News and events

Events are subject to change. We are currently running our external seminars series in a hybrid format; for updates on the series, please contact Barry Fong (b.fong@ucl.ac.uk) to be added to the mailing list.

External seminar series

16th October 2024	Gábor Csányi Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom ML model for chemistry shows extreme generalisation
9th October 2024	Shreya Saxena Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Constrained Models of Neural Dynamics for Generalization and Insights
11th September 2024	Pedro A. Ortega Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom An Introduction to Information-Theoretic Bounded Rationality
4th September 2024	Carsen Stringer Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Unsupervised pretraining in biological neural networks
28th August 2024	Evan Schaffer Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Representational drift preserves geometry
11th July 2024	Rajesh Rao Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom A sensory-motor theory of the neocortex based on active predictive coding
10th July 2024	Trenton Bricken Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Post-Bayesian Machine Learning
3rd July 2024	Anna Schapiro Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Learning representations of specifics and generalities over time
19th June 2024	Patricia Lockwood Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Computational approaches to social decision-making in health, development and disorder
12th June 2024	Liu Ziyin Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Symmetry, Model Capacity, and Learning of Representations
29th May 2024	Tom Verguts Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Learning cognitive control
22nd May 2024	Eric Schulz Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Machine Psychology
15th May 2024	Ingo Steinwart Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Some Aspects of Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning
1st May 2024	Fanghui Liu Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom From kernel methods to neural networks: double descent, function spaces, and learnability
17th April 2024	Srdjan Ostojic Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom The role of population structure in computations through dynamics
20th March 2024	Will Handley Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Nested sampling: powering next-generation inference and machine learning tools for astrophysics, cosmology, particle physics and beyond
6th March 2024	Patrick Rebeschini Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Constructing and Learning Mirror Maps.
28th February 2024	Mijung Park Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Privacy-preserving data generation in the era of foundation models: Generative transfer learning with differential privacy
31st January 2024	Rafal Bogacz Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Inferring neural activity before plasticity as a foundation for learning beyond backpropagation
24th January 2024	Samuel Livingstone Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Robust gradient-based sampling algorithms using skew-symmetric numerical schemes
17th January 2024	Greg Pavliotis Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Statistical inference for Interacting particle systems and their mean field limit
6th Decmber 2023	Arvind Kumar Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom How tuning curve shapes determine the speed-accuracy tradeoff in the brain
22nd November 2023	Jozsef Fiser Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Complex perceptual decision making processes in humans
15th November 2023	Peter Bartlett Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom In-Context Learning Linear Models with Transformers
8th November 2023	João Sacramento Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Gradient descent discovers gradient descent
1st November 2023	Robert Geirhos Virtual Only
18th October 2023	Alessandro Sanzeni Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Probing the operating principles of cortical circuits with theory and optogenetics
13th September 2023	Aaron Seitz 3rd Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Towards a whole brain model of perceptual learning
6th September 2023	Luca Mazzucato Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Neural mechanism of optimal performance
30th August 2023	Rafael Polania Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Rational sensing from insects to rodents to humans to machines
6th July 2023	Tamara Broderick Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom The Bayesian Infinitesimal Jackknife for Variance
31st May 2023	Loreen Hertäg Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom The formation, refinement, and functional implications of prediction-error circuits with diverse inhibitory interneurons
10th May 2023	Lior Fox Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Exploration in complex environments: computational modeling and human behavior
3rd May 2023	Sebastian Musslick Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Computational Dilemmas in Neural Systems: Principles for the Bounds of Human Cognition
19th April 2023	Naresh Shanbhag Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Brain-inspired Computing in Silicon
4th April 2023	Alex Lew and Vikash K. Mansinghka Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Scaling Probabilistic Reasoning by Generalizing Automatic Differentiation
3rd April 2023	Federica Gerace Zoom only DATA-CENTRIC AI: Play with Datasets to Improve Machine Learning Performances
29th March 2023	Tengyao Wang Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Sparse change detection in high-dimensional linear regression
