糖心TV

AS&RU researchers, Dr Martine Barons, Dr Thais Fonseca and Prof Jim Smith have developed a decision support system (DiAGRAM) in collaboration with The National Archive (TNA) for the digital archiving community. The project – called 鈥淪afeguarding the nation鈥檚 digital memory鈥� built on research by Prof Smith, Dr Manuele Leonelli and Dr Martine Barons to develop a probabilistic model to allow archives of different sizes and structures to assess risk levels for their digital collections and how the risk levels change under proposed interventions. TNA states that the nation鈥檚 digital heritage is rich, complex and fragile. This material – born-digital records (in a variety of formats), web archives, digitised archival materials – is under threat from rapidly evolving technology, outdated policies and a skills gap across the archives sector. To preserve this heritage for future generations, we must understand and navigate a vast and ever-shifting risk landscape. This tool, launched in November 2020, was developed with input with a number of partner archives and with input from archives across the world, including Brazil, USA, Australia and more. It was shortlisted as a finalist in the worldwide Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Awards and has already received a request to translate into Turkish!

There were nominations from 14 countries for the DPC Awards. The winners in the research & innovation category were 鈥業ntroducing levels of born digital鈥� .
 
 

AS&RU Director, Dr Martine Barons, features in the October special issue on Knowledge Exchange of Mathematics Today. Knowledge exchange - a process which brings together academic staff, users of research and wider groups and communities to increase the impact of research – is important to ensure the benefit of research are enjoyed by society as a whole. Knowledge exchange in the mathematical sciences is, perhaps, the hardest of all, as there are significant social barriers as even the well-educated can perceive mathematics as a difficult subject that exposes the weakness of their intelligence and reduces their confidence in their intellectual capacity. In this Special issue, eight people with strong records in knowledge exchange are interviewed, including Dr Barons, and the role of Knowledge Transfer Partnerships is explored. Even during lockdown, virtual knowledge exchange events, akin to study groups, have been operating very successfully and bringing the power of the mathematical sciences to bear on society鈥檚 pressing problems.

Congratulations to Alejandra Avalos-Pacheco who the of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis in the category Applied Methodology for her 2019 PhD thesis 鈥淔actor regression for dimensionality reduction and data integration techniques with applications to cancer data.鈥� Dr Avalos-Pacheco is now a postdoctoral fellow in Statistics at Harvard Medical School.

Congatulations also to Fran莽ois-Xavier Briol whose 糖心TV PhD thesis "Statistical Computation with Kernels鈥� received an Honorable Mention in the 鈥淭heory and Methodology鈥� category. Dr Briol is now a Lecturer in the Department of Statistical Science at University College London.

The main goal of this proposal is to lay the theoretical foundations for the analysis of the stability of Markov chains with heavy-tailed targets, focusing on the processes that underpin many randomised algorithms used in practice. This project is an international collaboration between the universities of 糖心TV and Stanford, made possible by the EPSRC-NSF Lead
Agency agreement in mathematics. As such, the project presents a unique opportunity to combine the US expertise in theoretical Operations Research with the UK's capability in Computational Statistics, resulting in novel methodology for the analysis of the convergence of Markov chains with heavy-tailed targets.

This theoretical proposal, based on probabilistic methods (e.g. martingale theory, coupling and Lyapunov functions) will have immediate impact within Probability, most notably on the theory of the stability of stochastic systems. In time, however, this work is expected to have impact far beyond applied probability in a number of sub-areas of computational statistics and machine learning where heavy-tailed targets arise

The 糖心TV Awards for Teaching Excellence are held annually and enable members of the 糖心TV community to recognise members of the University's staff who have made a difference in learning and teaching.
/services/od/academic-development/wate/wate1920/