What's On at UWA

A recent meta-study concluded that the use of computer-aided detection/diagnosis (CAD) "in breast MRI has little influence on the sensitivity and specificity of experienced radiologists and therefore their interpretation remains essential". In this talk I describe ongoing collaborative research to improve the sensitivity and specificity of breast MRI, and concomitantly its clinical utility, by combining multi-modal MRI with novel multi-parametric and multi-dimensional image analysis techniques. In particular we are developing methods to quantitatively characterise tissue morphology, microvasculature, and microstructure from spatially aligned multi-modal MR images including anatomical T1- and T2-weighted images, as well as images acquired using dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI, and diffusion-weighted imaging. We are also developing image analysis methods to automatically extract these features, segment (delineate) suspicious tissue, and classify the tissue as benign or malignant. Results to date include a novel registration evaluation framework based on a biomechanical breast model that permits realistic simulation of tissue deformation, new spatiotemporal features for improved discrimination of benign and malignant lesions in DCE-MRI, and most recently the first fully automatic method for breast lesion detection and delineation.

Time and place: 3pm Friday 6 February in Weatherburn LT.

Speaker: Gordon Royle (UWA)

Title: Homomorphisms and Endomorphisms of Graphs.

Abstract: A homomorphism from a graph X to a graph Y is a function f from V(X) to V(Y) that preserves edges (but not necessarily non-edges); if Y = X, then it is called an endomorphism. Just as all the automorphisms of a graph form its automorphism group, all the endomorphisms of a graph form its endomorphism monoid. After covering the background definitions, I will discuss a number of problems that have in common that any solution will rely on understanding - either theoretically or computationally - various aspects of the endomorphisms of the graphs involved.

Colloquium time date and location: 4pm, Thursday 19th February, Blakers Lecture Theatre.

Speaker: Prof. Nozer Singpurwallah, City University of Hong Kong.

Title: The Bayesian Paradigm for Statistical Inference and Decision Making.

Abstract: In this expository talk, open to a general audience, I outline the essence of the Bayesian paradigm for inference and decision making. After an overview of the subjective nature of probability, I discuss the notion of a likelihood, and the genesis of a probability model. The material here is standard, but the perspective is not. It will be illustrated by some simple examples.

Bain are looking to recruit bright and enthusiastic graduates with strong analytical, interpersonal and leadership skills to join their team in Sydney, Melbourne or Perth. Bain's recruits are a group of high achieving candidates across a diverse range of disciplines including economics, science, engineering, law, medicine and philosophy. Find out more at the presentation and networking session. RSVP on UWA CareerHub - http://uwa.careerhub.com.au/students/events/detail/199751

Time and place: 3pm Friday 27 February in Weatherburn LT.

Speaker: Cai-Heng Li (UWA)

Title: The regular one-face dessins and surface coverings.

Abstract: I will present a classification of edge-transitive dessins (orientable bipartite maps) with a single face, and applying it to determine ramification coverings between surfaces.

The University of Western Australia's Careers Fair provides excellent opportunities for students to engage, network and meet prospective employers looking to recruit students for graduate programs, vacation work, internships and voluntary positions. From first year to final year, Undergraduate to Post-Graduate, the Careers Fair is for you. Come along and meet more than 80 exhibitors and attend the 10 presentations.

We generally think of bubbles as benign and harmless and yet they can manifest the most remarkable range of physical effects. Some of those effects are the stuff of our every day experience as in the tinkling of a brook or the sounds of breaking waves at the beach. But even these mundane effects are examples of the ability of bubbles to gather, focus and radiate energy (acoustic energy in the above examples). In other contexts that focusing of energy can lead to serious technological problems as when cavitation bubbles eat great holes through ships' propeller blades or cause a serious threat to the integrity of the spillways at the Hoover Dam.

In liquid-propelled rocket engines bubbles pose a serious threat to the stability of the propulsion system and in artificial heart valves they can cause serious damage to the red-blood cells. In perhaps the most extraordinary example of energy focusing, collapsing cavitation bubbles can emit not only sound but also light with black body radiation temperatures equal to that of the sun.

