̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - programming

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.

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Yes

Pilot programme encourages researchers to share the code behind their work

sc604 — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 07:30:00 +0000

A new pilot project, designed by a Cambridge researcher and supported by the Nature family of journals, will evaluate the value of sharing the code behind published research.

For years, scientists have discussed whether and how to share data from painstaking research and costly experiments. Some are further along in their efforts toward ‘open science’ than others: fields such as astronomy and oceanography, for example, involve such expensive and large-scale equipment and logistical challenges to data collection that collaboration among institutions has become the norm.

Recently, academic journals, including several Nature journals, are turning their attention to another aspect of the research process: computer programming code. Code is becoming increasingly important in research because scientists are often writing their own computer programs to interpret their data, rather than using commercial software packages. Some journals now include scientific data and code as part of the peer-review process.

Now, in a commentary published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, a group of researchers from the UK, Europe and the United States have argued that the sharing of code should be part of the peer-review process. In a separate editorial, the journal has announced a pilot project to ask future authors to make their code available for review.

Code is an important part of the research process, and often the only definitive account of how data were processed. “Methods are now so complex that they are difficult to describe concisely in the limited ‘methods’ section of a paper,” said Dr Stephen Eglen from Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and the paper’s lead author. “And having the code means that others have a better chance of replicating your work, and so should add confidence.”

Making the programs behind the research accessible allows other scientists to test the code and reproduce the computations in an experiment — in other words, to reproduce results and solidify findings. It’s the “how the sausage is made” part of research, said co-author Ben Marwick, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Washington. It also allows the code to be used by other researchers in new studies, making it easier for scientists to build on the work of their colleagues.

“What we’re missing is the convention of sharing code or the tools for turning data into useful discoveries or information,” said Marwick. “Researchers say it’s great to have the data available in a paper — increasingly raw data are available in supplementary files or specialised online repositories — but the code for performing the clever analyses in between the raw data and the published figures and tables are still inaccessible.”

Other Nature Research journals, such as Nature Methods and Nature Biotechnology, provide for code review as part of the article evaluation process. Since 2014, the company has encouraged writers to make their code available upon request.

̽��ֱ��Nature Neuroscience pilot focuses on three elements: whether the code supporting an author’s main claims is publicly accessible; whether the code functions without mistakes; and whether it produces the results cited. At the moment this is a pilot project to which authors can opt in. It may be that in future it becomes mandatory and only when the code has been reviewed will a paper then be accepted.

“This extra step in the peer review process is to encourage ‘replication’ of results, and therefore help reduce the ‘replication crisis’,” said Eglen. “It also means that readers can understand more fully what authors have done.”

An open science approach to sharing code is not without its critics, as well as scientists who raise legal and ethical questions about the repercussions. How do researchers get proper credit for the code they share? How should code be cited in the scholarly literature? How will it count toward tenure and promotion applications? How is sharing code compatible with patents and commercialization of software technology?

“We hope that when people do not share code it might be seen as ‘having something to hide,’ although people may regard the code as ‘theirs’ and their IP, rather than something to be shared,” said Eglen. “Nowadays, we believe the final paper is the ultimate representation of a piece of research, but actually the final paper is just an advert for the scholarship, which here is the computer code to solve a particular task. By sharing the code, we actually get the most useful part of the scholarship, rather than the paper, which is just the author’s ‘gloss’ on the work they have done.”

Adapted from a ̽��ֱ�� of Washington press release.

New project, partly designed by a ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researcher, aims to improve transparency in science by sharing ‘how the sausage is made’.

Having the code means that others have a better chance of replicating your work.

Stephen Eglen

Lorenzo Cafaro

Close up code

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Yes

Cambridge is a major player in the £1bn UK computer gaming industry

pbh25 — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 15:49:36 +0000

In the field of computing, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is scarcely short of global firsts. For example, its Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) of 1949 is considered the earliest practical general-purpose electronic computer; and in 1953, the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science became the world’s first taught course in computing.

Between those two landmarks sits a lesser-known landmark. In 1952, PhD student Alexander S Douglas developed the world’s first computer video game – a noughts and crosses emulator that he titled ‘OXO’. ̽��ֱ��program ran on the EDSAC, which occupied more than 200 square feet of the Mathematical Laboratory. Competing against an artificially intelligent opponent, players would input their moves on a telephone dial, and follow the action on a flickering cathode-ray tube.

More than 60 years on video games are big business in the UK. According to industry body TIGA, the games development sector contributes around £1bn to Britain’s Gross Domestic Product each year, employing 9,000 skilled workers of whom 80 per cent are graduates. What’s more, Cambridge is at the very heart of the industry, home to a cluster of companies including Jagex, Frontier Developments, Geomerics, Guerrilla Cambridge, Ninja Theory and many more

“Cambridge is thought to have 18 per cent of the games market,” says Adrian Page-Mitchell of the Centre for Computing History. “And depending on who you talk to, it employs anything between 1,200 and 4,000 people.”