23rd March 2023 (3.30pm)	Agostina Palmigiano Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Mechanisms underlying behavioral modulations of sensory representations.
23rd March 2023 (10.30am)	Mladen Kolar Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Confidence sets for Causal Discovery
17th March 2023	Roberta Raileanu Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom From Solving Narrow Tasks to Learning General Skills
16th February 2023	Masatoshi Uehara Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Statistically efficient offline reinforcement learning
15th February 2023	Danijar Hafner Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Embodied Intelligence Through World Models
14th February 2023	Joshua Robinson Virtual Only Geometric neural representation learning
13th February 2023	Veronika Koren Virtual Only Efficient encoding and transmission of sensory signals along the feedforward somatosensory pathway
8th February 2023	Katharina Wilmes Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Cortical circuit computations underlying learning
7th February 2023	Raaz Dwivedi Zoom Only From HeartSteps to HeartBeats: Personalized Decision-making
1st February 2023	Francesco Locatello Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Causal Representation Learning
31st Janaury 2023	Ema Perkovic Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Identifying and estimating causal effects with incomplete causal information.
18th January 2023	Boris Hanin Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Bayesian Interpolation with Deep Linear Networks
16th November 2022	Rui Ponte Costa Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Unlocking efficient credit assignment in the brain
9th November 2022	Aldo Pacchiano Zoom only Unpacking Reward Shaping: Understanding the Benefits of Reward Engineering on Sample Complexity
2nd November 2022	Richard J Samworth Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Optimal nonparametric testing of Missing Completely At Random, and its connections to compatibility
26th October 2022	David Firth Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Multiple deprivation meets sport climbing: Exponential scores for ranking and weighted indices
19th October 2022	Uri Shalit Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Learning invariant models for out-of-domain generalization: good news and bad news
12th October 2022	Sadra Sadeh Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Perturbative analysis of neural dynamics in brain networks
5th October 2022	Samory Kpotufe Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Zoom Tracking Most Significant Changes in Bandits
26th September 2022	Mark van Rossum (Via Zoom) Energy efficient plasticity
14th September 2022	Bhaswar Bhattacharya (Via Zoom) Distribution-Free Nonparametric Inference Based on Optimal Transport: Efficiency Lower Bounds and Rank-Kernel Tests
2nd September 2022	Eero Simoncelli Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street Photographic Image Priors in the Era of Machine Learning Eero Simoncelli, NYU & Flatiron Institute
31st August 2022 (Postponed Date TBC)	Wang Miao (Via Zoom) Confounding adjustment for causal inference in observational studies
17th August 2022	Weijie Su (Via Zoom) When Will You Become the Best Reviewer of Your Own Papers? A Truthful Owner-Assisted Scoring Mechanism
6th July 2022	Yashar Ahmadian Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Via Zoom Excitatory-inhibitory balance, normalization, and adaptation
30th June 2022	Emmanuel Candès Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Via Zoom Sailing through data: Discoveries and mirages
21st June 2022	Misha Ahrens Ground Floor Seminar Room 25 Howland Street and Via Zoom Brain-wide computation for navigation, learning, and autonomic control
25th May 2022	Srini Turaga (Via Zoom) Visual selectivity emerges from connectome and task constraints in the fruit fly visual system
18th May 2022 (3pm)	Lei Jing (Via Zoom) Bias-adjusted spectral clustering in multi-layer stochastic block models
20th April 2022 (3pm)	Juan Álvaro Gallego (Via Zoom) Understanding the emergence of neural population dynamics underlying behaviour
6th April 2022 (3pm)	Kevin Miller (Via Zoom) Structured Reinforcement Learning in the Brain
30th March 2022 (3pm)	Alberto Bietti (Via Zoom) Statistical benefits of convolutional models: a kernel perspective
1st March 2022 (3.30pm)	Anna Sadnicka (Via Zoom) Exploring the feature space and mechanistic bounds of phenotype in movement disorders
23rd February 2022 (3pm)	Simon Tavaré (Via Zoom) Some statistical problems in cancer genome evolution
9th February 2022 (3pm)	Ann Hermundstad (Via Zoom) Design principles of adaptable neural codes
26th January 2022 (10am)	Zoltan Szabo (Via Zoom) When Kernel Machines Meet Shape Constraints
12th January 2022	Scott Linderman (Via Zoom) Reconciling empirical, algorithmic, and theoretically optimal models of mouse behavior in a time-varying two-armed bandit task
8th December 2021	Stefano Ermon (Via Zoom) Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution
24th November 2021	Jeff Beck (Via Zoom) Probabilistic codes and their predictions for neural activity
3rd November 2021	Ralf Haefner (Via Zoom) A perceptual confirmation bias as the result of approximate online hierarchical inference
27th October 2021 (5pm)	Marcelo Mattar (5pm) (Via Zoom) Prioritized experience replay supports planning and non-local learning.
27th October 2021 (10am)	Taiji Suzuki (10am) (Via Zoom) Optimization and generalization theories of deep learning and its connection to kernel methods
20th October 2021	Alison Etheridge (Via Zoom) Infinitesimal progress.
29th September 2021	Nathan Kallus (Via Zoom) Smooth Contextual Bandits
8th September 2021	Sam McDougle (Via Zoom) Space and time in movement planning and sensorimotor adaptation
21st July 2021	Po-Ling Loh (Via Zoom) A modern take on Huber regression
