37 Warwick researchers have been named as Fellows of the Alan Turing Institute this year, including 9 colleagues from the Department of Statistics. Congratulations to Julia Brettschneider, Theo Damoulas, Paul Jenkins, Adam Johansen, Ioannis Kosmidis, Chenlei Leng, Gareth Roberts, Jim Smith and Yi Yu.

https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/university_of_warwick_names_37_researchers_who_become_turing_fellows_this_academic_year1

Daphne Ezer has received an EPSRC Innovation Fellowship to design new methods to help biologists design experiments that learn the structure of gene networks, while minimising research time and costs. This will involve finding a good schedule for laboratory protocols, and dynamically adjusting the schedule in response to the new data generated by the experiments. Finding regulatory links between genes is one of the main research directions explored in both biomedicine and agriculture, and this project will help researchers in academia and industry perform this task more efficiently. This project will be performed in partnership with the Alan Turing Institute and Google Brain Genomics.

The election-day exit poll methods developed by Warwick Statistics professor David Firth surprised the world yet again at 10pm on election day, immediately after the polling stations closed.

The exit poll, commissioned jointly by broadcasters BBC, ITV and Sky, correctly predicted that the Conservatives would be the largest party in a hung parliament as the result of last Thursday's election. This was quite different from what had been expected by most politicians, commentators and the global financial markets — and a long way short of the increased majority that PM Theresa May had wanted when she called a snap election (three years earlier than scheduled).

Professor Firth said:

It's very pleasing that this continues to work so well — and especially pleasing that most people seem now to trust that the exit-poll prediction will usually be fairly accurate, regardless of the various pre-election opinion polls and punditry that might suggest otherwise.

For the full story and details of the methods used, see warwick.ac.uk/exitpolling.

The first set of Turing Lectures took place on Wednesday 2nd March, hosted at the BMA in London and live streamed via the ATI website. A mathematician lucidly explaining the challenges to formal analysis of Deep Learning induced operators and a physicist illustrated concepts of the emerging field of networks and their analysis in diverse areas of life. They were superb, entertaining, exciting and engaging.

Please visit www.turing.ac.uk to either register for the next of a series of lectures that Turing is holding or view remotely - one can even ask questions of the speakers online.

The next Turing Lecture on Wednesday 16th March features our very own Gareth Roberts, and you will see a number of the other lectures in the series that should be of interest. Do visit the website, come along and take part if possible or enjoy the live streaming of the events.