A trip to the centre, located off Newmarket Road, offers a crash course in how the city became a magnet for games talent. ̽��ֱ��museum’s most popular displays are almost certainly the 8-bit machines designed by Cambridge companies in the computing boom of the early 1980s, and particularly the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Acorn BBC Micro.

Today, the presence of technology giants such as Microsoft Research, Broadcom and ARM (a descendant of Acorn) makes Cambridge a particularly favourable location for software development, including games. This dates back to the 80s heyday of Sinclair and Acorn, says Page-Mitchell. “They were hardware people, and always on the lookout for software talent. So feelers went out to undergraduates, and you had these bedroom coders – of which the biggest ones were David Braben and Ian Bell, who wrote Elite.”

On its release in 1984, Elite was a startling piece of software: a space trading and combat game with revolutionary 3D graphics, open-ended gameplay and a vast universe. Co-writer David Braben has remained in Cambridge, where his company Frontier Developments is producing a 21st century reboot of the game, Elite: Dangerous, after raising a record £1.25m on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter.

Braben cites the close relationship between the ̽��ֱ�� and the ‘Silicon Fen’ tech hub as a great advantage for games developers. It’s strengthened by organisations such as games Eden and Creative Front, which organise events such as the annual Brains Eden gaming festival. “It all helps to cement the relationship between the town and the ̽��ֱ�� in a very positive way, and give people opportunities to stay in Cambridge and work for Cambridge-based companies,” he says.

One thing that the ̽��ֱ�� lacks is any courses specifically geared to computer games, unlike institutions such as Anglia Ruskin ̽��ֱ��, which runs a popular BSc in Computer Gaming Technology. However, Braben believes that a more generalist approach is best at undergraduate level: “you can pick up the vocational side very quickly. I’m not criticising any of the more specific courses, which teach some important things like team working, but I think it’s much more important to get a proper grounding [in computer science].”

It’s a view shared at Jagex, the UK’s largest independent game developer. Co-founded by Cambridge Computer Science graduate Paul Gower in 2001, the current company is headquartered at St John’s Innovation Centre and is best known for Runescape – the world’s largest free MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game). Jagex is a regular recruiter from the ̽��ֱ��, both at graduate and doctoral level. Chief executive officer Mark Gerhard says: “We value IQ and attitude over experience. A smart, ambitious, hungry graduate is best for us, as opposed to someone who has been in the industry for 20 years and either has a lot of bad habits or doesn’t want to learn anything new. But we’re competing for talent not just with Google and Microsoft but with Goldman Sachs.”

Yet despite the lure of chunky salaries in the City, the ̽��ֱ��’s brightest students are still drawn to gaming.

Among this year’s Part 1B projects for undergraduates on the Computer Science Tripos are several within the sector. They include “Evolve a Pet”, which will create a game to teach school pupils about genomic sequencing, and a transport game project to enable users to explore the impact of their journeys around Cambridge.

Comp-sci students are also targeting firms concerned with gaming technology for their internships and work placements. Second-year student Sakunthala Panditharatne of Churchill College is looking forward to working with Oculus VR, developers of the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset, who were recently acquired by Facebook for around £1.2bn. Already the winner of a Google technology prize at the age of 16 for her work in computer animation, she will be writing software to make the headset compatible with games.

Panditharatne plans to remain in the sector. “I think what I’ll end up doing in the next couple of years will be related to the 3D models that go into video games,” she says. “I want an opportunity to be using my computer science skills – I don’t want my degree just to be a ticket to something else.”

It’s not just a matter of Cambridge talent flocking to established studios. Like the bedroom coders of the 80s, small, boutique games developers are thriving again. ̽��ֱ��ability to distribute games online, and the need for simpler games for mobile platforms, means smaller outfits can flourish – and according to Jan Samols, who oversees the Computer Lab’s outreach activities, graduates are successfully going it alone.

She says: “I think Cambridge is unique in that it produces very entrepreneurial graduates, not only in gaming but in whatever area they may be interested in. I’ve catalogued more than 200 companies that have been started by Computer Lab graduates. Academically, we give them what they need to go it alone, and they can also draw inspiration from graduates who have gone before them and done extremely well.”

But it’s not merely as a graduate career choice that computer gaming permeates the ̽��ֱ��: it crops up throughout the faculties and departments, including in some unlikely quarters. In the Department of Education’s Centre for Children’s Literature, games are analysed alongside classic books to gain a more complete insight into what influences young people. Elsewhere, the High Performance Computing Service is employing a cluster of graphical processing units developed for game consoles to deliver vast computing power at a low operational cost.

What’s more, the Department of Engineering recently recruited a Senior Teaching Associate in Online Education and Computer Games Technology for an initiative to get school pupils interested in mechanics and engineering. Professor Richard Prager, head of the School of Technology, already maintains a website to help prospective students prepare for interviews. Now he hopes to take the project a step further using interactive games to capture teenagers’ interest.

