The School of Natural Science will host students from local high schools for a science day, when students will be driven through an exploration of the ideas and experiments that are relevant for the research carried out by the School divisions.
The Computing Science and Mathematics
division of the School of Natural Sciences
will present a set of talks on themes that are part of the experience
of our everyday life, like hearing, creativity, making the right decision
or dealing with abstract ideas like things that are infinite. Each talk
will try to highlight how a scientific approach can improve and drive
our understanding of such apparently simple things, which we deal with
quite naturally everyday, while possibly overlooking their inner complexity.
The schedule of the three days is as follows. Keywords lead to more details!
| Tuesday 17th | Wednesday 18th | Thursday 19th | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10:30-11:15 | Infinity | Creativity | Creativity |
| 11:15-12:00 | Infinity | Creativity | Creativity |
| 12:00-12:40 | Lunch | ||
| 12:40-13:25 | Sound | Sound | Sound |
| 13:25-14:10 | Decision | Decision | Decision |
Talks will be held in the Cottrell Building in Lecture Theatre B3.
We all have an idea of what 'infinity' means, but it doesn't seem to behave like other numbers we have come across. We shall explore some of the strange things that happen in the world of the infinite and come across a very hard-pressed hotel porter!
Sound is all around us, and people use sound to understand what is going on around them, as well as for speech. Animal hearing is very sophisticated, but so far artificial hearing (for robots, or for communicating with machines) is much simpler. What's the problem, and why is it difficult?
Computers follow rules. They do as we tell them and nothing more, so can a computer ever create anything new? They say that the secret to creativity is knowing when to break the rules, so perhaps they can't, but if there is a right time to break the rules, isn't that just more rules? This talk looks at questions of rule following, creativity, and whether or not there is really a difference between the human mind and a computer.
Big companies have to make many complex decisions to ensure the efficient running of their businesses. For example, for Amazon to deliver the products that customers have ordered on line, they firstly have to decide which of these are have to be delivered that day. Furthermore they have to do this efficiently choosing the most cost effective routes. This will involve further calculations about truck and driver availability and fuel costs.
It is surprising how complex these decisions are. You would think that all a business has to do is put these questions into a big computer and press a button and out will come the answer. However, in practice this not always possible. These decisions are so complex that even a computer struggles to answer all of them. Decision mathematics tries to offer methods for computers to solve these difficult real world problems. Through the example of Amazon we will get an idea of the complexities involved and how we might solve them.
The presentation of the talk can be found here.
The Aquaculture
division of the School of Natural Sciences will conduct a series of
experiments. These focus on health and hygiene, exploring the importance
of an everyday activity such as hand washing in controlling the spread of
diseases. This activity gives the students the ability to work in small
groups whilst performing simple but valuable experiments, interpret and
discuss their results before refining their next experiment!
Experiments will be held in the Cottrell Building in Room 2U2.
The
Psychology
division of the School of Natural Sciences will drive pupils to work
in small groups participating in tasks that reflect the psychological
areas of communication, memory and perception.
Group work will be held in the Cottrell Building in Room 2A73.
