Warwick SIAM Student Conference - November 2015
The second Warwick SIAM Student Conference of the year will take place on 25th November 2015.
We aim to give insight into what careers are available in mathematical and statistical areas, both industrial and academic, and provide networking opportunities for those involved.
We welcome speakers from TRL and Spectra Analytics to speak about uses and applications of mathematics and statistics in transport and data analysis industries. We also welcome two graduate students from the mathematics department at Warwick to give an accessible overview of their research in applied mathematics.
Attendees will be provided with lunch, tea and coffee, and wine and nibbles.
Registration is now closed.
You are still free to attend if you have not registered, however priority for food will be given to those who have registered.
Schedule [pdf]
All talks will be held in MS.04
Lunch will be served in the Street.
Tea and coffee, and wine and nibbles will be served in the Common Room B1.41
| 12:30-13:30 | Lunch |
| 13:30-14:30 |
Transport Research Statistics: An Alternative to Banking |
| 14:30-15:00 |
From Soap to Simulation: Surfactant Flow in a Multi-fluid |
| 15:00-15:30 | Tea and Coffee |
| 15:30-16:00 | Quantifying Crowd Size and Human Communication with Mobile Phone and Twitter Data Federico Botta (Warwick - Complexity Science) |
| 16:00-17:00 | Spectra Analytics: Data Analysis for a Complex World Daniel Sprague (Spectra Analytics) |
| 17:00- | Wine and Nibbles |
Talk details
Title: Transport Research Statistics: An Alternative to Banking
Speaker: Louise Lloyd
Abstract: Louise is Head of Statistics at the Transport Research Laboratory where she has climbed from the ranks of Graduate Statistician since graduating from the University of Warwick with a Masters in Maths and Statistics in 2005.
She and her team of research statisticians at TRL enjoy varied, exciting and challenging careers providing statistical support and research alongside world experts in all areas of transport. This includes using a broad range of statistics applied to night time road work signs, road surface testing machines, HGV platooning and electric vehicles amongst many other areas. Louise will share one of her favourite weeks in her career so far in the hope of encouraging some more exceptional statisticians to join the team, or at least consider a career in research.
Title: From Soap to Simulation: Surfactant Flow in a Multi-fluid
Speaker: Oliver Dunbar
Abstract: The soap! Surface active agents are molecules which, when added to certain liquids will find the enclosing boundary film of the liquid. Sticking themselves to the surface then results in a reduction in surface tension of the fluid. They are used extensively in industry in fields such as cosmetics, detergents, agrochemicals and emulsion polymerisation to name but a few.
The simulation! I would like to construct a mathematical model of these surfactants in multiple fluids with sufficient detail to show the aforementioned behavioural changes. In particular I will briefly present a model derived from physical laws, then modify this with a useful mathematical tool known as diffuse interface modeling that will allow for a much wider range of behaviour to be studied. Finally i will present a couple of simulations resulting from the diffuse model.
Title: Quantifying Crowd Size and Human Communication with Mobile Phone and Twitter Data
Speaker: Federico Botta
Abstract: Being able to infer the number of people in a specific area is of extreme importance for the avoidance of crowd disasters and to facilitate emergency evacuations. Here, using a football stadium and an airport as case studies, we present evidence of a strong relationship between the number of people in restricted areas and activity recorded by mobile phone providers and the online service Twitter. Our findings suggest that data generated through our interactions with mobile phone networks and the Internet may allow us to gain valuable measurements of the current state of society.
Similarly, the large amount of digital traces now available provides us with the unprecedented opportunity to perform a detailed analysis of how people interact and communicate. We consider the networks of phone calls across the city of Milan at different times of the day, week and month from 1 November 2013 to 31 December 2013, and we characterise their community structures. We investigate the evolution of communities during the period of analysis and we find that the similarity between communities presents a specific signal which closely reflects the behaviour of people. More specifically, we use Normalised Mutual Information to characterise the evolution of communities and evaluate their similarity across different time windows. Our findings suggest that communities in a communication network have a characteristic trace which closely resembles the behaviour of people.
Title: Spectra Analytics: Data Analysis for a Complex World
Speaker: Daniel Sprague
Abstract: Spectra Analytics is a data analytics startup from the Centre for Complexity Science at the University of Warwick, and has been running for just over a year. This talk will introduce the company, discuss some of the lessons we have learned so far, and then go into more detail about some of the projects we have undertaken in areas such as finance, marketing, and the hotel industry.