He says: “I’ve noticed with my own kids and others that they spend a lot of time being enormously creative and ingenious in the way they play games such as Minecraft and Roblox. Now, suppose we could channel all that ingenuity into stuff relevant to engineering. That would be fantastic.”

Words: Will Ham-Bevan

From the first computer game to the world's largest online fantasy gaming experience - Cambridge has been home to some of gaming's greatest minds.

Cambridge is thought to have 18 per cent of the games market and depending on who you talk to, it employs anything between 1,200 and 4,000 people.

Adrian Page-Mitchell of the Centre for Computing History.

Gaming by the numbers

̽��ֱ��UK video games industry is the largest in Europe

Estimates suggest that the global market for video games will grow from $52.5 billion in 2009 to $86.8 billion in 2014.

̽��ֱ��UK games development sector contributes approximately £1 billion to UK Gross Domestic Product per annum.

̽��ֱ��UK games industry employs over 9,000 highly skilled development staff, 80 per cent of whom are employed outside of London.

Figures from TIGA

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Yes

Marking the centenary of Turing's birth

bjb42 — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 08:00:24 +0000

Alan Turing was a mathematician, cryptographer and pioneer of computer science who possessed one of the greatest brains of the 20th century. His life was one of secret triumphs shadowed by public tragedy.

Perhaps best known today for his part in breaking the German Enigma code during World War II, Turing was by that time already established as a mathematician of extraordinary capability.

During his time at King’s College, Cambridge, he conceived of the ‘Turing Machine’ - a universal machine which could imitate all possible calculating devices. This mathematical model went on to become one of the cornerstones of computer science, and is arguably the most influential mathematical abstraction of the 20^th Century. Turing was 22 years old.

“Turing’s centenary year is a very special year for me, and other mathematicians like me,” said Dr James Grime from the ̽��ֱ��’s Millenium Maths Project, who regularly tours schools with an original ‘Enigma’ machine.

“In its purest form, mathematics is the search for truth, and Turing was one of the most important contributors to this search. It’s fantastic that his life is being celebrated.”

Grime has presented a short film produced by the ̽��ֱ�� on the life and work of Turing for the ̽��ֱ��'s YouTube and Vimeo channels. ̽��ֱ��film uses some of the photographs and documents that his family gave to King's College. ̽��ֱ��Turing family have continued to donate documents to the King's Archive Centre, and you can see many of these online at the Turing Digital Archive.

At 3.30pm on the afternoon of the centenary day, Saturday 23 June, the Mayor of Cambridge - Councillor Sheila Stuart - will unveil a Blue Plaque to commemorate Alan Turing on the grass in front of King’s College. ̽��ֱ��event will be streamed live on the internet on the King’s College website here.

A major centenary conference looking at Turing’s impact on mathematics, computing, philosophy and beyond is currently taking place in Cambridge - where the first issue of a new interdisciplinary journal called "Computability" has been presented. Inspired directly by Turing and his work, the journal aims to capture the spirit of Turing through the combination of theoretical insight and practical application that is the mark of Turing's work.

More information on the conference here

More information on the journal here

Born in London on 23 June 1912, Turing spent his childhood in Hastings in Kent and Sherbourne in Dorset. He displayed a precocious talent at school for maths and science, including condensing Einstein’s theory of relativity for his mum at the age of just 15. Turing’s abilities led to him receive a scholarship to King’s College.

He famously went on to make a vital contribution to the code-breakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Not only did he make the first breakthroughs with the Naval Enigma code, allowing Britain’s food and supplies to be shipped across the Atlantic, but, along with Gordon Welchman, he designed the machine - called the Bombe - which smashed the German Enigma code.

In 1945 Turing received an OBE for services to the Foreign Office, although the real reason for this honour remained top secret for another 30 years, long past Turing’s death. Many historians today believe that the work of the code-breakers shortened the war by two years.

In September 2009, the British government made a public apology to Alan Turing - who was gay at a time when it was illegal in Britain. When authorities discovered the truth about his sexuality, he was sentenced to endure horrific hormone treatment to avoid imprisonment, labelled a security risk and forced from his job as a code breaker.

Turing committed suicide in 1954 by biting from an apple laced with cyanide, a desperately sad end to the life of a genius whose astonishing contribution to the war effort remained unknown until the 1970s.

Saturday 23 June marks the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing - mathematical genius, hero of the WWII code breakers of Bletchley Park, and father of modern computing. To celebrate, a short film has been produced by the ̽��ֱ��. A blue plaque has been unveiled on the front of King’s College - where Turing was both a student and then a fellow.

Turing’s centenary year is a very special year for me, and other mathematicians like me.

James Grime

Alan Turing - Celebrating the life of a genius

King's College

Alan Turing aged 16

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Yes