Inaugural Lectures Series April/May 2014
On Thursday 24 April 2014 Professor Maribel Fernández, Head of the Software Modelling & Applied Logic research group in the Department of Informatics, presented her Inaugural Lecture, entitled Systems specification, analysis and simulation via rewriting: from programs to biology. The following week, on Wednesday 30 April 2014, Professor Zoran Cvetkovic, Professor of Digital Signal Processing in the Department of Informatics, delivered his Inaugural Lecture entitled Redundancy in signal expansions: making big data bigger and what it buys. For both events, staff and students from King’s College London, friends, and colleagues from other higher education institutions, lined the rows of the Anatomy Lecture Theatre to hear the professors deliver a one hour lecture relating to their area of research and expertise. Professor Peter McBurney, Head of the Department of Informatics and Professor Michael Luck, Head of the School of Natural & Mathematical Sciences, welcomed Professor Fernández, and invited her to present her Inaugural Lecture. Professor Evelyn Welch, Vice-Principal, Arts & Sciences, said a few words before Professor Zoran Cvetkovic’s Inaugural Lecture, and invited him to address the audience.
Professor Peter McBurney, Professor Maribel Fernandez & Professor Michael Luck
Professor Michael Luck, Professor Zoran Cvetkovic, Professor Evelyn Welch & Professor Peter McBurney
The Natural & Mathematical Sciences Inaugural Lecture series continued into May 2014, with Professor Mairi Sakellariadou, Professor of Theoretical Physics in the Department of Physics, giving her Inaugural Lecture on Thursday 22 May. Professor Sakellariadou’s Inaugural Lecture, entitled Unweaving the fabric of the universe, was delivered to a packed audience in the JKTL Nash Lecture Theatre. Professor Sir Rick Trainor, the Principal of King’s College London, and Professor David Richards, Head of the Department of Physics, welcomed Professor Sakellariadou to deliver her lecture.
The following week, on Thursday 29 May, Professor Reimer Kühn, Professor of Statistical Physics in the Department of Mathematics, delivered his Inaugural Lecture, Random walks in complex networks. Again, the JKTL Nash Lecture Theatre was full of students, staff and colleagues from other higher education institutions, eager to hear about Professor Kühn’s research. Professor Michael Luck, Head of the School of Natural and Mathematical Sciences and Professor Simon Salamon, Head of the Department of Mathematics welcomed Professor Kühn to deliver his Inaugural Lecture.
Professor David Richards, Professor Mairi Sakellariadou & Principal Professor Sir Richard Trainor
Professor Simon Salamon, Professor Reimer Kühn & Professor Michael Luck
An engaging Q&A session and further discussion followed presentations, as well as an informal drinks reception, which provided an opportunity for guests to discuss the talks further and network among peers.
Professor Maribel Fernández obtained her PhD in Paris in 1993, supervised by Jean-Pierre Jouannaud, and her Habilitation (higher doctorate) in 2000 while she was a Maitre de conferences at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris). Her research interests include computation models, specification and programming languages, and the development of visual tools for the analysis and verification of complex systems. She uses rewriting-based techniques to analyse the dynamic behaviour, security and reliability of systems, from software applications to the biochemical systems.
Professor Zoran Cvetkovic received his Dipl Ing and Mag degrees from the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, an MPhil from Columbia University, and a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He has held research positions at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland (1996), and at Harvard University (2002-04). Between 1997 and 2002 he was a Principal Member of the technical staff of AT&T Shannon Laboratory. His research interests are in the broad area of signal processing, ranging from theoretical aspects of signal analysis to applications in audio and speech technologies and biomedical engineering. From 2005 to 2008 he served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.
Professor Mairi Sakellariadou obtained a BSc from the University of Athens and graduated from the University of Cambridge with an MSc. Since completing a PhD at Tufts University, she has held research positions at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Université de Tours, Université Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris 6), Universität Zürich, Université de Genève, and CERN. She was Associate Professor at the University of Athens and joined King’s College London in 2005 as a Reader. Professor Sakellariadou’s field of research is theoretical physics and cosmology with emphasis on the physics of the early universe. She is a member of the Euclid consortium, the MoEDAL experiment, the Virgo Ego Scientific Forum, and the eLISA consortium.
Professor Reimer Kühn received a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Kiel University in 1987. He has held post-doctoral and lecturer positions at the University of Heidelberg, and visiting professorships at Leuven, Bordeaux and Göttingen. He has been a member of the Department of Mathematics at King’s College London since 2003. Professor Kühn has broad interests in the dynamics and statistical physics of complex and disordered systems. He has worked on spin-glasses, neural networks, low-temperature anomalies of glasses, combinatorial optimisation, phase transitions and critical phenomena in pure and random systems, on the modelling of risk in networked systems, and recently on random matrix theory.