09:40:31 +0000

During his secondment, Professor Aston's role will be to ensure that departmental decisions are informed by the best science and engineering evidence and advice. ̽��ֱ��Chief Scientific Adviser offers advice directly to ministers and officials and works together with the Chief Scientific Advisers’ network to advise on issues that cut across government.

Professor Aston specialises in applied statistics but will provide advice on a range of issues at the Home Office. He was, until recently, a trustee of the Alan Turing Institute, and has previously spent much of his career working in the United States and Taiwan. As well as his position in Cambridge’s Statslab, he is also Co-Director of the EPSRC Centre for Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Multimodal Clinical Imaging Data and on the management board of the Cantab Capital Institute for the Mathematics of Information.

Speaking ahead of starting his new role, Professor Aston said: “I am honoured and privileged to be joining the Home Office as its Chief Scientific Adviser. I’m looking forward to working with the scientific community to understand the issues facing the Department over the coming years and identify how science, engineering and analysis can help to overcome those challenges.”

Patsy Wilkinson, Second Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, said: “Professor Aston brings with him a wealth of experience that will be of great value in ensuring the work we do to keep our country safe and secure continues to be supported by the latest scientific advice and research.”

Professor Sir Mark Walport, the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, added: “Having access to high-quality expert scientific advice is critical to every government department. I am delighted to welcome someone with Professor Aston’s expertise to the Chief Scientific Advisers’ network and look forward to working with him.”

Professor Aston’s appointment follows the retirement of Professor Bernard Silverman earlier this year. He will join the Home Office on 4 September.

Professor John Aston, Professor of Statistics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, has been appointed as the Home Office’s new Chief Scientific Adviser.

I’m looking forward to working with the scientific community to understand the issues facing the [Home Office] over the coming years and identify how science, engineering and analysis can help to overcome those challenges

John Aston

Professor John Aston

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Time travelling to the mother tongue

lw355 — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 08:00:51 +0000

No matter whether you speak English or Urdu, Waloon or Waziri, Portuguese or Persian, the roots of your language are the same. Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the mother tongue – shared by several hundred contemporary languages, as well as many now extinct, and spoken by people who lived from about 6,000 to 3,500 BC on the steppes to the north of the Caspian Sea.

They left no written texts and although historical linguists have, since the 19th century, painstakingly reconstructed the language from daughter languages, the question of how it actually sounded was assumed to be permanently out of reach.

Now, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford have developed a sound-based method to move back through the family tree of languages that stem from PIE. They can simulate how certain words would have sounded when they were spoken 8,000 years ago.

Remarkably, at the heart of the technology is the statistics of shape.

“Sounds have shape,” explains Professor John Aston, from Cambridge’s Statistical Laboratory. “As a word is uttered it vibrates air, and the shape of this soundwave can be measured and turned into a series of numbers. Once we have these stats, and the stats of another spoken word, we can start asking how similar they are and what it would take to shift from one to another.”

A word said in a certain language will have a different shape to the same word in another language, or an earlier language. ̽��ֱ��researchers can shift from one shape to another through a series of small changes in the statistics. “It’s more than an averaging process, it’s a continuum from one sound to the other,” adds Aston, who is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). “At each stage, we can turn the shape back into sound to hear how the word has changed.”

Rather than reconstructing written forms of ancient words, the researchers triangulate backwards from contemporary and archival audio recordings to regenerate audible spoken forms from earlier points in the evolutionary tree. Using a relatively new field of shape-based mathematics, the researchers take the soundwave and visualise it as a spectrogram – basically an undulating three-dimensional surface that represents the shape of that sound – and then reshape the spectrogram along a trajectory ‘signposted’ by known sounds.

While Aston leads the team of statistician ‘shape-shifters’ in Cambridge, the acoustic-phonetic and linguistic expertise is provided by Professor John Coleman’s group in Oxford.

