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On Wednesday 20th November (week 8), Samuel Achord from Towers Watson will come and give a talk on the mathematical applications in actuarial work. The talk will be

Risk, modelling, problem solving. Risk management is both quantitative and qualitative: actuaries are technical experts with business and project management skills. There are mathematics in everything we do, there are opportunities for higher mathematics in the most unexpected places. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of what it's like to be actuary, how maths fits in on a daily basis, and present some of the current areas where a good mathematical background is vital to success.

Location: MS.03

Time: 4pm to 5pm

There will be refreshments before and after the talk.

On 6th Novemeber (Wednesday Week 6) we have a talk by Dr. Sarah Davis from Alstom Powers. Sarah obtained her Ph.D. from Warwick under the supervision of Prof. Miles Reid in 2012 and had been working with Alstom Power, who specialises in the field of power generation and transport.

Time and location:

4pm to 5pm in MS.04

Abstract

In order to maximise market share engineering companies continuously strive to design the best product at the lowest cost. Often there will be tens or even hundreds of design parameters that determine the performance of the end product.
Performing an optimisation algorithm based search – or brute force grid search – of the design space may be useful in finding the optimum design in situations where there are only a few variables. However these approaches would require infeasibly large numbers of evaluations for high dimensional situations. Even for five or ten parameters, it is not realistic to use optimisation algorithms due to the computational expense of one run, of, for example, a computational fluid dynamics simulation, which may take minutes or hours to complete.
A solution to these problems is to use a limited number of sample points to generate a surrogate model of the original system, the behaviour of which is expensive to determine.
In this talk I will introduce some surrogate modelling techniques and discuss some of the issues faced by industry when trying to apply them to the product design process.

Robert Calderbank is Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Information Initiative at Duke University. Prior to joining Duke as Dean of Natural Sciences in 2010, he directed the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. Prior to joining Princeton in 2004 he was Vice President for Research at AT&T, in charge of what may have been the first industrial research lab where the primary focus was Big Data.

Professor Calderbank is well known for contributions to voiceband modem technology, to quantum information theory, and for co-invention of space-time codes for wireless communication. His research papers have been cited more than 30,000 times and his inventions are found in billions of consumer devices. Professor Calderbank was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2005 and has received a number of awards, most recently the 2013 IEEE Hamming Medal for his contributions to information transmission.

Postgraduate study in California, research in mathematical sciences at Bell Labs, executive positions at AT&T, and finally professor at Princeton and Duke. This will be an informal talk with stories from Industry and Academia and a description of some mathematical ideas that have been incorporated in billions of consumer devices.

Please join us at 3pm on Wednesday 16th October in MS.04 for what I am sure will be a highly interesting and entertaining talk. There will be some snacks and juice available in the common room after the talk.