The Wolfson College Science Society, founded in the Michaelmas Term 2010, aims to promote science, medicine, technology and engineering research in College.
The Society hosts termly series of lay-friendly talks, which help to contribute to an understanding of how science and technology affect not only the way we live now, but perhaps more importantly, how they will affect our lives in the future.
Talks take place every other week on a Friday in the OCR, followed by an open discussion and formal hall. Speakers are also invited to dinner, so there are opportunities to continue the discussion over the meal.
Easter Term 2012 schedule:
Friday 4 May, Old Combination Room
Dr Christine Watson, Department of Pathology
'The mammary gland: a source of milk and a cancer time bomb'
The mammary gland evolved to produce milk over 200 million years ago. Milk-producing cells develop during pregnancy and die dramatically during weaning. This life giving function has, however, a downside as the breast is highly susceptible to cancer with 1 in 8 women (and 1 in 1000 men) being diagnosed with this disease at some time in their lives. Furthermore, the risk of breast cancer rises following a pregnancy and lactation. We are interested in identifying the genes that control the development and subsequent death of milk-producing cells. We will use this information to study what goes wrong with these processes in breast cancers. Our ultimate aim is to improve therapy and patient survival. In this talk, I will discuss our recent work and how the breast cancer time bomb could be defused. Chair: Dr Maria Caffarel
Friday 18 May, Gatsby Room
Professor Ian Hutchings, Department of Engineering
'From Gutenberg to the digital age: the challenges and opportunities of inkjet printing'
Inkjet printing differs fundamentally from more conventional printing methods, in that the precise location of each drop of ink deposited on the paper is under digital control. This means that the pattern being printed can be varied very easily. Instead of ink, the technique can also be used to deposit a wide range of different materials, and thus inkjet printing provides a uniquely powerful and flexible tool for manipulating materials on a small scale. This talk will describe the fundamental mechanisms involved in the generation of small liquid drops, and provide some examples of applications of inkjet printing as a manufacturing process.
Chair: Dr Steve Hoath
Friday 25 May, Gatsby Room
Professor Ann Copestake, Computer Laboratory
'Extracting meaning from text'
One of the main long-term goals of automatic human language processing has been to produce computationally-tractable representations of what a text means. This includes determining the relationships between entities and events mentioned explicitly (e.g.,'`who did what to whom'), working out some of the implicit content (e.g., which 'Clinton' are we talking about) and making inferences (e.g., if X assassinated Y, then X killed Y - unless 'assassinate' is being used metaphorically). I'll outline some of the technology we're investigating to address some of these tasks on a large scale and describe how the results can be used in applications. With the aid of some computer-generated poetry, I'll also show that these techniques can reveal surprising aspects of language use.
Chair: Dr Enrico Gili
Friday 8 June
Old Combination Room
Professor Brian Moore, Department of Experimental Psychology
'Hearing loss and hearing aids'
Hearing loss affects more than 10% of the adult population in most countries, and is especially prevalent among the elderly. The most common form of hearing loss arises from dysfunction of the cochlea in the inner ear. In most cases, the only form of treatment is via hearing aids or (for profound losses) cochlear implants. In this seminar I will review some of the perceptual consequences of hearing loss, which involve much more than just loss of sensitivity to weak sounds. I will then describe the signal processing that is performed in hearing aids and will consider the extent to which hearing aids “compensate” for hearing loss. Possible avenues for the future will be discussed.
Chair: Dr Xavier Moya
Meetings begin at 6.00pm with drinks; the talk follows at 6.15pm, with questions at 7.00pm.
The Science Society is organised by a small team of Junior Research Fellows. Please contact Xavier Moya (xm212) or Maria Caffarel (mm794) with any comments or suggestions for speakers, etc.