14th July 2021	Persi Diaconis (Via Zoom) Tales from the Trenches of Foundations
17th June 2021	Emmanuel Candès (Via Zoom) Reliable predictions? Equitable treatment? Some recent progress in predictive inference
9th June 2021	Gabrielle Gutierrez (Via zoom) Smart compression in the retina: a theoretical study of recoding inputs in neural circuits
2nd June 2021	Morgane Austern (Via zoom) Asymptotics of cross-validation
12th May 2021	Helen Barron (Via zoom) Neuronal computation underlying inferential reasoning in humans and mice
29th April 2021	Puneet Dokania (Via zoom) Impact of Parameter Regularization and Overfitting in Neural Network's Robustness.
27th April 2021	Christopher Tosh (Via zoom) Doing more with less: Machine learning with precious data
21st April 2021	Gabriel Koch Ocker (Via zoom) Decomposition of higher-order correlations by nonlinear Hebbian learning.
24th March 2021	Ilija Bogunovic (Via zoom) Robust Learning Algorithms for Sequential Decision Making
15th March 2021	Wei Hu (Via zoom) Opening the Black Box: Towards Theoretical Understanding of Deep Learning
10th March 2021 (10am)	Volkan Cevher (Via zoom) Limits of Robbins-Monro-type algorithms: From minimization to minimax optimization
23rd February 2021	Tuan-Anh Le (Via zoom) Building AI with Neuro-Symbolic Generative Modeling
10th February 2021	Erik Bodin (Via Zoom) Black-box density function estimation using recursive partitioning
3rd February 2021	Cristina Savin (Via zoom) Task-specific routing of information in neural circuits viastructured noise
20th January 2021	Robert Rosenbaum (Via zoom) Universal Properties of Strongly Coupled Neuronal Networks
13th January 2021	Wuchen Li (Via Zoom) Innovations in Mean-Field Game Theory for Scalable Computation and Diverse Applications
25th November 2020	Le Song and Xinshi chen (Via Zoom) Understanding Deep Architectures with Reasoning Layer
11th November 2020	Josh McDermott (Via Zoom) Successes and Failures of Neural Network Models of the Auditory System
4th November 2020	Alessandro Rudi (Via Zoom) Non-parametric Models for Non-negative Functions
14th October 2020 (3pm)	John Murray (Via Zoom) Modeling large-scale dynamics of human cortex
16th March 2020 (12.00 - 1pm)	Robert Guangyu Yang Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG (12-1pm) Understanding brains by building artificial networks
12th March 2020	Emtiyaz Khan Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm TBC
9th March 2020 (12.00 - 1pm)	Eric Nalisnick Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG (12-1pm) Building and Critiquing Models for Probabilistic Deep Learning
5th March 2020 (2pm)	Ahmed El Alaoui Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG (2pm) Reconstruction problems on amenable graphs
4th March 2020	Arnak Dalalyan Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm All-In-One Robust Estimator of the Gaussian Mean (arXiv:2002.01432)
24th February 2020 (12 - 1pm)	Yixin Wang Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG (12-1pm) The Blessings of Multiple Causes
21st February 2020 (12 - 1pm)	Yingzhen Li Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG (12-1pm) Deep probabilistic modelling for reliable machine learning systems
26th February 2020 Cancelled	Mihaela van der Schaar Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm Cancelled
22nd January 2020	Michael Bronstein Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm Deep learning on graphs and manifolds: going beyond Euclidean data
15th January 2020 (Talk 2) 4pm	Wei Ji Ma (Talk 2) Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm Human planning in large state spaces
15th January 2020 (Talk 1) 1pm	Wei Ji Ma (Talk 1) Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 1pm Growing up in Science: Wei Ji Ma's unofficial story
8th January 2020	Chand Chandrasekaran Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm Single Trial Neural Circuit Dynamics Underlying Perceptual Decision-Making
18th December 2019	Irina Gaynanova Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm Simultaneous Non-Gaussian Component Analysis (SING) for Data Integration in Neuroimaging
11th December 2019	David Freedman Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm Neural Circuits of Cognition in Artificial and Biological Neural Networks
27th November 2019	Matthew Chalk Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm Inferring the function performed by a recurrent neural network
20th November 2019	Benjamin Guedj Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm A walkthrough of advanced PAC-Bayes results
13th November 2019	Omri Barak Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm Structure in the randomness of trained recurrent neural networks
23rd October 2019	Rajen Shah Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm Low-priced lunch in conditional independence testing
2nd October 2019	Christian Walder Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm New Tricks for Estimating Gradients of Expectations
24th September 2019 (Tuesday)	Gergely Neu Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm A unified view of entropy-regularized Markov decision processes
19th September 2019 (Thursday)	Emtiyaz Khan Ground Floor Seminar Room, 25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG 4pm Learning-Algorithms from Bayesian Principle

Upcoming events

Past events

2024

Gatsby Bridging Programme - a 7-week maths summer school (24 Jun-9 Aug).

2023

Analytical Connectionism 2023 - summer course and workshop (28 Aug-8 Sep).
Gatsby Bridging Programme - a 7-week maths summer school (19 Jun-5 Aug).
Gatsby25 - a 2-day event to celebrate Gatsby Unit's 25th anniversary (16-17 June).

2019-20

Neural interfaces for neurobiological insights (9 Oct 2020)
Recent developments on kernel methods (26-27 Sep 2019)
Gatsby21 - a 3-day event to celebrate the Gatsby Unit's 21st anniversary (11-13 Jul 2019)

Follow @GatsbyUCL