Event Calendar

Models of Concurrency and Open Computing: A one day seminar to commemorate the retirement of Mike Shields.

Professor Fred Piper, Royal Holloway, University of London

Professor mark Josephs, London South Bank University

Professior Paul Lewis, University of Southampton

Professor Yong Yan, Department of Electronics, University of Kent

Dr Hugh Deighton, LogicaCMG

Doug Amos, Synplicity Inc.

Dr Russ Clark, University of Surrey

Dr Stefan Katzenbeisser, Philips Research Eindhoven

Professor Xin Yao, University of Birmingham

Professor Yun Q Shi, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Professor Yun Q Shi, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Professor Yun Q Shi, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Associate Professor Chang-Tsun Li, University of Warwick

Professor Stephen Brewster, University of Glasgow

Dr Vesna Brujic-Okretic, City University

Professor Michael Fisher, University of Liverpool

Professor Erol Gelenbe, Imperial College London

Professor Kecheng Liu, University of Reading

Professor Chunming Rong, University of Stavanger & University of Oslo, Norway

This talk will provide a critical explanation of the 2006 Act, including:
A brief examination of the origins, structure, process and objectives of the Company Law Review (which was probably the most ambitious attempt to reform commercial law ever) and its key recommendations and the main features of the Act which followed, focusing on: corporate form; company objectives and fiduciary duties; corporate governance in law and practice, including the "Think Small First" initiative for small companies and shareholder controls and remedies; disclosure and transparency; and governance of company law reform. It will also if there is time cover some of the key gaps in the legislation, areas where Review recommendations were rejected and its relationship with key EU developments.

Professor Josef Kittler, University of Surrey

Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany

Policy-makers and international development organizations have emphasized the importance of foreign direct investment (FDI) in reducing the global gap between wealthy and poor nations. However, the balance of evidence suggests that FDI will only contribute to sustainable development under certain circumstances. Particularly relevant is the regulatory context in which the investment is situated. Despite this acknowledgement, there has been very little research conducted on one of the most important regulatory mechanisms employed in developing countries with respect to foreign investment: the foreign investment contract. Foreign investment contracts, also referred to as ‘host government agreements’ or ‘state contracts’, are agreements made between a foreign investor (often a multinational corporation) and a government or state-owned entity acting on behalf of its government.  Foreign investment contracts govern the relationship between a private actor and a state, imposing rights and obligations on both parties.  In many cases they supplant national regulation and they may affect the implementation of international agreements. This presentation will examine several particularly controversial contracts that govern transnational pipelines, large hydroelectric dams, and exploration and production in the oil, gas and mining sectors.  The presentation will focus on ‘stabilization clauses’, clauses related to liability, and clauses on the environmental and social impact of the investments.  It is argued that the contracts examined are unlikely to promote sustainable development. Given the general lack of public disclosure of foreign investment contracts, it is difficult to determine whether these particular contracts are examples of ‘worst practice’ or are evidence of a more widespread problem.

Dr Karoline Wiesner, School of Mathematics and Centre for Complexity Sciences, University of Bristol

Dr Peter Tino, Computer Science Department, University of Birmingham

Dr Richard Zanibbi, Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, USA

Since January 1, 2007, Romania and Bulgaria are members of the European Union. This date marks, on the one hand, the end of a thirty year process of approximation of these two Balkan States to the European common space; and, on the other hand, the beginning of a new process, this time of real integration within the same. This second phase will not be easy due to the precautions, the amplitude of the safeguard clauses, the transitional dispositions and the established monitoring and control mechanisms. It will also not be easy due to the amplitude of the necessary economic and social reforms, which these two “lower Danube” countries must undertake and are undertaking. Furthermore, these two Balkan countries have benefited and they are still benefiting from a considerable financial pre-accession assistance and the current funds in order to make easier this hard process. In this sense, the aim of the presentation is double: firstly, to analyse the way which has lead to the signing of the Accession Treaty of these countries to the European Union; and, secondly, to emphasize the challenges and difficulties met by both these countries and the European Union to make real its integration in the European space.

Professor Leslie Smith, University of Stirling

This paper provides an investigation into the evolution of the criminological arguments against the death penalty from the beginning of the Council of Europe in 1949 to our present time. The issues of the deterrence value of the punishment, the possibility of the execution of the innocent, the failure of proportional retribution, and that the punishment brutalises society, will be explored. These criminological perspectives are then compared with the current human rights standards which remove the death penalty in the Council of Europe and the European Union. The thesis which is proposed is that the origins of the removal of the death penalty in Europe may be more accurately explained from criminological perspectives, rather than human rights values. However, the current removal of the punishment must be viewed as maintained through a symbiosis of criminology and human rights, and that the anti-death penalty discourse which results must be read an a “never-ending story.”

Prof Gavin Lowe, Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford

Risto Sarvas, Visiting Research Fellow, Digital World Research Centre, University of Surrey and Research Scientist, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Finland

Prof Angelo Cangelosi, Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition Research Group, School of Computing and Mathematics

As custom logic circuits (e.g. field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs) have become larger, the limitations of conventional design flows have become more apparent. For large designs, verification by simulation is now impractical.

Most technical people end up having to make pitches – explaining their work in order to secure the next round of funding - or to get technical work turned into real business. Sometimes you know you are going to have to pitch in a formal setting, but it can also be a spontaneous opportunity from a chance meeting.

I shall briefly review the usefulness and shortcomings of readability formulas. I will then describe CLEAR, an online aid to plain writing which I am developing: it will colour-code submitted text to show the difficulty of every word and every sentence. But simplifying sentences and cutting out jargon is not enough. So the bulk of the talk will consist of advice on structuring documents to help readers find what they need and understand what they find.

An insightful look into the exciting, cutting-edge research happening right on your doorstep. Research students from the University of Surrey present a series of short talks showcasing current activities in fields ranging from nuclear physics to the latest developments in nanotechnology and communication devices. Discover how the science and technology of today will impact tomorrow's society.

The primary benefit of digital content, the ease with which it can be duplicated and disseminated, is also the primary concern when endeavouring to protect the rights of those creating the content. Copyright owners wish to deter illicit file sharing of copyrighted material, detect it when it occurs and even trace the original perpetrator.

Alan will talk about the vision for the future of the BCS, as it undergoes a major transformation. He will outline the challenges and opportunities that the BCS faces, and the strategies that the Society is adopting to increase the engagement and relevance of the BCS within industry and within the wider community in the 21st Century.

The concept of robust and semi-fragile watermarking is described for copyright protection and authentication of digital images. A number of different transforms and algorithms used for robust and semi-fragile image watermarking are reviewed in detail. Four novel robust and semi-fragile transform based image watermarking related schemes are introduced. These include wavelet-based contourlet transform (WBCT) for both robust and semi-fragile watermarking, slant transform (SLT) for semi-fragile watermarking as well as applying generalised Benford’s Law to estimate the JPEG QF, then adjust the appropriate threshold for improving semi-fragile watermarking technique.

The Environmental Protection of the Guarani Aquifer: A Legal Perspective

The Environmental Protection of the Guarani Aquifer: A Legal Perspective

The need for a generic and adaptable object detection and recognition method in static images is becoming a necessity today, given the rapid development of the internet and multimedia databases in general. Comparing with human vision, the computer vision is out-performed in terms of efficiency, accuracy and depth of understanding, as the computerised recognition is achieved at contextual level. In order to achieve recognition at semantic level, computer vision systems must not only be capable of recognising objects, regardless of the changes in appearance, location, and action, but also be able to interpret abstract non-observable concepts.

As the number of electronic files containing commercially sensitive or confidential information increases every day, the importance of identifying the originality of files is becoming a hot topic for enterprises as well as computing professionals. But how can this be done in a world where ever more sophisticated image manipulation tools are widely available?

The ability to solve unfamiliar and novel problems is an important graduate attribute. There has been much research that has explored the factors that affect student’s success as problem solvers. This lecture reviews the literature on problem solving with a focus on strategies that aid success. It will then present some recent investigations into the differences between algorithmic, conceptual and open-ended problems and how cognitive factors may influence success.

Abstract: Tuberculosis is a respiratory infectious disease estimated to kill 1.7 million people annually worldwide. Recently, outbreaks of multi- and extensively-drug-resistant variants of this pathogen have occurred in numerous disparate locations. TB is a fully sequenced organism, so we understand something about its metabolism, and there is a wealth of gene expression data available. But despite the importance of linking genotype to phenotype in pathogens like TB, methods to integrate these datasets have been somewhat lacking. In the first part of the talk, I'll present a computational method based on linear optimisation, for interpreting gene expression data in the context of a metabolic model, and apply it to mycolic acid production in M. tuberculosis. The method uncovers known anti-tuberculosis drugs including isoniazid, one of the main drugs to which TB is now becoming resistant.

Speaker: Dr Yuliya Kyrychko (Bristol)

Democracy depends on elections --- the people elect those to lead them and to make decisions for them. Any election is the difficult marriage of secrecy and verifiability in that we want all the votes to be secret so that no voter feels intimidated but free to vote according to her own heart and we want the election to be verifiable so that we can all rest assured that the outcome of the election does reflect the will of the people. Elections depend on people, procedures, software and hardware --- people stand for office, vote and count the votes and if, in the heat of the moment, they get a chance many of them would cheat to get ahead. To make cheating hard we have put in place procedures that have to be followed: the ballot box is shown to be empty at the start of election day and then it is sealed; ballots are cast into it one by one; at the close of the election the box is signed; it is safely transported to a counting place and only after checking signatures and lists is it opened and finally the votes are counted under close watch from election observers.

Web evangelist Henny Swan will give an overview of trends in Web standards, with practical demonstrations showcasing new technologies and what they can do.

• Opera Software: innovative products and commitment to open Web standards
• Widgets and developing for the mobile Web
• Emerging standards: HTML5, CSS3, SVG/canvas and video
• Relevance for the Web, today and tomorrow

Speaker: Dr Carlo Laing (Massey University, Albany, New Zealand)

Speaker: Dr Yves Capdeboscq (Oxford)

Speaker: Nigel Gilbert, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Research in Social Simulation, University of Surrey

Speaker: G.A. Pavliotis, Imperial College London

Abstract: TBA

Abstract: The laminar flow of an incompressible fluid in a pipe with a sudden expansion exhibits surprisingly complex behaviour that is not yet fully understood. This talk will describe recent developments in numerical methods for stability and bifurcation calculations and describe their application to the pipe problem

Linguistic Steganography aims to provide techniques for hiding information in natural language texts, through manipulating properties of the text, for example by replacing some words with their synonyms. Unlike image-based steganography, linguistic steganography is in its infancy with little existing work. 

Binary Watermarking, robust to printing and scanning, is the process of imperceptibly hiding information in binary documents, typically text documents, so that the hidden information can still be recovered following the printing and scanning of a document. It presents a challenging problem, both in finding an imperceptible way to hide data within a sparse text document, and providing an embedding strategy that can handle the myriad of distortions introduced during printing and scanning. Our goal was to develop a scheme that had sufficient capacity to embed our proposed authenticating and localising watermark. Existing schemes did not provide sufficient capacity, requiring us to develop techniques to increase the embedding capacity whilst maintaining the robustness to printing and scanning.