̽��ֱ��researchers are working on the words for numbers as these have the same meaning in any language. ̽��ֱ��longest path of development simulated so far goes backwards 8,000 years from English one to its PIE ancestor oinos, and likewise for other numerals. They have also ‘gone forwards’ from the PIE penkwe to the modern Greek pente, modern Welsh pimp and modern Englishfive, as well as simulating change from Modern English to Anglo-Saxon (or vice versa), and from Modern Romance languages back to Latin.

(Other audio demonstrations are available here)

“We’ve explicitly focused on reproducing sound changes and etymologies that the established analyses already suggest, rather than seeking to overturn them,” says Coleman, whose research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

They have discovered words that appear to correctly ‘fall out’ of the continuum. “It’s pleasing, not because it overturns the received wisdom, but because it encourages us that we are getting something right, some of the time at least. And along the way there have also been a few surprises!” ̽��ֱ��method sometimes follows paths that do not seem to be etymologically correct, demonstrating that the method is scientifically testable and pointing to areas in which refinements are needed.

Remarkably, because the statistics describe the sound of an individual saying the word, the researchers are able to keep the characteristics of pitch and delivery the same. They can effectively turn the word spoken by someone in one language into what it would sound like if they were speaking fluently in another.

They can also extrapolate into the future, although with caveats, as Coleman describes: “If you just extrapolate linearly, you’ll reach a point at which the sound change hits the limit of what is a humanly reasonable sound. This has happened in some languages in the past with certain vowel sounds. But if you asked me what English will sound like in 300 years, my educated guess is that it will be hardly any different from today!”

For the team, the excitement of the research includes unearthing some gems of archival recordings of various languages that had been given up for dead, including an Old Prussian word last spoken by people in the early 1700s but ‘borrowed’ into Low Prussian and discovered in a German audio archive.

Their work has applications in automatic translation and film dubbing, as well as medical imaging (see panel), but the principal aim is for the technology to be used alongside traditional methods used by historical linguists to understand the process of language change over thousands of years.

“From my point of view, it’s amazing that we can turn exciting yet highly abstract statistical theory into something that really helps explain the roots of modern language,” says Aston.

“Now that we’ve developed many of the necessary technical methods for realising the extraordinary ambition of hearing ancient sounds once more,” adds Coleman, “these early successes are opening up a wide range of new questions, one of the central being how far back in time can we really go?”

Audio demonstrations are available here: www.phon.ox.ac.uk/jcoleman/ancient-sounds-audio.html

Inset image: Spectrograms showing how the shape of the sound of a word in one language can be morphed into the sound of the same word in another language; credit: John Aston.

̽��ֱ��sounds of languages that died thousands of years ago have been brought to life again through technology that uses statistics in a revolutionary new way.

As a word is uttered it vibrates air, and the shape of this soundwave can be measured and turned into a series of numbers

John Aston

Spectrogram showing the shape of the sound of a word

Medical imaging reshaped

̽��ֱ��statistics of shape are not just being used to show how different languages relate to each – they are also being used to improve the analysis of medical images.

Just as soundwaves have a shape that can be analysed using statistics, so do the patterns of neurons interacting with each other or the dimensions of the surface of a tumour. Now a new research Centre will develop tools that use the mathematics of the shapes found in medical images to improve diagnosis, prognosis and treatment planning for patients.

̽��ֱ��EPSRC Centre for Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Multimodal Clinical Imaging, one of five ‘maths’ centres recently funded by £10 million from EPSRC, is co-led by Aston and Dr Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in Cambridge.

“ ̽��ֱ��new methodologies will allow clinical medicine to move beyond one person reading single scans, to automated systems capable of analysing populations of images,” explains Schönlieb. “As a result, clinicians will have far greater scope to ask complex questions of the medical image.”

It’s already possible to extract statistical information from an image of a patient’s thigh bone, turn the data into a template for comparison with those from other people in the population, and then ask whether a particular shape of bone is more prone to being broken than others in the elderly.

Most organ scans split the image into many elements, which are then analysed voxel by voxel. “But complex structures like the heart and the brain should be analysed holistically,” explains Dr James Rudd, from the Department of Medicine, who leads the clinical interaction with the Centre. “ ̽��ֱ��tools we are developing will enable the analysis of organs like the brain as single objects with millions of connections.”