But, harnessed carefully, this ability to focus energy can also be put to constructive use. Cavitation bubbles are now used in a remarkable range of surgical and medical procedures, for example to emulsify tissue (most commonly in cataract surgery or in lithotripsy procedures for the reduction of kidney and gall stones) or to manipulate the DNA in individual cells.

By creating cavitation bubbles non-invasively and thereby depositing and focussing energy non-intrusively, one can generate minute incisions or target cancer cells. This lecture will begin by ranging over some of the fundamentals of cavitation and will end with a vision of the new horizons for the amazing bubble, in the process ranging from ship's propellers to medical supertools.

PS* This seminar is free and open to the public & no RSVP required.

All Welcome

In this public lecture, Professor Roland Span, Dean, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Ruhr-University Bochum will highlight how models developed for oil and gas applications are deficient for many important Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) applications. He will discuss new models for predicting the properties of CCS mixtures that have been developed by his research group.

Cost: free but RSVP required via http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/span

Time and place: 3pm Friday 6 March in Weatherburn LT.

Speaker: John Bamberg (UWA)

Title: Multimarkdown and typesetting mathematics.

Abstract: Markdown has been around for around a decade or so, and is a simpler alternative to xml for producing simple easy-to-read text with powerful mark-up capability. If you don't already know what Markdown is, then you really ought to know! The genius of Markdown is that it has an almost flat learning curve, and it is ideal for people who have no programming experience. It can be easily converted to RTF or HTML and is essentially platform independent. For more advanced use, there is "Multimarkdown", and yet it is still amazingly simple and intuitive. Multimarkdown can be easily converted to HTML and LaTeX, and so it has the potential to be very useful to mathematicians. This seminar is a basic introduction to this fantastic mark-up language.

If you're a Year 12 student (or a parent of a Year 12 student), this session will provide information about UWA's courses, admission requirements and how to achieve your study and career goals.

UWA Prospective Students Office staff will be on hand to answer your queries following the presentation.

Time and place: 3pm Friday 13 March in Weatherburn LT.

Speaker: Luke Morgan (UWA)

Title: A non-classification theorem for 2-arc-transitive graphs.

Abstract: It would be great to have a classification of 2-arc-transitive graphs! Sadly, this is probably out of reach. However, there are many results on classifications of 2-arc-transitive graphs of certain orders, valencies, girth, etc... In this talk, I'll describe a recent result of Eric Swartz, Gabriel Verret and myself where we do something slightly different. Rather than classify all the possible graphs, we show that for fixed n and k, the family of 2-arc-transitive graphs of order kp^n is finite, with p a prime, once the valency is big enough (relative to n). So, our "non-classification" shows that the most interesting 2-arc-transitive graphs are those of small valency (relative to n).

In this public lecture, Professor Hermann Nicolai, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, will review some recent ideas and approaches towards a more complete theory of quantum gravity unifying the fundamental interactions of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Cost: free but RSVP required via http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/nicolai

Representatives from Goldman Sachs will be on campus to give a presentation on their graduate program and opportunities for UWA students.

Session includes presentation and networking opportunity.

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March 16-19 is INVESTMENT BANK WEEK

UWA Careers Centre will be hosting firms from the Investment Bank/Finance industry during Investment Bank Week. It is not essential to be studying Finance - UWA Physics, Maths and Science graduates have found work in this industry.

These events are your opportunity to meet employers, find out about their organisations, their application processes and meet key people. Come prepared with questions and think about how you present yourself to a potential employer.

Tuesday 17 March

Lazard

Azure Capital

Thursday 19 March

JP Morgan

Goldman Sachs

RSVP through CareerHub Events

Mathematics & Statistics Colloquium

Time and date: 4pm, Thursday 19th March

Venue: Blakers Lecture Theatre

Speaker: Prof. Michael Small, The University of Western Australia.

Title: Complex Systems: From nonlinear dynamics to graphs, via time series.