Abstract: 

Geophysical and plasma systems are often mentioned together because of the common basic nonlinear model used for them: Charney-Hassegawa-Mima equation (CHME). In both applications, zonal jets are often formed. This is important process which leads to transport barriers. I will describe two mechanisms, modulational instability and anisotropic inverse cascades, which lead to generation of the zonal jets.

Information Assurance solutions are usually made up of a variety of techniques which together a level of assurance to the information being used. It is currently beyond the state of the art to automate the identification, understanding and response to developing treat vectors and the operation of Information Assurance solutions over the long term demands very heavy levels of human expertise with all of the associated costs. Part of the issue here is that whereas we as the information assurance community (developers and assessors) do have a rigorous framework for the assessment of quality in certain types of high assurance components these techniques do not exist for large parts of the infrastructure on which assured components are reliant.

Professor Ireland is the Co-Director of Research at Kent Law School. His personal research interests include the historical development of company law, corporate governance and theory, law and neoliberalism and critical legal theory. Professor Ireland teaches on the undergraduate module Company Law and Capitalism, and on the postgraduate Corporate Governance module at Kent.

Abstract:

Over the last years so-called {\em set oriented\/} numerical methods have been developed in the context of the numerical treatment of dynamical systems. The basic idea is to cover the objects of interest -- for instance {\em invariant manifolds\/} or {\em invariant measures\/} -- by outer approximations which are created via adaptive multilevel subdivision techniques. These schemes allow for an extremely memory and time efficient discretization of the phase space and have the flexibility to be applied to several problem types.

Abstract TBA

Abstract: 

This work focuses on the sweep-stick mechanism of particle clustering in turbulent flows whereby heavy particles cluster in a way which mimics the clustering of zero acceleration points. We present this phenomenology in 2D and 3D homogeneous, isotropic turbulence and turbulent channel flow. Crucial to the mechanism in each case is the nature of sweeping in the flow. We quantify the Stokes number dependency of the probability of the heavy particles to be at zero acceleration points and show that in the inertial range of Stokes numbers the sweep-stick mechanism is dominant over the conventionally proposed mechanism of heavy particles being centrifuged from high vorticity regions to high strain regions.

Abstract: Omega-limit sets are important objects in the study of discrete dynamical systems, in that they tell us a great deal about the asymptotic behaviour of the orbits of points. Furthermore, they have many interesting dynamical properties, one of which is that of internal chain transitivity, which is related to computer-based numerical analysis.Using symbolic dynamics as well as traditional analysis, and focusing our attention on tent maps, we investigate the cases for which being an omega-limit set is identical to having internal chain transitivity."

Consumer and retailer demands in some of New Zealand’s key export markets are driving substantial changes in the value chains that begin in New Zealand.

Abstract: Two great puzzles in solar astrophysics concern the source of coronal heating and the distribution of solar flares. The atmosphere of the sun is heated to one million degrees or more, possibly by swarms of tiny flares. These tiny flares could be consequences of the braiding of magnetic field lines. Reconnection between braided threads of magnetic flux can release energy stored in the braid. The larger flares exhibit a power law energy distribution. Several authors have suggested that a self-organization process in the solar magnetic field could lead to such a distribution. Here we show how reconnection of braided lines can organize the small scale structure of the field, leading to power law energy release.

Abstract: In oscillatory systems, invasions often generate periodic spatiotemporal oscillations, which undergo a subsequent transition to chaos. The periodic oscillations have the form of a wavetrain, and occur in a band of constant width. I will describe this phenomenon in detail, and will explain the concept of absolute stability of wavetrains, which is central to a full understanding of the behaviour. In applications, a key question is whether one expects spatiotemporal data to be dominated by regular or irregular oscillations, or to involve a significant proportion of both. This depends on the width of the wavetrain band. I will describe a new method for calculating this width, based on the absolute stability of the wavetrain in moving frames of reference. I will illustrate the work via two examples: the generation of wavetrains in the wake of the invasion of a prey population by predators, and spatiotemporal patterning behind propagating fronts in the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation. The work that I will describe in this talk has been done in collaboration with Matthew Smith (Microsoft Research, Cambridge) and Jens Rademacher (CWI, Amsterdam).

Abstract: In this talk the existence and nonexistence of similarity solutions is considered for the PDE arising from a simple model which has applications in both morphogen transport and the diffusion of solvents into polymeric materials.

Abstract: TBA

We are delighted to welcome Erik Assadourian, Project Director of this year’s State of the World 2010 report, published annually by the Worldwatch Institute based in Washington DC. 

1^st October 2007 was the 48^th Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It was also the date on which the Property Rights Law of PRC came into force. The actual and symbolic effect on this 2007 Law on land use rights in China was, and remains, highly controversial. When the law was enacted many outside commentators – and also many critics within the PRC – viewed it as a major step towards state recognition of private ownership of land, and the abandonment of socialist principles. The reality is, inevitably, more complex and less easy for anoutsider to grasp. At the heart of the difficulties lies the fundamental question: can our concept of private property ever be compatible with the Chinese concept of the rule law?

Abstract: Symmetries provide useful tools to study and classify differential and discrete equations, as well as to construct solutions for these equations. A new and interesting application of symmetries is that they provide a link between discrete and differential equations. Specifically, one can employ the symmetries of the former in order to derive systems of differential equations. In particular, the discrete potential KdV equation and its symmetries will be used as an illustrative example to present this derivation. It will be shown that integrability aspects, like multidimensional consistency and Bäcklund transformation, are inherited to the resulting system of differential equations by its discrete counterpart. Finally, this analysis will be extended to the class of equations to which the discrete potential KdV belongs.

Animals are capable of navigating through an environment. This requires them to recognise, remember and relate positions. Spatial representation is one of the main tasks during navigation. The brain seems to have a world centric positioning system such that we remember positions of objects in relation to a reference frame. Such spatial representation is believed to have been constructed in the hippocampus and related brain areas. Place cells, head direction cells, grid cells and border cells seem to transform vestibular information to spatial information in the brain. However, when psychological studies reveal how these areas are connected together, the process of transforming vestibular information to the kind of representation seen in place cells is still in question.

The Homes and Communities Agency was launched in December 2008 and represents a merger of the Housing Corporation (which was the government’s agency for funding affordable housing) and English Partnerships (which was the government’s agency for developing public land).

Abstract: Sets of constrained orbit segments of time continuous flows are collections of trajectories that represent a whole or parts of an invariant set. A non-trivial but simple example is a homoclinic orbit. A typical representation of this set consists of an equilibrium point of the flow and a trajectory that starts close and returns close to this equilibrium point within finite time. More complicated examples are hybrid periodic orbits of piecewise smooth systems or quasi-periodic invariant tori. Even though it is possible to define generalised two-point boundary value problems for computing sets of constrained orbit segments, this is very disadvantageous in practice. In this talk we will present an algorithm that allows the efficient continuation of sets of constrained orbit segments together with the solution of the full variational problem.

Interference between two competing stimuli has been extensively studied in many research areas including attention, information processing and cognitive control. For this study, both competition and cooperation of stimuli are explained by the developed Hopfield based Stroop model within the classical colour-word Stroop effect paradigm. Competition of stimuli occurs when the task is to name the colour for an incompatible colour-word and its colour (e.g. a word RED written in green), meanwhile the cooperation among stimuli can be observed when congruence (e.g. a word RED written in red) between both facilitates the response to the colour name. The Hopfield network is chosen for several reasons; we address the Stroop phenomenon as an association problem, the competition and cooperation of Stroop stimuli meets the pattern processing nature of the Hopfield network and the recall algorithm in Hopfield is biologically realistic. We have shown that, with a relatively simple but biologically plausible neural network of a single Hopfield network, our model is also able to predict the Stroop effect in comparison to the human performance.

The JFS (Jews Free Schools) are part of a growing number of faith schools in the UK. They are entitled, once oversubscribed, to select pupils who conform to their religion; in JFS’s case, Judaism. The JFS exercised an admissions policy based upon what the Office of the Chief Rabbi (OCR) considered to be Jewish. This test required that the Mother of a prospective pupil be either born Jewish, or had converted prior to the student’s birth to Judaism through an Orthodox Synagogue; pupils applying after oversubscription who did not meet this test were liable to be refused.  A thirteen year old boy, ‘M’, was refused entry to the North London JFS because his Mother had converted from Catholicism to Judaism after he was born at a progressive synagogue; a subsequent appeal to the Admissions Appeals Panel failed.

M’s Father, ‘E’, sought a judicial review of this decision, contending that it was either (1) direct racial discrimination or, (2) indirect discrimination. The Supreme Court, affirming the Court of Appeal’s decision, on a 5:4 split, found the JFS admissions policy to amount to direct racial discrimination, and was thus unlawful. The minority, believed the policy to be based on religious, and not racial tests; two of whom found there to be indirect discrimination, and two found there no discrimination whatever. The policy was declared unlawful.

Abstract: I will discuss some explicit examples of nonlinear systems that have heteroclinic attractors with depth two - namely chain recurrent attractors composed of a union of relative equilibria, connecting orbits between them as well as connecting orbits between connecting orbits. One of the examples (joint with O Podvigina) arises in the normal form for a mode interaction; the other (joint with T Chawanya) arises in a game dynamical system.

Abstract: I will discuss the effect of extrinsic noise in metabolic networks. In particular I will introduce external random fluctuations at the kinetic level, and show how these lead to a stochastic generalization of standard metabolic control analysis. While summation and connectivity theorems hold true in the presence of extrinsic noise, control coefficients are shown to incorporate its effect through an explicit dependency on the noise intensity. This leads naturally to the introduction of the concept of 'control by noise' as a way of tuning the systemic behaviour of metabolisms. I argue that this framework holds for intrinsic noise too, when time-scale separation is present in the system, and define the noise propagation problem in metabolic networks.

Second Life is a 3D multi-user role-playing online environment. Unlike other virtual worlds, created as games with set rules and stock characters, most of what goes on in Second Life is created by its users. This makes it an ideal playground for all sort of creative people. At any given time, there are no fewer than 20,000 people active in Second Life. Over a period of 60 days as many as one and a half million registered users log in. 

Considerable effort goes into specifying secure and security protocols and the equipment in which these are embodied. In most cases the specification concentrates on positive cases with very little concentration on failure modes.

This talk will concentrate on limitations that are imposed on our ability to make assertions about the security of a system where we are unable to understand the quality of the implementation. It will do so by examining the types of failure that have led to security system failures. Finally, the talk will examine some of the extant security protocols and show that these provide very little support for identifying and guaranteeing the quality of components networked together in a distributed system

Abstract: When simulating actual geophysical flows, inaccuracies in initial conditions, forcing fields and in the model equations themselves, both numerical and physical, lead to differences between the actual behavior of the system and the simulation. One way to address this problem is to try to incorporate the uncertainties in the simulations, e.g. in the form of probability density functions. The problem then is that for large-dimensional simulations in e.g. numerical weather prediction, the state space is so large, typically a million variables, that no computer is large enough to store these probability density functions.So, if we want to include these uncertainties we need an efficient representation of the pdf's.

