Events

Leveraging out of distribution testing to build robust machine learning systems
ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Sai Sathiesh Rajan – This dissertation serves to remind us of the importance of thoroughly testing machine learning models before deploying them as they can cause societal, economical and reputational damage.


Detecting concurrent bugs in Go via capture and replay
ISTD Seminar by Martin Sulzmann – Prof Martin will survey the state of the art in the area of controlled concurrency (CCT) testing for Go to explore schedules that reveal panic and blocking bugs, and discuss several new novel aspects such as the ability to perform controlled replay of programs to guarantee that new schedules are actually explored in this seminar.


Beyond scale: efficient pre-training and controllable post-training for language models
ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Zeng Guangtao – Language models are foundational to modern artificial intelligence, but their development is often constrained by challenges in efficiency, controllability, and reasoning. In this thesis, we aim to address these limitations by introducing advanced paradigms at both the pre-training and post-training stages.


Context-aware perception in adverse conditions
ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Tan Yu Xiang – Adverse conditions such as rain or murky water environment, significantly impacts various perception tasks. In rain conditions, the images captured are easily corrupted by both raindrops on the lenses and lens flare. Meanwhile in turbid underwater conditions, the murkiness reduces the contrast and saturation of the image. To tackle these problems, we utilise contextual information to improve robustness of perception algorithms.


Analysis and synthesis of audio with AI: from neurological disease to accented speech and music
ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Jan Melechovsky – In the modern era, new technology is opening opportunities to help various groups of people around the world. In this thesis, deep learning and audio processing is utilized to target the needs of and develop specific applications for patients with progressive neurological diseases, speakers of non-native English accents, and amateur and leisure musicians and music enjoyers.


Linux under the hood: powering everything from your laptop to the cloud
ISTD COIL Seminar by Norman Hsu Chen-Wei – A brief, engaging introduction to Linux as the powerful, often unseen operating system behind much of the digital world.


Advancing signal processing with modulo sampling: theory, algorithms, and applications
ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Qi Zhang – Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are crucial in signal processing but face challenges when handling high-dynamic-range signals. In radar systems, the coexistence of strong and weak targets can lead to significant information loss due to ADC limitations.


Neural network-defined physical layer: a new paradigm for software radio in the IoT era
ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Wang Jiazhao – The increase of the Internet of Things (IoT) has created a complex and heterogeneous wireless ecosystem, demanding IoT gateways that are both flexible and efficient. While Software Defined Radio (SDR) provides the necessary hardware adaptability, its potential is frequently undermined by significant software implementation challenges, including a lack of portability across platforms, prohibitive design complexity for advanced algorithms, and poor computational efficiency. This thesis posits that these persistent bottlenecks can be overcome by a paradigm shift in physical layer (PHY) design: reframing core communication functionalities as learnable, interpretable neural network (NN) models.


Foundations and emerging trends in database systems
ISTD COIL Seminar by DBS Bank – This talk connects foundational knowledge with real-world applications, emphasising the vital role databases play in powering today’s AI-driven technologies.


Where code meets capital: How AI and emerging tech are redefining finance
ISTD COIL Seminar by Rohit Bansal – In this session, the speaker draws on two decades of experience at the intersection of technology and global finance to offer students an industry-first perspective on how emerging technologies are transforming the financial landscape.
