Events
Roundtable on Global Gardens: Botanical Spaces in Literature, Science, and Sustainable Design
Two of our speakers will be familiar faces from HASS and ASD. Dr. Zhenxing Zhao (Senior Lecturer, HASS) will be speaking about gardens in Chinese poetry and art (a topic which he teaches on in his elective class), and Dr. Daniel Whittaker (Senior Lecturer, ASD) will talk about what we can learn about sustainable design from rainwater cooling strategies from gardens in India, Mexico, and Southeast Asia.
Bayesian design principles for frequentist sequential learning
ESD Research Seminar by Yunbei Xu – We develop a general theory to optimise the frequentist regret for sequential learning problems, where efficient bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms can be derived from unified Bayesian principles.
Building effective RAG applications for public good
ISTD COIL Seminar by Isaac Lim – Join Isaac, a Data Scientist from GovTech’s AI Practice, as he shares his experience empowering developers in government to build effective RAG (and more generally, LLM-based) applications.
Utilising large language models for tour itinerary recommendation
ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Ho Ngai Lam – Planning a tour Itinerary poses a significant challenge for tourists, especially when navigating unfamiliar territories. The computational complexity of tour recommendation further compounds this challenge due to its inherent intricacies.
Need to relax – but perhaps later? Reflections on modelling sparsity and mixed-binary nonconvex optimisation problems
ESD Research Seminar by Immanuel M. Bomze – This talk will advocate the necessity of research efforts in the quest for global solutions and strong rigorous bounds for quality guarantees, showcased on one of the nowadays most popular domains – cardinality-constrained models.
Bridging the gap: navigating the transition from design school to UX design in the real world
ISTD COIL Seminar by Samath Aravinda & Imran Nordin – In this talk, we will delve into my personal journey as a UX designer, highlighting the essential design processes that drive successful projects. We will discuss the myriad opportunities available in the field, from emerging technologies to innovative methodologies, and how these can shape your career trajectory. To enrich our discussion, I am excited to introduce my colleague, a seasoned UX researcher, who will present for 15-20 minutes on the UX research process. He will cover key methodologies, tools, and techniques used to gather user insights that inform design decisions.
LLMs for out-of-domain use cases
ISTD COIL Seminar by Anirudh Shrinivason – This talk will “delve” into Cohere’s strategies for harnessing the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) within the enterprise domain. By exploring fine-tuning techniques and the integration of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), we aim to showcase how these methods can be tailored to solve complex, industry-specific challenges.
Quantum machine learning: What’s happening, what’s hard, and what’s next
ESD Research Seminar by Kishor Bharti – This talk will provide an introduction to quantum machine learning, a summary of its current status, the challenges it faces, and what lies ahead.
Introduction to modern LLM pre-training: Sailor use case
ISTD COIL Seminar by Qian Liu – This talk will present some key techniques in modern LLM pre-training, including scaling laws, data quality engineering, data mixture optimization, and efficient training strategies. We will use Sailor, a family of open language models (0.5B to 14B parameters) tailored for South-East Asian languages, as a case study.
Exploration and optimisation of black-box functions with safety guarantees
ESD Research Seminar by Jonathan Scarlett – The exploration and optimisation of black-box functions is of broad interest in domains such as hyperparameter tuning, robotics, scientific discovery, and more.