Abstract: The Lorenz system still fascinates many people because of the simplicity of the equations that generate such complicated dynamics on the famous butterfly attractor. This talk addresses the role of the stable and unstable manifolds in organising the dynamics more globally.

On Tuesday 23 March, the Department will hold its 7th Annual PhD Conference.
The conference celebrates the work of all of our PhD students through presentations and posters, recognising their valuable contribution to computer science research. Two keynote speakers ( Professor Rudolf Hanka - University of Cambridge and David Krause - Varian Medical Systems Inc) will present motivational talks during the event.

Victor Kattan is a Teaching Fellow at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.  He is the author of The Palestine Question in International Law (BIICL), and his most recent book, From Coexistence to Conquest:  International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1891-1949 (Pluto Press) is the subject of his presentation. 

While fuel poverty is often seen as a social problem, the solution is to improve the energy efficiency of the home,
providing strong synergies with climate change policy.

Abstract: How can one discover a new integrable system? Various approaches have been used to answer this question for integrable PDEs, but relatively few integrable difference equations are known at present. We introduce an approach that is based on the following observation: for a given degree of complexity, integrable difference equations commonly have more low-order conservation laws than nonintegrable ones do. We have used this observation to sift a large class of difference equations, in order to find candidates for integrability.

Abstract: We derive a new family of models for shallow water near geostrophy via asymptotic expansion of the shallow water Lagrangian in Rossby number and study this family on a periodic domain.    

Abstract: We introduce a class of piecewise linear transformations that can be used to generate beta-expansions with arbitrary digits. Under some conditions on beta and the digit set, we can construct a natural extension for such a transformation, which allows us to get an invariant measure equivalent to Lebesgue for the original transformation. From the natural extension, we obtain a multiple tiling of a Euclidean space. For the classic greedy beta-transformation (Tx = beta x (mod 1)) the Pisot conjecture states that this construction gives a proper tiling for all Pisot numbers beta. We give an example of a double tiling, showing that this conjecture is no longer true in the more general setting.

Tony Dyhouse will discuss some standards applicable to the fields of Information Assurance and Service Delivery, illustrating areas of commonality with regard to aim and approach. 

This is part of a series of collaborative meetings between Bristol University, Liverpool University, Manchester University, Queen Mary, Surrey University and Warwick University, supported by a Scheme 3 grant from the London Mathematical Society.

Abstract: We generalize the Newtonian n-body problem to spaces of curvature k=constant, and study the motion in 2 dimensions. We prove the existence of several classes of relative equilibria, including the hyperbolic rotations for k<0. We also classify all homographic solutions of the 3-body case with equal masses. In the end, we prove Saari's conjecture when the bodies are on a geodesic that rotates elliptically or hyperbolically. We also emphasize that fixed points are specific to the case k>0, hyperbolic relative equilibria to k<0, and Lagrangian orbits of arbitrary masses to k=0, results that provide new criteria towards understanding the large-scale geometry of the physical space.

Abstract: The regulation of dietary fats is controlled by the production and uptake of lipoprotein particles by the liver. Such particles consist of a combination of cholesterol and triglyceride esters. The particle content of these is important – particles with high cholesterol, but reduced triglyceride, content can remain in the blood stream becoming the precursors for the formation of coronary artery disease. 

Abstract: Slow manifolds in singular perturbed ODEs are the set of equilibria of the fast system with $\epsilon=0$, where $\epsilon$ is the small parameter. Fenichel showed that normally hyperbolic slow manifolds do persist together with its stable and unstable manifolds. On the other hand, normally elliptic slow manifolds only persist adiabatically in general. In particular for Hamiltonian systems with only one fast degree of freedom they persist with exponentially small error.

Our invited speaker is Dr Godfried Williams from the company Intellas UK, experts in Business Intelligence Security and Intelligent Forensics using AI techniques.

A lecture delivered by Clinton Walker, Security Consultant at Logica.  

Recent media reports covering major breaches of security claimed that they might have been prevented if staff awareness of security, procedures, appropriate data handling and security controls had been more reliable. Human error has become the biggest security concern for IT directors, end users and all parties concerned with data that’s held about them.

"Enterprises must recognise that simply trusting employees will inevitably prove detrimental to their security, their risk postures and their business interests," wrote Perry Carpenter, a research director at Gartner. Vnunet.com (10th Oct 2008).

Abstract: In this talk we will discuss some prospects form mathematics of the Digital Economy and Digital Society. We will focus on one of these topics: evolving graphs and their applications. Evolving graphs are simply sequences of random graphs (with or without long term memory). These may be good models of communication and complex dynamical  networks. We will discuss range dependent graphs (with small world properties), inverse problems (modelling data), memory dependence, SIR models on evolving graphs and communicability (sources sinks and transient sensitivities).

The presentation provides a brief review of current military needs together with an assessment of how image and data processing technology can be used to meet these capability gaps.

A range of examples are presented that show how image and data processing can be used within a variety of different applications ranging from airborne, maritime, and land-based platforms. These system examples are based on specific activities and programmes undertaken by Waterfall Solutions Ltd.

Abstract: The aeroacoustic generation of turbulence noise in voiced fricative speech sounds (e.g., /z/, /v/) offers an intriguing practical example of compressible and incompressible fluid flow inside the vocal tract. In fricatives, air flowing into the tract through the larynx passes through a narrow constriction, e.g. made by the tongue, where it forms a jet. 

There are many areas of bio-inspired computing, where inspiration is taken from a biological system and 'magically' transplanted into some engineered system. 

In this talk, Jon Timmis will explore thoughts on a slightly more principled approach to bio-inspired system development, that hopefully does not include any magic, and discuss in the context of immune-inspired systems, some of the potential and pitfalls of using biological systems as inspiration. To help ground the talk, he will explore a case study from their recent work with DSTL in the development of an immune-inspired robotic sniffer dog detection system, inspired by a signalling mechanism in T-cells that are present in the immune system

Climate change and global pandemics both highlight the complex, multi-scale, uncertain dynamics that pervade societal problems today - and also the circulation of highly contrasting narratives about these dynamics, why they matter and to
whom, and what to do about them.

Abstract: Whenever Lagrange multipliers are used for the pointwise unit-vector constraints in director modelling of liquid crystals, or in both director and order tensor models when an electric field that stems from a constant voltage is present, the resulting discretised equations take the form of saddle-point problems.

We describe a general approach enabling one to prove the uniqueness of a stationary distribution and a mixing property for the 2D Navier-Stokes system perturbed by a non-degenerate random force. It is based on a development of the classical coupling method introduced by Doeblin in 1940. We begin with the case of Markov chains in a phase space containing finitely many points. We next turn to the Navier-Stokes system and apply the Bogolyubov-Krylov argument to construct a stationary distribution. To prove the uniqueness and mixing, we introduce the concept of maximal coupling and use it to construct an auxiliary Markov process in the direct product of two copies of the original phase space. This auxiliary process is such that its marginal laws coincide with those of solutions for Navier-Stokes equations, and its components converge to each other as time goes to infinity. These properties imply the required results.

There has been a rapid decrease in the amount of open or natural space in Japan in recent years, in particular in urban areas due to the development of housing. Preserving these areas as wildlife habitats and spaces where children can play is a very important issue nowadays. 

Abstract: Subject of the talk will be the derivation and rigorous mathematical justification of macroscopic continuum models describing the effective dynamics of amplitude-modulated plane waves in discrete lattices. We will present different continuum models (e.g. the nonlinear Schrödinger and the three-wave-interaction equations) corresponding to different ansatz'es and describing different physical phenomena.

Abstract: This will be a short talk to introduce Models and Mathematics in Life and Social Sciences (MILES), which is Surrey's newly funded Bridging the Gaps programme that will start in the autumn. The idea is to get people thinking about how we can make the most of this grant, so that there is lots of activity when we officially launch. It could potentially benefit any of us and is aimed just as much at people who have not thought previously about cross-disciplinary research, as those who already work in life or social science modelling. The value of the award is £800K over 3 years, the majority of which will be available to support new research projects that form during the programme.

Abstract: The field of human circadian rhythms and sleep research has a longstanding tradition of mathematical modelling. Initially these modelling efforts were inspired by oscillator theory but more recent models are more directly based on physiology. 

Mineral extraction projects have frequently found themselves at the fault lines of competing interests. Expectations to safeguard habitat, water, climate, and human rights have not always been reconciled with expectations to enhance living standards and economic prosperity.

Traditional image steganalysis techniques are conducted with respect to the entire image. In this work, we aim to differentiate a stego image from its cover image based on steganalysis results of decomposed image blocks. As a natural image often consists of heterogeneous regions, its decomposition will lead to smaller image blocks, each of which is more homogeneous

On 12th and 13th July the Department of Computing is hosting the Summer meeting of NCAF, the Natural Computation Applications Forum, a platform for exchange of ideas between academia and industry.  The special theme is: Making Sense of Data - Theory and Practice.

Despite many advances in computational intelligence, it is clear that we have yet to achieve Turing’s dream of “intelligent machinery” – machines with human-level understanding. A broader reference point for intelligent behaviour which encompasses artificial agents is now being advocated (Cristianini 2010). 

In this seminar, I will prompt discussion by asking some key questions, which include “have we forgotten Turing’s dream?” and “should we abandon human intelligence as our reference point?” And of course, I will also provide my own opinion as to what I think the way forward might be.

Biologically inspired computing studies the properties and mechanisms of information processing in nature and embeds this knowledge into artificial systems. Due to its adaptability to wider range of applications, neural network has been of interest in many research areas. Furthermore, the growing evidences from the neuroscience field have led to evolutions of artificial neural network (ANN). From the simple McCulloch-Pitts models, ANN has now in its third generation with spiking neuron network (SNN) models. SNN based model provides more meaningful interpretation of biological neural system. However, information encoding is a major challenge as the trade off for its realism.

This seminar will bring together an interdisciplinary group of international water experts to discuss the experience gained by in the sustainable management of the Guarani Aquifer System in the light of the current developments on international law of transboundary aquifers. Speakers will include experts who have been collaborating with the United Nations International Law Commission in the work that has led to the adoption of the Draft Articles on the law of transboundary aquifers and experts whose work focuses on the Guarani Aquifer System.

https://store.surrey.ac.uk/events/eventdetails.asp?eventid=29

Tim has been working in the field of sustainability for over a decade, primarily in air quality – but also in the strongly related fields of climate change, public health, transport, and the built environment. For much of this time, he has been based at the University of the West of England where he has worked very closely with Defra and the Devolved Administrations on the UK’s Local Air Quality Management process.

