LMS/BCS-FACS Evening Seminars

In association with the British Computer Society Formal Aspects of Computing Science (BCS-FACS), the LMS hosts an annual evening seminar on aspects of the computer science–mathematics interface. These events are free to anyone who wishes to attend, and have attracted high-quality speakers.


LMS/BCS-FACS Evening Seminar 2022

The next LMS/BCS-FACS Evening Seminar will be held online, via Zoom, on Thursday 17 November (6  7:30pm). The speaker will be Professor Sam Staton (Oxford). 

Sam Staton is a Professor of Computer Science and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. There he currently runs an ERC grant "Better Languages for Statistics". Before arriving in Oxford in 2015, Sam spent time in Nijmegen, Paris, and Cambridge. His PhD was in Cambridge with Marcelo Fiore (2007). Sam's main research is in programming language theory, but he is also interested in logic and category theory. He has recent contributions in probabilistic programming languages, and quantum computing and programming languages.

Title: Programming-based foundations for statistics

Abstract: Probabilistic programming is a popular tool for statistics and machine learning. The idea is to describe a statistical model as a program with random choices. The program might be a simulation of a system, such as a physics model, a model of viral spread, or a model of electoral behaviour. We can now carry out statistical inference over the system, for example, by running a Monte Carlo simulation – running the simulation 100,000’s of times.

As I will discuss in this talk, the idea of treating statistical models as computer programs also has a foundational appeal. |f we can understand statistical models as programs, then the foundations of probability and statistics can be discussed in terms of program semantics. There is a chance of new foundational perspectives on statistics, in terms of programming languages and their formal methods.

As I will explain, this programming-based foundation for statistics is attractive because there are some intuitively simple scenarios, such as inference over function spaces, which have an easy programming implementation, but for which the traditional mathematical interpretation is complicated.

Click here to register to attend the 2022 LMS/BCS-FACS Evening Seminar.

Email Katherine Wright, Society Business, Research & Communications Officer, if you have any questions: lmscomputerscience@lms.ac.uk.


Previous Seminars:

2021

Professor Peter Sewell - Underpinning mainstream engineering with mathematical semantics

2019

Professor Marta Kwiatkowska - When to trust a self-driving car

2018

Professor Bill Roscoe - Verifying CSP and its offspring

2017

Professor Erika Ábrahám - Symbolic Computation Techniques in SMT Solving

2016

Professor Muffy Calder - Probabilistic Formal Analysis of Software Usage Styles in the Wild

2015

Professor Roland Backhouse - The Mathematics of Programme Construction

2014

Professor Joel Ouaknine - Decision Problems for Linear Recurrecnce Sequences

2013

Professor Philippa Gardner - Views: Compositional Reasoning for Computer Programs

2012

Professor Jack Copeland - The Mathematical Objection: Turing, Gödel and Penrose on the Mind

2011

Professor Andrew Ireland - Reasoned Modelling: Towards Decision Support for System Designers.

2010

Professor Peter O’Hearn - Reasoning about Programmes Using a Scientific Method

2009

Professor Mike Gordon, FRS - Forward with Hoare.

2008

Professor John Tucker - The Equations of Computer Science