Abstract: Given a deterministic dynamical system - possibly contaminated by noise - what can I say about that system by measuring the time evolution of a single state? There are standard methods to answer this question, and I will review these. I will also show that by transforming the reconstructed system into a large graph, it is possible to learn even more.

Time and place: 3pm Friday 20 March in Blakers LT.

Speaker: Frederico A. M. Ribeiro (Federal University of Minas Gerais)

Title: UCS groups and associated algebras.

Abstract: Groups having many characteristic subgroups tend to have simpler automorphism subgroups, so it might be a good idea to look into the automorphism subgroups of groups having few characteristic subgroups. While characteristically simple groups are well understood, this is not the case when "few" is greater than zero. UCS groups are groups having a unique non-obvious characteristic subgroup. When investigating one of the two classes of UCS p-groups, I, together with Csaba Schneider, showed that they could be associated bijectively with a class of algebras we called IAC (irreducible and anticommutative). We can then, by looking into properties of these algebras, gather information about the groups.

Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is pleased to invite you to the Nectar Research Cloud Training Introductory Workshop. The workshop will provide attendees with the available Cloud resources at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, and will aim to provide a basic introduction to the NeCTAR Research Cloud. Area's covered will include the basics of configuring, and launching a virtual instance, followed by an introduction to the Unix shell, and, time permitting, a short course on programming using R. By the end of the workshop attendees should feel confident in applying and experimenting with this exciting new technology. NeCTAR workshop training topics covered -

- Introduction, outcomes and motivation for using NeCTAR

- Setting up your local resource for accessing the cloud

- Accessing the NeCTAR dashboard

- Obtaining Keys and setting Security Groups

- Creating and Launching an Instance

- Moving your data to the NeCTAR research cloud

- Creating Snapshots

Introduction to the Unix shell topics covered -

- The basics of the Unix shell

- Creating and Editing files

- Basic system configuration

Introduction to Programming using R topics covered -

- Basic programming concepts reading and writing data

- Using help in R

- Data types and subsetting data

- Using Vectors

- Control flow

- Plotting

This workshop is free of charge, however registration by 20 March 2015 is ESSENTIAL as space is limited. A light lunch and refreshments will be provided. Please note that participants will need to bring their own UWA or personal laptop to this training workshop.

Please register your attendance by emailing [email protected]

The Gates Foundation and its Grand Challenges partners are now accepting applications for a number of programs, including its Grand Challenges Explorations initiative, which encourages innovative and unconventional global health and development solutions.

To learn more about the Foundation, and how to approach its grant application process, you are invited to attend an information session featuring Dr Laura Boykin -- a Research Fellow, Computational Biologist, TED Fellow, and a CI on a new US$15.75 million Gates grant to the University of Greenwich's Natural Resources Institute entitled "African cassava whitefly: outbreak causes and sustainable solutions."

2015 UWA Gleddon Visiting Fellow Dr Kirill V. Larin, Biomedical Engineering, University of Houston, Texas, USA will talk about "Optical Coherence Tomography: imaging from molecules to whole (embryonic) body" and Dr Kirk W. Feindel, Centre for Microscopy, Characterisation and Analysis (CMCA), UWA will talk about "The evolution of noninvasive imaging for embryo characterisation". Refreshments will be served during an informal networking break. Please register your attendance to [email protected] by Friday 20 March (with 'Bioengineering Seminar-Thursday 26 March' in the subject line of your email.).

Time and place: 15:00 Friday 27 March in Weatherburn LT.

Speaker: Gabriel Verret (University of Western Australia)

Title: Vertex-primitive digraphs having vertices with almost equal neighbourhoods.

Abstract: Apart from some very trivial examples, a vertex-primitive digraph cannot have two vertices with equal neighbourhoods. (This is an easy exercise.) The first non-trivial case is thus when a vertex-primitive digraph has two vertices with neighbourhoods differing by one. I will give a proof of the classification of such digraphs, and describe a more general result and some applications.

The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has a range of opportunities for health professionals and engineers. Find out more at the ADF information sessions on 31 March where you can speak to a serving Engineering Officer. Register at: uwa.careerhub.com.au