̽��ֱ��Centre brings together researchers and clinicians from applied and pure maths, engineering, physics, biology, oncology, clinical neuroscience and cardiology, and involves industrial partners Siemens, AstraZeneca, Microsoft, GSK and Cambridge Computed Imaging.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Parent-led tool opens up NHS children's heart surgery data to families

sc604 — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 23:00:39 +0000

Researchers are calling for the end to an era of confusion and alarm about children's heart surgery statistics by launching an innovative communication tool that will help people make sense of published survival data about children’s heart surgery in the UK and Ireland.

̽��ֱ��website, Understanding Children’s Heart Surgery Outcomes, which launches today, shows decision makers and parents that hospitals should not be ranked by their survival rates, because hospitals treat different patients — high performing hospitals can have lower survival rates simply because they are taking on the most complex cases. An individual hospital’s actual survival rate should only be compared to its own predicted range, which is determined by the complexity of the procedures it undertakes, among other factors. ̽��ֱ��website also sets out why if a hospital's survival rate is below its predicted range, it need not indicate alarm, but rather serves as a trigger for further investigation.

̽��ֱ��website was developed by Christina Pagel from ̽��ֱ�� College London and Sir David Spiegelhalter from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, in collaboration with the charity Sense about Science and experimental psychologist Tim Rakow from King’s College London. It explains a risk adjustment method known as PRAiS (Partial Risk Adjustment in Surgery).

“This website draws a line under an era of poor risk communication of hospital surgery statistics,” said Tracey Brown, director of Sense about Science. “In 2013 over-interpretation of faulty data resulted in temporary hospital closure of Leeds General Infirmary's paediatric heart unit. Parents and children were faced with all the additional stress, risks and costs of travelling further for operations, and for others the horrendous unnecessary guilt as they wondered if their child’s outcome would have been better at another unit. There could not be a stronger case for professionals and decision makers using the risk adjustment model and communicating it well.”

Each hospital that performs children’s heart surgery in the UK and Ireland has had its overall survival rates published by the National Congenital Heart Disease Audit (NCHDA) since 2013. ̽��ֱ��researchers used PRAiS to calculate a predicted range of survival for each specific hospital, taking into account the complexity of each individual child’s medical condition and surgery. No hospital will have exactly the same predicted range of survival as another hospital, because each hospital treated different children.

However, the report the NCHDA publishes is lengthy, hard to find and hard to understand without expert knowledge. Sense about Science ran user-testing workshops to involve the public, patients’ families and medical charities in co-designing the website with Pagel and Spiegelhalter, a first in this area.

“There is an understandable urge to put hospitals in a league table when comparing survival rates,” said Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge. “But rather than try and directly compare hospitals with each other, we need to compare a hospital’s survival rate with what we would predict it to be, taking into account how severe their cases are. This is a tricky idea but, with the help of many families, I think we have made it clear.”

“Because different hospitals treat different children and some children can have more complex medical problems than others, it is not valid to directly compare survival rates between hospitals,” said Pagel, Reader in Operational Research at UCL, who helped develop the formula the NHS uses to evaluate hospital survival rates. “We involved families from the beginning of the project and throughout to help us researchers communicate these complicated concepts clearly. I definitely learned that incorporating their feedback was absolutely crucial to building something useful. An accountable NHS is one where we can all understand how it is doing- and for this you need to listen to patients and families.”

Spiegelhalter and Pagel are calling for other researchers, companies and government to make health statistics accessible to patients and families by making them understandable. Transparency without accessibility is not enough; improved understanding by decision makers, health care professionals, patients and families can prevent misuse, confusion and unfounded anxiety.

Transparency without accessibility is not enough: stats must be put in context, say researchers.

Rather than try and directly compare hospitals with each other, we need to compare a hospital’s survival rate with what we would predict it to be, taking into account how severe their cases are.

David Spiegelhalter

CC0 Public Domain

Surgeon

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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