British Computer Society Debate

Adrian Seccombe (formerly Chief Information Security Officer, Eli Lilly), Ian Wells (Royal Surrey County Hospital), chaired by Roger Peel (Department of Computing, University of Surrey)

How do governments actually make policy in a complex area such as climate change? Why do they take the decisions they do? And why do they not take other decisions they are lobbied to do?

Abstract: Ensemble forecasting systems, comprising a control forecast and a large number of perturbed forecasts, form the mathematical basis of probabilistic weather prediction. The control forecast is a lower resolution version of the main 'deterministic' run and the perturbed runs address uncertainty in the initial conditions and model equations. Terms introduced into the model equations attempt to account for random error associated with the chaotic nature of sub-grid processes and upscale energy transport.

This talk describes ways to enhance the operational potential of Industrial and Urban Ecosystems to support sustainable development.

Abstract: The dynamics of evolution, ecology and demography are dependent: a population changes due to the actions of individuals within it while species evolve through competitive interactions in their physical environment. To understand what drives these dynamics, we need to understand what distinguishes individuals, populations and assemblages. Using multi-state, non-linear dynamical systems exposed to Markovian environments, I'll show how biological structure and environmental stochasticity are crucial regulatory aspects in population and evolutionary dynamics.

Abstract: The flow of thin liquid films driven by gravity and surface tension is of interest in a variety of medical and industrial applications. The lubrication approximation of the Stokes system provides a suitable model for thin film flow, and the resulting partial differential equations have a particularly interesting structure for flow in the presence of surfactants.

Politics Seminar Series -- in collaboration with RESOLVE 

Wednesday October 20th, at 13:00 - 14:00

Location: 45a AZ 04

Abstract: Mathematical modeling plays an important role in studying complex biological systems and parameter estimation is an essential component of developing mathematical models. However, accurate estimation of parameters is conceptual and computational challenging as high fidelity models can contain a large number of parameters. Nonlinear filtering is one method that can be used to sequentially estimate both states and parameters. We shall examine the application of these filtering techniques on nonlinear models with varying sets of parameters.

Copyright owners are faced with the task of limiting illicit file sharing of multimedia content. With this aim, Buyer-Seller Watermarking protocols are proposed to act as a suitable deterrent to file sharing by providing the copyright owner with adequate evidence of illegal distribution if and only if such illicit behaviour has occurred. A recent survey of BSW protocols concluded that only heuristic approaches to the security analysis of such protocols had been adopted in the literature and that formal analysis of the security of such schemes is a research direction worth pursuing.

Abstract: Weather and climate models comprise a so-called 'adiabatic dynamical core' and a collection of 'parametrizations' (often given the unfortunate name of 'physics'). The former is a more or less well understood numerical solution of dynamical equations based on the Euler equations. The latter attempt to represent a wide variety of physical processes. 

Our meeting this month features the recent formation of a "Computing At School" Hub based around the BCS Guildford Branch and the Department of Computing at the University of Surrey.

There is an increasing realisation that the study of computing topics in schools is not laying the foundations for a lifelong appreciation of the subject, but instead just training students in skills related to particular current technologies. The BCS, Microsoft Research and several other industrial and educational organisations have created "Computing At School" (CAS; see http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/) as a vehicle to incubate improvements in the school-age study of computing, and to support teachers with high-quality resources to enable this change.

The BCS Guildford Branch is the first BCS Branch [to our knowledge!] to launch a local Computing At School Hub. This will be based in Guildford, but attracted teachers from south London and West Sussex as well as from Surrey and Hampshire to its Launch event last week. So far, there are about 10 Hubs country-wide, but we hope to promote our model to other Branches.

This month's meeting will introduce the Surrey CAS Hub to the BCS Guildford Branch, and outline the role that our industrial and commercial members can play to help it to achieve its goals. In particular, we will be exploring particular technologies that could be used to provide motivating learning experiences for mass teaching of the foundations of computing - such as the mobile phone.

Abstract: In the first part I will discuss an existence result of infinitely many weak solution for the one-dimensional version of the Perona-Malik forward-backward diffusion equation model in image processing. The main tool is the partial differential inclusion method. In the second part I will briefly present some applications of recent joint works with colleagues on noise reduction and feature extraction.

When designing a legged robot a small change in one variable can have a significant effect on a number of the robot’s characteristics, meaning that making tradeoffs can be difficult. The algorithm presented here uses biologically inspired optimization techniques to identify the effects of changing various robot design variables and determine if there are any general rules which can be applied to the design of a legged robot. Designs produced by this simulation are compared to existing robot designs and biological systems, showing that the algorithm produces results which require less power and lower torque motors than similar existing designs, and which share a number of characteristics with biological systems

Mr Ariranga G. Pillay (UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; President, SADC Tribunal; former Chief Justice of Mauritius) will be speaking on the topic “Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and Climate Change” on Friday 29th October, 13.30, in 32MS03. A reception will follow the event. All are welcome.

If you would like to attend this seminar, please RSVP to Chrissie Leveridge (fmlevents@surrey.ac.uk).

This Seminar has been organised by Surrey International Law Centre (SILC) and forms part of the School of Law's Research Seminar Programme.

Zipf’s law, one of the empirical laws, was originally used to analyse the probability of occurrence of an event in mathematical fashion. For instance, it can be used to describe the relationships between the popularity rank of words and their frequency of use in a natural language. Similarly, it can be shown that there is a mathematical pattern between the size of the population in a country and the size of its cities.

The speaker at this seminar will be Mr Mohan Ahad, Assistant to Chief Technologist at MBDA, and Managing Director at Microlaunch Systems Ltd.  MBDA is Europe's largest supplier of Guided Weapons.  With reductions in defence budgets it has to look for innovative ways of developing technology for its military customers by leveraging capability from the civil sector.  

The talk will give an overview of the company, the funding mechanism available for low level technology and its ambitions for participating EU Framework Programmes. 

All are welcome so please make a note in your diary to attend.

Professor Warren Thorngate of Carleton University and Visiting International Fellow at the Department of Sociology will give a seminar today from 2-3 pm in Room 04 AD 00.  The title of the seminar is Inference is not evidence:  An Old (and easy) way of testing theory-data fit.

The Department of Sociology holds a number of seminars throughout the Autumn and Spring terms.  View the forthcoming seminars being held in Autumn 2010.

Abstract: I will report on joint work with Gerhard Keller (Erlangen) and Jean-Baptiste Bardet (Rouen). We study systems consisting of a large number of identical chaotic components which interact via a mean-field coupling rule, meaning that the evolution of each component depends on the global average of all states.  

Designing complex, self-organising systems is challenging. It requires to find local, decentralised rules for the agents which result in a good global performance of the overall system. In this talk, two approaches are presented at the example of a self-organising manufacturing system where local dispatching rules are used for decentralised scheduling.

The first approach supports a human designer by revealing the weaknesses of an examined manufacturing system. This is achieved by automatically searching for easy-to-analyse problem instances where the applied dispatching rule performs poorly.
The other approach is to generate the dispatching rules automatically by simulation-based Genetic Programming.

Abstract: TBA

Professor Robert Blackburn (School of Law, King’s College London) will be presenting on “Monarchy and Hung Parliaments” for the School of Law’s Research Seminar series. All welcome. If you would like to attend this seminar, please RSVP to Chrissie Leveridge (fmlevents@surrey.ac.uk).

Please note the change of time and venue, to 81MS02 and 2-3pm.

Abstract: Period-doubling cascades occur in many one-parameter maps, and may be either supercritical or subcritical.  In a two-parameter system it is possible that for one fixed value of the second parameter we observe a supercritical period-doubling cascade on varying the first parameter, and that for a different (fixed) value of the second parameter we observe a subcritical period-doubling cascade.  We investigate what happens for intermediate values of the second parameter in such systems.  In particular, we present a structure which we call an "alternating period-doubling cascade".

As part of the Department's PDP week Dr Alan Channer and Imad Karam introduce, show and talk about their film An African Answer.

Abstract: I will present a simple, physiologically-based model of the key sleep-wake neuronal circuitry.  The model, first proposed by Phillips and Robinson in 2008, has been constrained from both behaviour and physiology, and is able to predict many diverse phenomena: from sleep deprivation recovery, arousal thresholds, and fatigue variation during sleep deprivation. I will explain the model and my contributions to it, including a mathematical characterization of its main dynamical features, and extensions of it to include the impact of external stimuli, including pharmaceutical perturbations, and fatigue variation during sleep deprivation. My aim will be to show how behavioural predictions follow from the mathematical properties of the underlying model, which itself has a direct physiological interpretation; this style of model is able to explain behaviour in terms of underlying physiological processes.

This event on Friday 19th November 2010 from 10.30 am to 15.30 pm will comprise presentations and discussion and lunch will be provided.

Substantial interest in digital watermarking over the last 15 years resulted in a considerable number of different watermarking systems that have been proposed.  However, despite this extensive literature on watermarking, not much progress has been made in tackling one of the most devastating attacks on these systems:
the original Stirmark attack introduced by Peticolas et al.

The attack has been described as the software equivalent of a high resolution print-scan attack which is part of a much larger class of random bending attacks (RBAs).

Abstract: Control moment gyros (CMGs) are momentum exchange devices which are considered to be good actuators for spacecraft due to their fast slewing capabilities. They consist of  systems of gimballed momentum wheels. Singularities occur when, no matter how the gimbal angles are moved, the angular momentum cannot be increased in a given direction. We analyze the relationship between gimbal angles and the angular momentum for different CMG  geometries to understand the different types of singularities which occur in these systems.

This talk introduces a theoretical framework based on approximate reasoning, it first extends Euclidean transformations into quantity space via the proposed fuzzy qualitative algebra, next, system behavior is represented by a set of automatically generated sampling data, then, data analysis methods are selected to extract features of the dataset according to individual application context, finally system behavior and corresponding data features are integrated at the system level. The framework is presented in terms of robotics, it has been adapted into applications with encouraging results such as hand gesture recognition, human motion analysis. A unified approach to human/prosthetic hand gesture recognition and results in vision/capture based human motion analysis will be reported in the talk. The framework is intended to provide a foundation towards a unified representation by “gluing” hybrid representations.

As part of the Department of Sociology seminar series Ben Fincham of the University of Sussex will present the seminar on 'Suicide:  Sociological autopsy and repertoires of action'

Water is one natural resource whose management is especially susceptible to uncertainties, many of which are being exasperated by climate change. Some of these uncertainties originate from knowledge deficits in physical conditions while others relate to behavioral and social variability related to water supply and use.

Abstract: In this talk I will discuss a class of Hamiltonian systems which are motivated by game theory and which have surprisingly interesting dynamics.

A discussion aimed at exploring how Watermarking might be able to help with the Identity Dilemmas.  All are welcome to attend so please enter this event in your diary.

Abstract: Our intention is to show the Gardner method for generation of conservation laws for partial difference equations. We apply it to all the ABS equations and to an asymmetric quad-graph equation. We also show that the Gardner method can be applied for symmetries. Namely, we use it to generate an infinite number of symmetries from known one.

