Keble College

Professor Helen Hackett gives a talk for the Keble College Seminar Series on 26th April 2013.

The ASC Networks cluster visiting researcher Prof. Richard Wilson (Department of Computer Science, University of York) gives a public lecture on his work on networks at Keble College. A characterisation of a network is a number which describes some structural property of the network; a good example is the number of edges. In this talk I will discuss a wide range of characterisations of networks which we have developed at York over the past decade. The inspiration for these comes from diverse areas of mathematics and physics, and I will explore ideas from graph spectra, random walks (classical and quantum), heat diffusion and the connection between prime numbers and networks. These all lead to characterisations which reveal different properties of the networks.

Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute Viktor Mayer-Schönberger gives the Keble London lecture 2012. He looks at the surprising way the internet and computing technology allows nothing to be deleted or forgotten and how this could be detrimental to society's functioning and why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget.

Cities are epicentres of creativity and innovation but are also easily locked into patterns of infrastructure and behaviour that may not serve them best. The Co-Director of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities looks at these phenomena and considers ways to enhance the ability of cities to adjust to changes in their natural, political and financial environments.

Professor Paul Collier, Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford discusses the opportunities and challenges facing Africa.

Prof. Margaret Boden (Philosophy, Sussex) delivers a lecture as part of the Keble College Creativity series. Creativity is likely to remain a neuroscientific mystery for many years. Of the three types of creativity (combinational, exploratory, and transformational), only the first has been significantly illuminated by neuroscience. And even that is not fully understood in neural terms. The other two are even more recalcitrant. This is due to difficulty in defining thinking styles in art or science, and in identifying the various computational processes that are involved in using them. Without doing that, helpful neuroscientific questions simply cannot arise. One key problem is that hierarchical systems -- including many creative "styles"-- cannot yet be effectively represented by (connectionist) computer models inspired by the neural networks in the brain. Another is the difficulty of explaining the recognition of relevance in computational/theoretical terms.

Professor Eric F. Clarke gives a talk for the Keble College Creativity series on creativity in musical performances.

Professor Robin Dunbar, Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, Oxford, gives a talk as part of the Keble College Creativity Lecture series.

Professor Chris Gosden talks about what it means to be English with reference to a project at the Pitt Rivers Museum called 'The Other Within'.

Sir Jonathan Phillips of Keble College, Oxford, chairs a debate between Professor Nigel Biggar, Theology Faculty, University of Oxford, and Islamic Studies lecturer, Tim Winter, University of Cambridge; on the topic : Can the West Live with Islam?