Abstract: As formation flying missions are becoming a reality, relative motion modelling has received an enhanced interest through the past decade. 

Abstract: Automorphisms of nilmanifolds present an interesting and rich family of examples of partially hyperbolic dynamical systems. In this talk the mixing properties of such automorphisms will be discussed. This is a joint work with R. Spatzier.

Abstract: Intuitively, an end of a leaf in a minimal set of a foliation is a  'distinct way to go to infinity'. Analysis of end spaces of leaves  provides information about the asymptotic behavior of leaves in the  minimal set. Although the notion of an end is rather simple, it is  not always easy to compute the number of ends of leaves in actual  examples of minimal sets. In the talk I will introduce a notion of  the Schreier continuum, which gives a way to compute end structures  of leaves within the minimal set of a certain class of foliations  geometrically, and give examples of computations with Schreier  continua.

Dr Christian Henderson (Department of Law, Oxford Brookes University) will be speaking on the topic “UN Security Council Resolution 1860 (2009) and the Contemporary Legal Nature of UN Security Council Resolutions” on Wednesday 8th December at 13.00.  All welcome.

This Seminar has been organised by Surrey International Law Centre (SILC) and forms part of the School of Law's Research Seminar Programme.

If you would like to attend this seminar, please RSVP to Chrissie Leveridge (fmlevents@surrey.ac.uk).

Dr Christian Henderson (Department of Law, Oxford Brookes University) will be speaking on the topic “UN Security Council Resolution 1860 (2009) and the Contemporary Legal Nature of UN Security Council Resolutions” on Wednesday 8th December at 13.00.  All welcome.

This Seminar has been organised by Surrey International Law Centre (SILC) and forms part of the School of Law's Research Seminar Programme.

If you would like to attend this seminar, please RSVP to Chrissie Leveridge (fmlevents@surrey.ac.uk).

As part of the Department of Sociology seminar series, Rebecca Boden of the University of Cardiff will give a seminar entitled 'Managing ethics?  Critiquing regimes of ethical control'

Formal analysis is based on ensuring that a model preserves particular system properties. Defining the model and specifying the properties requires specialist expertise, the formal model and properties are typically written by hand, based on some informal definition. These definitions range from English written requirements, Unified Modelling Language (UML) models to Domain Specific Language (DSL) descriptions. Our work focuses on the investigation of whether the formal models can be automatically generated from their corresponding informal definition.

Alex Evans is based at New York University's Center on International Cooperation, where he runs a program on what issues of resource scarcity - especially food, land, water and energy - mean for globalisation and international development, and what kinds of international collective action are needed to manage them.

Abstract: Poincare's fundamental problem of dynamics concerns the behaviour of an integrable Hamiltonian system under a (small) non-integrable perturbation.  Under rather weak conditions Komolgorov-Arnol'd-Moser (KAM) theory settles this question for the majority of initial values.  The perturbed motion is (again) quasi-periodic, the number of frequencies equals the number of degrees of freedom.  KAM theory proves such Lagrangean tori to persist provided that the frequencies are bounded away from resonances by means of Diophantine inequalities.

Abstract: TBA

Abstract: TBA

FORESTSPECS provides research based biological and technical understanding and solutions needed for upgrading wood related residues and humic substances to value-added chemicals and materials. 

Abstract: A successive  averaging method is developed for explaining the regularization mechanism in the periodic Korteweg- deVries (KdV) equation in the homogeneous Sobolev spaces  H^s for s>0.  Specifically, a proof is given of global existence existence, uniqueness, and Lipschitz continuous dependence on the initial data of the solutions of the periodic KdV. For the case  where the initial data is in L_2 we also show the Lipschitz continuous dependence of these solutions with respect to the initial data as maps from H^s to H^s for -1 < s < 0.

As part of the Department of Sociology seminar series Dan McCarthy of the University of Surrey will give a seminar entitled 'Gendering 'soft' policing:  The fluidity and fragilities of occupational cultures'

The globally accepted association between Brazil and the Environment is often a negative one, with Amazon deforestation an overriding theme.

With the advancement of imaging devices and image manipulation soft-ware, production, development and manipulation of digital images can now be done by almost everyone.  For this reason, the task of tracking and protecting digital data (images, videos etc.) has become very difficult.  To provide adequate policing over the use of digital content, both Active and Passive security techniques are followed.  Digital watermarking is an active approach that involves pre-processing an image in order to protect it.  

Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Master Inventor, will introduce technology which is helping to make the planet smarter: instrumenting objects in the real world with sensors, linking them together over a network, and then applying intelligent applications to reason about what's happening, and how to react accordingly. 

Organic semiconductors fall into a class of materials that shows significant potential for future applications and as a result, the field is becoming extremely topical. 

Abstract: A big problem in malaria control is the rapidity with which mosquitoes can develop resistance to insecticides. The possibility of creating evolution-proof insecticides is therefore of considerable interest. Biologists have suggested that effective malaria control, with only weak selection for insecticide resistance, could be achieved if insecticides target only old mosquitoes that have already laid most of their eggs. The strategy aims to exploit the fact that most malarial mosquitoes do not live long enough to transmit the disease. 

The paper examines a decision by the UK Government in 2003 to adopt a demanding, long-term CO2 emissions reduction target, following the advice of one of its longest-standing environmental advisory bodies, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (established in 1970, the RCEP is one of the bodies that the Coalition Government has decided to abolish). 

Quantum theory can have powerful applications due to the possibility of implementing new quantum technologies such as the quantum computer. 

Abstract: Complicated pattern formation can be found in many PDE models. Sometimes one can analyze the patterns, for example, the existence and stability of travelling waves, emerging spots and evolving spiral structures with dynamical systems theory, asymptotic methods, singular perturbations and other tools from applied analysis. Most of the time, however, one is restricted to numerical techniques to approximate, predict and explore the arising complex structures. In some cases, applied and numerical mathematics even go hand in hand, thereby stimulating each other in giving new insights in the model.  

Abstract:  This illustrated talk will be about two mathematical models which claim to describe the sudden changes in velocity and pressure that occur within a fluid domain when a water wave hits or meets a rigid impermeable surface, such as a seawall.  The first model involves classical mechanical ideas of impulse extended to the flow of a fluid.  The second model is a stab at describing the whipping motion (flip-through) of the free-surface when a wave breaks against a plane wall and makes a high speed splash.

Professor Eric Barendt (Goodman Professor of Media Law, UCL) will be presenting on the topic "Academic Freedom in the UK" as part of the School of Law’s Research Seminar Series. All welcome. If you would like to attend this seminar, please RSVP to Chrissie Leveridge (fmlevents@surrey.ac.uk).

Abstract: It is seen in some natural biological situations, that a living organism requiring a change in its location and orientation is able to do so by executing a sequence of internally controlled motions. These motions cause a resultant location change due to the conservation of momentum.

Abstract: Traditional ship design optimises the design of ship hull and propeller for calm water conditions and then applies a suitable empirical margin to account for the influence of seastate and wind on the ship resistance.  An alternative approach is to understand the unsteady flowfield generated around the hull for each wave and how this impacts on the net energy requirement for propulsion.  

Oxide semiconductors have enormous potential for new and innovative uses and may also improve existing device applications.

A round table discussion between academic members of the School of Law on pertinent issues related to the impact of EU law in their area of research post-Lisbon.

Controlling light on the nanoscale is an equally exciting and challenging goal, and it allows us to strongly enhance light-matter interactions.

The second in the Technologies and Applications seminar series, presented by Tony Dyhouse.

Tony Dyhouse will discuss some standards applicable to the fields of Information Assurance and Service Delivery; illustrating areas of commonality with regard to aim and approach. Different mechanisms for the protection of CIA will be discussed from a point of view of risk transference and third party provision of services, including a look at potential conflict of interest and how that can be addressed. Finally, a view on advancing technology and Cloud services.

Abstract: Abstract:  Linkages in the plane are know to have geometrically interesting configuration spaces M.  
One can describe the dynamics of some simple idealized  linkages in terms of the geodesic flow on M, for an  appropriate Riemannian metric. We describe how to associate to the linkage the curvature of this metric, which has a direct bearing on the dynamics of geodesic  flow, and thus of the linkage.

As silicon possesses weak generally weak electro-optic coefficients, the creation of compact, efficient optical components tends to be challenging.

The medical sector naturally attracts considerable interest from the microsystems community. The area poses interesting challenges, often has research funding and offers the potential for sufficiently high value that the cost of development can be repaid. 

Considerable effort goes into specifying secure and security protocols and the equipment in which these are embodied. In most cases the specification concentrates on positive cases with very little concentration on failure modes.

This talk will concentrate on limitations that are imposed on our ability to make assertions about the security of a system where we are unable to understand the quality of the implementation. It will do so by examining the types of failure that have led to security system failures. 

Finally, the talk will examine some of the extant security protocols and show that these provide very little support for identifying and guaranteeing the quality of components networked together in a distributed system

Catherine Heard (Fair Trials International) will be speaking on the topic “Justice Issues in Today’s EU” on Wednesday 9th March at 13.00.  All welcome.

This Seminar has been organised by Surrey European Law Unit (SELU) and forms part of the School of Law's Research Seminar Programme.

If you would like to attend this seminar, please RSVP to Chrissie Leveridge (fmlevents@surrey.ac.uk).

A brief introduction into why IT security has become increasingly important to businesses over recent years: what has driven the increasing use of IT in transactional business and why this has caused a focus on security.  We will also discuss the type of threats that business is aware of and what it is they believe they are responding to.  This we will use as the backdrop to describing some of the worst “real” incidents and how these might differ from the threat that business was preparing to meet.  We will then go on to talk about how software vendors view IT security and how this is driving their efforts to secure their products.  This will focus primarily on the approach that Microsoft have taken over recent years.

Abstract: In this talk we will discuss a unifying approach to the smoothing estimates for dispersive equations based on the canonical transforms from the microlocal analysis, as well as on the comparison principles for evolution equations. The talk will be based on the joint work with Mitsuru Sugimoto (Nagoya).

This week we will be have talks from two of the visitors to the ATI:-

The Surrey International Law Centre and the Department of Politics of the University of Surrey join for a topical seminar where the key question that the international community is currently dealing with in regard to the situation developing in Libya will be dealt with: whether to intervene or not…

Dr. Mulugeta Ayalew l will be presenting on the topic "Regulation of Water Providers in Ethiopia and Kenya" as part of the School of Law’s Research Seminar Series.  

ERRG Seminar Series present:

Dr. Mulugeta Ayalew, School of Law, University of Surrey:

“Regulation of Water Providers in Ethiopia and Kenya”

The Surrey International Law Centre and the Department of Politics of the University of Surrey join for a topical seminar where the key question that the international community is currently dealing with in regard to the situation developing in Libya will be dealt with: whether to intervene or not…

This presentation is given by Mr Paul King, Senior Security Advisor at CISCO.  Paul will give an overview of how organisations are at risk from corporate espionage - how organisations might be attacked and how they might reduce the risk. The talk will use Cisco's own organisation as an example. Paul will also discuss some of the research he is doing in this space.

This talk will covers three topics. As introduction, it will give a brief history of how early understanding of field electron emission (FE) grew.

Dr. Glen Plant will be presenting on the topic "Legal Issues surrounding off-shore renewable energy development in Europe, with an emphasis on the British Isles" as part of the School of Law’s Research Seminar Series.  

Abstract
This paper arises from work undertaken to revise and update ‘Organisational Misbehaviour’(Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999) which is now being republished in a revised and updated edition. In 1999 the topic of Managerial misbehaviour was not covered in our book for a number of reasons. Although there was some evidence for managerial misbehaviour – including some spectacular examples (Punch, 1996) - by and large it seemed a marginal subject matter. At the time, managers defined what counted as organisational misbehaviour almost exclusively, and for us that was a key point of our thesis. Today, of course, much has changed. Today, it is seldom possible to read a serious newspaper without encountering reports of misbehaviour and alleged malfeasance amongst managers, and especially their top echelons. Today, journalists have an active interest in reporting misbehaviour and certain aspects of it have become matters of public politics. What is considered in this paper is not so much whether there is more managerial misbehaviour, as the capacity to assess this adequately evades us; but why managerial beliefs and practices have moved so far from the norms of acceptable conduct held by educated opinion and that of the general public.

The Hospitality Entrepreneurs Society is proud to present an evening with Vince Pearson.

Vince Pearson is Chairman of the Waterfall Group, a privately owned Contract Caterer with an annual turnover of 45 million and close to 2500 employees.  Vince was a former Hospitality student at Surrey in 77 to 81 and was sponsored by the Army Catering Corps.  After sandhurst and a short service commission as a Catering Officer, Vince has spent the last 25 years in Contract Catering.  This included working for Sodexo and Vince was a UK main board director in 1999 looking after all their public sector businesses with some 18,000 employees.  

In early 2007 Vince and a Management team led a successful buy in to Caterplus with Venture Capital backing and have grown the business through both organic and acquisition.

Vince will use his address to highlight the lessons and experiences that have shaped his views on Hospitality entrepreneurs and to launch the Hospitality Entrepreneurs Society at Surrey University as the first President. Vince is known for his direct and honest style and it is sure to be an interesting address.

ERRG Seminar Series present:

Dr. Glen Plant: 

“Legal Issues surrounding off-shore renewable energy development in Europe, with an emphasis on the British Isles”

The H.264/MVC standard offers good compression ratios for multi-view sequences by exploiting spatial, temporal and interview image dependencies.  The performance of this coding scheme is optimal in error-free channels, however in the event of transmission errors it leads to the propagation of the distorted macro-blocks, degrading the quality of experience of the user.  In this presentation we will review the state-of-the-art error concealment solutions and look into low complexity concealment methods that can be used with multi-view video coding.  Error resilience techniques that help error concealment will also be discussed.

Abstract: Insects have evolved diverse and delicate morphological structures in order to capture the inherently low energy of a propagating sound wave. In mosquitoes, the capture of acoustic energy, and its transduction into neuronal signals, is assisted by the active mechanical participation of the scolopidia.

Professor Christian Johnson (University of Utah, USA) will be presenting on “Extraordinary Actions: The U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. Financial Crisis” for the School of Law’s Research Seminar series. All welcome. If you would like to attend this seminar, please RSVP to Chrissie Leveridge (fmlevents@surrey.ac.uk).

All students and staff of the School of Law, University of Surrey, are cordially invited to the first LLM affirmative debate on the topic:

Does section 172 of the Companies Act 2006 signify a departure from the shareholder value approach in UK company law?

The Law of Tendency to Executability states that all useful descriptions of processes have a tendency towards executability.  Attempts to rise above the perceived low abstraction level of executable code can produce increased expressive power, but the notations they engender have a tendency to become executable.  This has many consequences for software; its creation, evolution and deployment. It also has wider implications.  The automation that drives this tendency also raises fundamental questions about how human decision making can remain inside the execution loop.

In this talk I will review our work in the field of heterogeneous III-V semiconductor/silicon photonic integrated circuits for communication applications  

Our next speaker in this series of seminars will be Professor Gary Yen from the Oklahoma State University.  All are welcome to attend.  

Evolutionary computation is the study of biologically motivated computational paradigms which exert novel ideas and inspiration from natural evolution and adaptation.  The applications of population-based heuristics in solving constrained and dynamic optimization problems have been receiving a growing interest from computational intelligence community.  Most practical optimization problems are with the existence of constraints and uncertainties in which the fitness function changes through time and is subject to multiple constraints.

The School of Management Seminar Series is proud to present Dr Gábor Péli to give a talk titled "Managerial bias supports market wave formation: evidence with logical formalization".

On Friday May 6th, there will be a London Dynamical Systems Group meeting at the University of Surrey.

Lewis Wong and Ben Crutchley will talk about their research

The Environmental Regulatory Research Group (ERRG) and School of Law Research Seminar Series are proud to present Professor Maria Lee, speaking on Tort, Regulation and Environmental Law.

Abstract: A new theory of viscous oscillatory flows has been developed. Our theory represents an adaptation of the Vishik-Lyusternik approach combined with the two-timing and averaging methods. We consider high Reynold's number viscous incompressible flows driven by a vibrating boundary for the simple geometry of a half-space.  From the physical viewpoint the required boundary conditions may be seen as the tangential vibrations of material points of a plane stretchable membrane. The main result is the construction of general, global, and uniformly valid asymptotic solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations. These solutions satisfy general oscillating boundary conditions and three different regimes of the scaling parameters (that correspond to the strong, moderate, and weak nonlinearities).

Abstract: Abstract: The vector nonlinear Schroedinger equation (VNLS) models the propagation of an ultra-short light pulse along an optical fibre. The equation is integrable, affords multi-soliton soliton solutions, and also finite-gap solutions where the underlying algebraic curve is trigonal. The vector nature of the complex-valued dependent variable contains information about the polarisation state of the electromagnetic field.

Martin George (Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham) will be speaking on the topic “Comity and Mutual Trust in Private International Law” as part of the School of Law’s Research Seminar Series. Further details to follow. All welcome.

If you would like to attend this seminar, please RSVP to Chrissie Leveridge (fmlevents@surrey.ac.uk).

Abstract: We prove by an explicit construction that solutions to incompressible 3D Euler equations, defined in the periodic cube, can be mapped bijectively to a new system of equations whose solutions are globally regular.  We establish that the usual Beale-Kato-Majda criterion for finite-time singularity (or blowup) of a solution to the 3D Euler system is equivalent to a condition on the corresponding regular solution of the new system.

The Department of English at the University of Surrey are pleased to be hosting the first Surrey Poetry Festival.

Nathan Owens and Oijai Ongrai will talk about their research

Abstract: We present recent results regarding escape rates and conditionally invariant measures for a periodic Lorentz gas with holes.  We then derive a variational principle connecting the escape rate to the pressure on the survivor set, the set of points which never enters the hole.  This relation generalizes to a broad class of systems with holes and requires only weak assumptions on the size and boundary of the hole.

Jayanta Mukherjee and Sayid Sayid will talk about their research projects

Molecular simulation is evolving more and more into a complementary tool to experiments that allows not only predictions of macroscopic properties but also provides insight on the molecular level that is not easily accessible from experiments. 

Paul Critchley and Dilla Berhanuddin will talk about their research

Indium Antimonide has the narrowest bandgap of all the III-V semiconductors. Traditionally it has been used for IR applications both in imaging and for IR emitters and detectors.

Abstract: TBA

With support from the Institute of Advanced Studies, SILC is pleased to announce an international interdisciplinary seminar on cultural legitimacy and the international law and policy on climate change that will take place on 21 June 2011 at the School of Law, University of Surrey.

This seminar seeks to contribute to research on the international law and policy of climate change by focusing on the issue of cultural legitimacy.  Beginning from the premise that legitimacy critiques of international climate change regulation have the capacity to positively influence policy trends and legal choices, we seek a range of papers, from across all the disciplines that investigate the link between the efficacy of international legal and policy mechanisms on climate change and cultural legitimacy or local acceptance.

Visit the Institute of Advanced Studies page for more details on the seminar programme and registration!

With support from the Institute of Advanced Studies, SILC is pleased to announce an international interdisciplinary seminar on cultural legitimacy and the international law and policy on climate change that will take place on 21 June 2011 at the School of Law, University of Surrey.

This seminar seeks to contribute to research on the international law and policy of climate change by focusing on the issue of cultural legitimacy.  Beginning from the premise that legitimacy critiques of international climate change regulation have the capacity to positively influence policy trends and legal choices, we seek a range of papers, from across all the disciplines that investigate the link between the efficacy of international legal and policy mechanisms on climate change and cultural legitimacy or local acceptance.

Visit the Institute of Advanced Studies page for more details on the seminar programme and registration!

With support from the Institute of Advanced Studies, SILC is pleased to announce an international interdisciplinary seminar on cultural legitimacy and the international law and policy on climate change that will take place on 21 June 2011 at the School of Law, University of Surrey.

This seminar seeks to contribute to research on the international law and policy of climate change by focusing on the issue of cultural legitimacy.  Beginning from the premise that legitimacy critiques of international climate change regulation have the capacity to positively influence policy trends and legal choices, we seek a range of papers, from across all the disciplines that investigate the link between the efficacy of international legal and policy mechanisms on climate change and cultural legitimacy or local acceptance.

Visit the Institute of Advanced Studies page for more details on the seminar programme and registration!

Abstract: Magnetic liquid or ferrofluids are complex fluids which interact with external magnetic field. Many effects can be observed.

Abstract: Several dispersive wave equations can be formulated as Hamiltonian PDEs.  Steady travelling waves can then be interpreted as critical points of the Hamiltonian functional.  Furthermore, their stability is linked to the spectrum of the Hessian of this functional.  In this talk, the Maslov index, an index defined on paths of Lagrangian spaces, is used to study this spectrum in the case of traveling waves arising in various higher-order Korteweg-de Vries-type equations.

Compared to current silicon-based solar cells that are rigid, organic-based solar cells that use solution-based processing or low-cost non-vacuum deposition techniques are simpler and less expensive to manufacture. 

CNRP seminar being offered across SEPnet partners by Prof Jim Al- Khalili at Surrey via video-conference

Abstract: Air cushioning in droplet impacts will be investigated. A model will be presented, which couples an inviscid liquid droplet to a gas film satisfying a lubricating squeeze film equation. As the droplet approaches impact a high pressure is generated in the gas film, which causes the droplet free-surface to deform and ultimately trap a gas bubble. Predictions of the size of this trapped bubble will be made and compared to experimental data.

Abstract: TBA

Abstract: In the weakly nonlinear long wave regime, solitary waves are often modeled by the Korteweg-de Vries equation, which is well-known to support an exact solitary wave solution. However, when the effect of background rotation is taken into account, the resulting relevant nonlinear wave equation, the Ostrovsky equation, does not support an exact solitary wave solution. Instead an initial solitary like disturbance decays into radiating oscillatory waves. In this talk, we will demonstrate through a combination of theoretical analyses, numerical simulations and laboratory experiments that the long time outcome of this radiation is a nonlinear wave packet, whose carrier wavenumber is determined by an extremum in the group velocity.

This paper introduces a novel area of research to the Image Forensic field; identifying High Dynamic Range (HDR) digital images. We create and make available a test set of images that are a combination of HDR and standard images of similar scenes. We also propose a scheme to isolate fingerprints of the HDR-induced haloing artefact at “strong” edge positions, and present experimental results in extracting suitable features for a successful SVM-driven classification of edges from HDR and standard images. A majority vote of this output is then utilised to complete a highly accurate classification system.

In the past few years, semi-fragile watermarking has become increasingly important to verify the content of images and localize the tampered areas, while tolerating some non-malicious manipulations. Moreover, some researchers proposed self-restoration schemes to recover the tampered area in semi-fragile watermarking schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel fast self-restoration scheme resisting to JPEG compression for semi-fragile watermarking. In the watermark embedding process, we embed ten watermarks (six for authentication and four for self-restoration) into each 88 block of the original image. We then utilise four (44) sub-blocks' mean pixel values (extracted watermarks) to restore its corresponding (88) block's first four DCT coefficients for image content recovering. We compare our results with Li et al. and Chamlawi et al. DCT related schemes. The PSNR results indicate that the imperceptibility of our watermarked image is high at 37.61 dB and approximately 4 dB greater than the other two schemes. Moreover, the restored image is at 24.71 dB, approximately 2 dB higher than other two methods on average. Our restored image also achieves 24.39 dB, 22.98 dB 21.18 dB and 19.98 dB after JPEG compression QF=95, 85, 75 and 65, respectively, which are approximately 2.5 dB higher than other two self-restoration methods.

A recent Wilton Park conference examined the challenge of verification ‘…across the range of treaties where (it) is essential; biological weapons, whale conservationists, carbon emission specialists, political economists, and auditors…’. Reporting In his blog, Richard Burge, Chief Executive of Wilton Park, wrote pessimistically of the prospects for treaties without effective verification mechanisms. Despite decades of effort, the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention which came into force in 1975, still lacks any such mechanisms. This seminar will give a scientific perspective on the quest to control the threat from biological weapons, contrasting its frustrations with apparent progress with other ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and asking whether we can agree with Mr Burge.

Abstract: TBA

Digital video are widely used in today’s society due to the availability of a wide range of affordable digital video cameras with different specifications and functions. The manipulation of digital video is made simple with easily available processing tools, making it harder to trust them. This is where the role of digital forensics becomes important; to ensure the integrity of the evidence is restored. Digital forensics helps by providing some essential information about a video, such as to tracing the source of a digital video to the device that captured it. In this research, we propose a video camera identification technique based on the conditional probability features (CP Features). Specifically we focus on its performance for identification of video sources using cameras of different models. Using three cameras of different model, we demonstrate that the CP Features are able to correctly match the test video frames with their source. These findings provide a good indication that CP Features are suitable for digital video forensics.

Dr David Langley 

David Langley, a medical scientist with a background in clinical laboratories and teaching took a research post with the Ministry of Defence in the late ‘80s. After a spell ‘at the bench’, he worked in operational analysis, intelligence assessment and, after 9/11, the protection of critical infrastructure, focussing on weapons of mass destruction and working closely with colleagues across government. Since retirement in 2006, he has combined consultancy with research and teaching in Cambridge.

Drawing on this experience, he will discuss the challenges faced by scholars of the 'secret world’, especially the sources available to them and the impact of their backgrounds and research methods on their work. Exploring the impact of ’9/11’ he will also reflect on the questions raised by advocates of Critical Terrorism Studies.

Travel directions and campus map

The next in the series of NICE seminars.  Details to follow.

Abstract: Plants defend themselves using chemical toxins the concentration of which often varies with the age of twig segments. In boreal forests, woody internodes of the youngest segments of the twigs of the deciduous angiosperm species that herbivores such as hares prefer to eat are more defended by toxins than the woody internodes of the older segments that subtend and support the younger segments. Thus, the per capita daily intake of the biomass of the older segments of twigs by herbivores is much higher than their intake of the biomass of the younger segments of twigs. 

For further information please visit:

http://resolve.sustainablelifestyles.ac.uk/events

Abstract: In this talk I shall present the "reflection Hopf algebra" formalism. This formalism may be used in boundary scattering theory and is a natural extension of the usual Hopf algebra for the analysis of the reflection processes. I shall give several examples where this formalism proved to be very useful. They include the (generalized) twisted Yangians in AdS/CFT correspondence and the coideal quantum affine algebra of the Deformed Hubbard Chain. The talk will be based on arXiv: 1010.3761, 1101.6062 and 1110.4596.

Dr Daniel Bush is our next seminar speaker in this series of NICE seminars.  All are welcome to attend.

On 4 September 2010, Christchurch, New Zealand was struck by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake causing extensive structural damage but not loss of live. On 22 February the city was hit by a shallow, violent aftershock, at magnitude 6.3, the quake killed over 180 people and ‘munted’ or destroyed thousands of homes. Since then over 8000 aftershocks of varying intensity have hit the city. In the six month period to July 2011, the community coped on average, with a magnitude 5 earthquake every 10 days. Working from a tent for 12 weeks on campus and living with ongoing suspension of local democracy in a cordoned central city, prompts this professional and personal reflection on the concept of resilience.

Abstract: TBA

(N.B. Seminar at 2 pm in LTB)

Virtually all optical imaging systems introduce a variety of aberrations into an image. Chromatic aberration, for example, results from the failure of an optical system to perfectly focus light of different wavelengths. Lateral chromatic aberration manifests itself, to a first-order approximation, as an expansion/contraction of color channels with respect to one another. When tampering with an image, this aberration is often disturbed and fails to be consistent across the image. We describe a computational technique for automatically estimating lateral chromatic aberration and show its efficacy in detecting digital tampering.

Abstract: TBA

Abstract: We illustrate the role of non-Abelian T-duality in string theory  with emphasis on backgrounds with non-vanishing Ramond flux fields. We discuss generic features such as the fate  of geometric isometries and of supersymmetry. We present important examples in the gauge/gravity correspondence,  that is AdS_3 X S^3 X T^4 and AdS_5 X S^5$. In conjunction, we comment on possible integrable structures in the  T-dual theory.

Professor Jason Ralph, University of Leeds

This paper introduces the early findings of a British Academy mid-career fellowship project.  Its starting point is Tony Blair's assumption that regime change by military force was an 'obvious'  policy for the Labour Party to adopt.  It describes how, during the lead up to war in Iraq, Blair tried to square what he saw as 'doing the right thing' (i.e. supporting the American invasion) with his concept of 'international community'and his party's longstanding commitment to the United Nations. Ultimately, Blair's strategy was reduced to attacks on the procedures that constitute what it means to act on behalf of the international community.  This served only to strengthen the accusation that his brand of centre-left foreign policy was imperialistic. The coalition government's response to the Arab spring, in particular its intervention in the Libyan conflict, was very much influenced by a desire not to repeat Blair's mistakes.  Yet despite this, centre-left opinion remains divided on the legitimacy of the Libyan operation and liberal interventionism more generally. The paper critically engages that opinion in an attempt to help liberal governments navigate the most reasonable course. 

Travel directions and campus map

Dr André Grüning will be our NICE seminar presenter this week.  Details to follow. We look forward to a good turnout for this interesting talk.

Surrey International Law Centre is proud to present Dr Douglas Guilfoyle, UCL, presenting on 'Somali Pirates and International Law'

Abstract: TBA

In this paper we have presented SULFA (Surrey University Library for Forensics Analysis) for benchmarking video forensics. This novel video library has been built for the purpose of video forensics specifically related to Camera identification and integrity verification. It contains original as well as forged video files, which will be freely available through university of surrey website. There are about 150 videos, collected from three camera sources, which are Canon sx220 (codec H.264), Nikon S3000 (codec MJPEG) and Fujifilm S2800HD (codec MJPEG). Each video is approximately 10 sec long with resolution of 240x320 and 30 frames per second. All videos have been shot after careful considering both temporal and spatial video characteristics. In order to present life like scenarios various complex and simple scene have been shot with and without using camera support (tripod).

Abstract: The non-linear wave equation (sometimes called the non-linear Klien-Gordon equation) is a much studied equation with applications in Josephson transmission lines, dislocations in crystals, DNA processes and much more.  It possess many types of solutions which may include stationary front solutions.  In this talk we shall consider what effect adding a step-like inhomogeneity has on the stability of such fronts and present some of the results we have derived over the last three years.

Surrey Business School is proud to present Dr Timotheos Angelidis, (University of Peloponnesse, Greece), presenting on the topic 'Cross-Sectional Return Dispersion: Global Evidence'.

Abstract: Any triangle ABC has a pedal triangle (whose vertices are the feet of the perpendiculars from each vertex to the opposite side).  We study how the shape changes as we repeatedly take the pedal triangle.  Does the sequence of triangles converge?  (Background material on Euclidean Geometry will be included for those too young to have studied this.)

Near field communication (NFC) is a standard-based wireless communication technology that allows data to be exchanged between devices (computers, TV, mobile, ...) that are a few centimeters apart. There will be a significant number of interesting applications (payment, ticketing, e-keys, mobile coupons, ...). One of these applications is mobile coupons (mCoupons), where users can get coupons from NFC mCoupon issuer (smart poster on the street or a NFC tagged newspaper) just by touching their (NFC-capable) mobiles. However, it would cause huge losses for companies if these coupons issued in uncontrolled way. Therefore, a secure protocol is needed to meet mCoupons requirements. Moreover, it must be formally verified, as all secure protocol must be, before building the system in the reality.

There is a proposed mCoupon protocol in the literature. Ali has formally analysed the protocol by using CasperFDR2. This is result in an attack founded. However, whether this attack is feasible in the really is another challenge especially with the different communication nature of NFC.

Organic solar cells are a potentially promising source of electrical power for portable and off-grid applications due to their combination of low cost, low weight and mechanical flexibility.  

Development and applications of new nanomaterials for high speed, high efficiency and high resolution radiation detectors FP7-PEOPLE-2012-ITN

The AdS/CFT correspondence has produced remarkable connections between different areas of physics and mathematics. In this talk I will start by reviewing the relation between the Wilson loop observable in gauge theories and the problem of finding minimal area surfaces in hyperbolic (or AdS) space. Until recently only very few explicit solutions were known to such problem but I will show how, using Riemann theta functions an infinite parameter family of new solutions can be found. Moreover a one parameter family of deformations is identified such that the area is preserved. The solution to this problem uses methods from the theory of solitons and non-linear differential equations and sheds a new interesting light on the connection between the Wilson loop observable in gauge theories and integrable systems.

Abstract: TBA

Thinking on your feet, taking the unexpected in your stride and working well with others are all attributes we need in the fast changing business world.  The ability to adapt, collaborate and deal with constant change are essential to your progress.  

20% of the world's CO2 emissions from energy and processes arise in the production of just five materials: steel, cement, plastic, paper and aluminium. Demand for these materials is likely to double in the next 40 years, but the industries that make them are already very efficient, so if we look ahead with one eye open - pursuing energy and process efficiencies only - we can't make a significant reduction in their impact.  However if, in addition, we look ahead with both eyes open - looking for opportunities to pursue material efficiency, to deliver the same services with less new material - we can make a much greater reduction in our impacts.  This talk, based on the £1.5m EPSRC funded WellMet2050 project, will explore the realities of future material efficiency, particularly for steel and aluminium goods.

Abstract: Here we give a pedagogical introduction to Euler-Poincar\'e flows on the (extended) Virasoro orbit, divided into three parts. In the first part, we introduce some basic notions of Euler-Poincar\'e flows, Virasoro orbit etc. The second part describes an Euler-Poincar\'e formulation of a new class of peakon equations with cubic nonlinearity found by Z. Qiao and V. Novikov. We show that the Hamiltonian structures obtained by Qiao and Hone and Wang can be obtained by our method. The last part introduces integrable ODEs associated to stabilizer set of Virasoro orbit.

Abstract: TBA

The presented paper discusses and evaluates the impact of cognitive (or self-perceived) age on the grocery store patronage (behaviour) of elderly shoppers. I propose that cognitive age moderates the effects between the perception of store attributes, satisfaction, (re)patronage intentions and ultimately share of visits. The test of hypotheses uses a sample of 404 supermarket patrons aged 60 and older. The latent construct of cognitive age was operationalised by six items representing feel, look, do, interest, health and think age. The chronological age of our respondents proved to be significantly higher than cognitive age. To evaluate the moderating effects I applied the product indicator approach based on variance based structural equation modelling. As a result the impact of product range, manoeuvrability and atmospherics on patronage behaviour becomes significantly stronger with increasing cognitive age whereas the negative impact of personnel becomes significantly weaker. The contribution of this paper is to provide theoretical rational and empirical evidence to consider cognitive age as a substantial influencer and predictor of patronage behaviour of elderly shoppers and call for a stronger consideration of self-perceived age dimensions along with chronological age in the research of older consumer cohorts.

The traditional view of the university administrator is someone engaged in disinterested processing in the civil service tradition, playing a supporting role to academic staff. In recent years, the term ‘professional services’ has been introduced to describe the activities of non-academic staff engaged in the administration and management of English universities. It could be argued that this is long overdue and simply rectifying earlier injustices; alternatively, it could be viewed as symptomatic of a reconstitution of relations between academics and administrators in which the latter have begun to ‘carve out critical space’ in universities, and, at senior levels, move into roles previously reserved for senior academics (Szekeres, 2011:679).There has been little acknowledgement of the repositioning of professional administrators and managers in higher education, nor broader consideration of the implications. This study addresses these gaps in the literature. It queries whether the organisational professionalism of administrators and occupational professionalism of academics are dichotomous, gauges the state of academic / administrator relations, and explores the implications of the continued professionalisation of the administration in English universities. Does the professionalisation of the administrator herald the deprofessionalisation of the don?

Abstract: Biochemical pathways involve the interaction of large number of species, a property which can make their simulations computationally expensive and their analysis prohibitively complicated. To reduce this complexity, it is common practice to group a bunch of elementary reactions together as a single complex reaction and to do the analysis / simulation with this simplified model. But is this justified? Are the statistics at least qualitatively correct if one does such a procedure? In this talk I'll address these questions, illustrate the problems of such approaches and a new method which we developed to obtain a statistically correct coarse-grained description of the chemical master equation.

Abstract: TBA

Surrey Business School is proud to present Professor Rolf von Lüde, University of Hamburg, as part of it's Research Seminar series.

There is a large body of literature regarding the choice and optimization of different processes for converting feedstock to bioethanol and bio-commodities; moreover, there has been some reasonable technological development in bioconversion methods over the past decade. 

Abstract: The recently developed method of control based continuation allows the continuation of periodic solutions directly in physical experiments. The key ideas of this approach are (1) to introduce a control scheme that locally stabilizes periodic solutions without perturbing them, and (2) to use continuation to guide the experiment around folds and through bifurcation points. The experiment runs asynchronously from the actual continuation method, which communicates with the experiment by setting a control target and by taking measurements. In this talk we will present results obtained in a lab experiment of an impact oscillator that exhibits a large hysteresis loop. We will indicate current challenges with this method and how we intend to tackle them.

Abstract: TBA

Abstract: Isostatic mounts are used in applications like telescopes and robotics to move and hold part of a structure in a desired pose relative to the rest, by driving some controls rather than driving the subsystem directly. To achieve this successfully requires an understanding of the coupled space of configurations and controls, and of the singularities of the mapping from the coupled space to the space of controls. It is crucial to avoid such singularities because generically they lead to large constraint forces and internal stresses which can cause distortion. In this paper we outline design principles for isostatic mount systems for dynamic structures, with particular emphasis on robots.

Professor Nancy Puccinelli’s research explores customer attributes influencing price perception and persuasion in retail promotions. Her previous research finds that retail promotions and employee behaviour need to be tailored to the affective state of the customer. This research finds that customer mood impacts tolerance for ambiguity (Braun-LaTour, Puccinelli & Mast, 2007), preference for spokespeople in an advertisement (Puccinelli, 2006), and choice of retail outlets (Puccinelli, Deshpandé and Isen, 2007). Surprisingly, this work finds that people in a bad mood avoid options that make them feel better and suggests that successful retailers will seek to customize their offerings to match these customer attributes. Professor Puccinelli will talk about her current program of research that builds on this earlier work and examines: 1) the cost of consumer mood improvement and its impact on decision making, 2) the effect of price color on price perception, 3) regulatory fit as a driver of retail format preference in India.

Abstract: The economist Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel prize for his work in economic geography. In his book "The Self-Organizing Economy" he promotes a Santa Fe-style approach to modelling complex economic systems. Krugman's arguments are illustrated with some simple mathematical models. In this talk, I explain how one such model has exact solutions with very similar properties to the peaked solitons ("peakons") that appearing in an integrable partial differential derived by Camassa and Holm in shallow water theory. The exact solutions in Krugman's integro-differential model turn out explain the numerical behaviour he observed. This is joint work with J. Kelsey and F. Medda.

Abstract: TBA

Abstract: Molecular monolayers, especially water monolayers, are playing a crucial role in modern science and technology. In order to derive simplified models of monolayer dynamics, we consider the set of rolling self-interacting particles on a plane with an off-set center of mass and a non-isotropic inertia tensor.  To connect with water monolayer dynamics, we assume the properties of the particles like mass, inertia tensor and dipole moment to be the same as water molecules. The perfect rolling constraint is considered as a simplified model of a very strong, but rapidly decaying bond with the surface. Since the rolling constraint is non-holonomic, it prevents the application of the standard tools of statistical mechanics: for example the system exhibits  two temperatures -- translational and rotational-- for some degrees of freedom, and no temperature can be defined for other degrees of freedom.

Abstract: The famous Laguerre polynomials are orthogonal over [0,\infty) with respect to a negative exponential weight function. They are thus natural  candidates for the efficient numerical approximation of such decaying exponential behaviour. We shall give a number of examples, including stable manifolds and fluid mechanics problems related to dynamical systems.

Abstract: TBA

This presentation starts with a reflection on three different notions of “the implicit”. Drawing on Personal Construct Theory, ‘Repertory Grids‘ will then be discussed as a powerful methodological approach to analysing the implicit dimensions of human reality construction. Following on from there, the analytical potential of this methodology will be exemplified in the context of building and destroying trust in business relationships. Empirical research will be presented to illustrate the argument of this paper.

This study explores the management of performance in food retail operations from the perspective of the store manager. Critical Incident Technique is used to collect data on where these managers draw performance information from and how they perceive it influences their behaviour. The method is novel in this context and yields insight to the world of retail store management. Corporate performance measures are a part of this world, but the study finds some support for the existence of informal performance information being used by front-line retail operations managers.

Contextualised in the multi-disciplinary debate on the emergence of ‘modern’ retailing systems in Western Europe and North America in the early post war decades, this paper explores the growth of supermarket retailing in the UK.  An introduction to the current debate reveals an emphasis on describing the uneven development of the format, and its impact on so-called ‘cultures of consumption’.  In contrast, this paper focuses on some of the implications of the rapid growth of supermarket retailing for retail management practices, particularly those related to matters of knowledge transfer. It does so through two perspectives: first, the role of inter-locking directorates in enabling the transfer of knowledge fundamental to the success of the earliest supermarket retailing operations; second, the changing characteristics of retailers’ governance of their supermarket store estates as the format became more firmly established in the UK retail market.

Abstract: We demonstrate existence of discrete solitons in Discrete Nonlinear Schrodinger equation (dlns) with saturable nonlinearity. We consider two types of solutions to (dlns) periodic and vanishing at infinity. In the second part of our talk, we prove the existence of periodic and solitary traveling waves in Fermi-Pasta-Ulam lattices with saturable nonlinearities. Calculus of variations and Nehari manifolds are employed to establish the existence of these solutions. We present some extensions of our results, combining the Nehari manifold approach and the Mountain Pass argument.

In this discussion, we build upon our novel research in High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging for Image Forensics by comparing the 'halo' artifact with a similar artifact caused by JPEG compression, known as the 'ringing' artifact (Gibb's Phenomenon).  We briefly discuss the relationship between these two artifacts, how they appear in the Fourier transform space, and how reliable our scheme is at distinguishing between the two.  We also analyse and evaluate each step of our algorithm in order to optimise it for producing more accurate results.  Finally, a new framework for detecting the halo artifact is presented in reference to existing schemes that detect the ringing artifact, and our initial results will be discussed.

Abstract: Superstring theory on AdS_5 x S^5 is classically equivalent, via the Pohlmeyer reduction, to a fermionic generalization of an extended sine-Gordon model. The Pohlmeyer-reduced and light-cone gauge string S-matrices turn out to be different limits of a larger interpolating S-matrix, based on the q-deformed R-matrix of Beisert and Koroteev, 2008. In this talk I will briefly review the reduction before discussing recent progress in constructing the quantum S-matrix of the reduced and interpolating theories. It is suggested that the interpolating S-matrix may provide a new way to regularize computations in the string theory.

Abstract: TBA

The DEFRA-funded research programme SLRG (2010-2013), directed by Prof. Tim Jackson of CES, has just completed its first full year, and initial results are coming in from fieldwork. In this seminar Ian Christie, a Fellow of CES and coordinator of the SLRG, presents an overview of the programme and discusses emerging findings and the policy and research context for the work

Abstract: TBA