Promoting a cross-disciplinary machine learning community to share, learn and connect
OxfordXML brings together researchers across different disciplines to share and learn about the impact of machine learning in their respective fields, such as physics, finance, social sciences, engineering, healthcare, and psychology.
“What we want is a machine that can learn from experience”
Alan Turing
Alan Turing
our mission
To provide a cross-disciplinary platform for Machine Learning researchers to share, learn and connect with other researchers across different disciplines
our community
We bring together researchers from various disciplines to build a community that promotes knowledge transfer, networking and interdisciplinary collaboration.
our activities
Termtime hybrid talks, held at Wolfson College and online, discussing different applications of Machine Learning in an informal and supportive setting.
our audience
We welcome anyone interested in learning more about Machine Learning applications across different fields. Past attendees of our events include postgraduate students, early career researchers and professors.

upcoming events

what's coming up

Please fill in this form if you're interested in joining as a student affiliate.

Stay updated on our latest events and news by joining our mailing list.

Interested in sharing your expertise? Apply to give a talk at our next seminar.

Wolfson college

7

Nov

2024
Active Learning for Billion Scale Data

Speaker: Dr. Talfan Evans
Calendar Icon Time: 17:00-18:00
Location Icon Levett Room, Wolfson College & Online (Teams link).

Biography:

Talfan Evans is a research scientist at Google Deepmind working. His work is focused on developing scalable data curation strategies for compute efficient large-scale pretraining. He has a MEng from Keble College and did his PhD at UCL in Cognitive Neuroscience, where he worked on adapting message-passing algorithms from the autonomous driving literature to explain neural activity during spatial exploration. As a postdoc with Andrew Davison at Imperial, he worked on real-time computer vision systems before moving to Deepmind.

Abstract:

Large foundation model scaling laws tell us that to continue to make additive improvements to performance, we should expect to need to pay orders of magnitude more in compute costs and data. In this talk, I'll present work that paints a more optimistic picture - actively choosing which data to train on can shift these curves in our favour, producing significantly more performant models for the same compute budget.

Wolfson college

26

Nov

2024
What have Large Language Models actually learned about language(s)? Lessons from linguistics and mechanistic interpretability

Speaker: Dominik Lukeš
Calendar Icon Time: 17:30-18:30
Location Icon Levett Room, Wolfson College & Online (Teams link).

Biography:

Dominik Lukeš is a Lead Business Technologist at the AI and ML Competency Centre with a focus on digital scholarship and academic practice. Prior to joining the Centre he started the Reading and Writing Innovation Lab where he focused on technologies supporting reading and writing in academic contexts.

Dominik's research focus is in linguistics and language pedagogy. He has previously run workshops at Oxford on using corpus analysis tools for humanities research. Dominik's core area of expertise is an intersection of conceptual metaphor theory and discourse analysis with a particular focus on construction grammar. He was the founding member of the journal Cognitive Approaches to Critical Discourse Analysis (CADAAD) and co-edited with Chris Hart the 2007 volume Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis. He also translated George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things into Czech. He is the author of Czech Navigator, a grammar of Czech for non-native speakers.

He blogs on MetaphorHacker.net and maintains a site focusing on exploring Large Language Models as Semantic Machines and publishes an occasional newsletter on AI in Academic Practice.

Abstract:

This talk will explore what exactly large language models (LLMs) have learned about language, and why it matters. It will attempt an outline of an answer to how these models understand the structure of language, and how this compares to how humans think about language. To answer the question, it will look at how LLMs perform across a range of different languages, even those with smaller digital footprints, and what this implies about how they represent language. It will contrast the results from this investigation with the latest findings from the field of "mechanistic interpretability." These findings offer insights into the inner workings of LLMs, offering clues about the fundamental differences between how we understand language and how language is represented inside the models. Finally, it will suggest a need a new approach to LLM research that brings together a richer understanding of language and a systematic investigation into how LLMs perform across a variety of languages.

Past events (2022-2024)

Events held and scheduled by us

Watch recordings of past events on our YouTube channel.

23
Oct 2024
Bridging AI-Adaptive and Human Teaching: A Dialogic Approach to Blended, Multimodal Learning
Jessica White
  • Wolfson College
    05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
19
Oct 2024
Linking creative clay models with AI 3D Printing and design
Margaret O'Rorke & Dr. Yi Yin
  • Wolfson College
    07:00 PM - 09:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
16
Oct 2024
Combining AI and imaging to understand cardiovascular diseases
Prof Paul Leeson
  • Wolfson College
    05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
5
Jun 2024
THE EMOTIONAL CONTENT OF CHILDREN'S WRITING: A DATA-DRIVEN APPROACH
Rainy Dong
  • Wolfson College
    05:30 PM - 06:30 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
30
May 2024
DEMONS: ROBUST SELF SUPERVISED DEPTH AND MOTION NETWORKS FOR ALL-DAY IMAGES
Madhu Vankadari
  • Wolfson College
    05:30 PM - 06:30 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
23
May 2024
GEOMETRIC MACHINE LEARNING FOR PATIENT-SPECIFIC 3D CARDIAC ANATOMY RECONSTRUCTION
Abhirup Banerjee
  • Wolfson College
    05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
15
May 2024
ADVANCING AI-ECG DIAGNOSIS USING DEEP LEARNING AND NEURAL ARCHITECTURE SEARCH
Lei Lu
  • Wolfson College
    05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
1
May 2024
The Law and Economics of AI
George R Barker
  • Wolfson College
    01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
21
Mar 2024
RESURRECTING RECURRENT NEURAL NETWORKS FOR LANGUAGE MODELLING
Razvan Pascanu
Recording of the seminar can be viewed here.
  • Wolfson College
    05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
13
Mar 2024
Citizen Weather Data and Machine Learning to identify urban climate risk at high spatio-temporal resolution
Prof Jesus Lizana
  • Wolfson College
    05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
7
Mar 2024
MULTI-AGENT REINFORCEMENT LEARNING
Jakob Foerster
Recording of the seminar can be viewed here.
  • Wolfson College
    05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
6
Mar 2024
LINKING DISCIPLINES, OMICS AND AI TO IMPROVE HUMAN HEALTH
Prof James Crabbe
Recording of the seminar can be viewed here.
  • Wolfson College
    01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
27
Feb 2024
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR MATHEMATICAL DISCOVERY
Daattavya Aggarwal
Recording of the seminar can be viewed here.
  • Wolfson College
    05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
19
Feb 2024
USER PROFILING FOR PERSONALIZATION
Dr Huizhi Liang
  • Wolfson College
    01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
15
Feb 2024
SEEING THE UNSEEN: MACHINE LEARNING IN CARDIAC ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY
Dr Rasheda Chowdhury
  • Wolfson College
    01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
8
Feb 2024
RISKS AND BENEFITS OF OPEN SOURCING LANGUAGE MODELS
Jakob Foerster, Christian Schroeder, Aleksandar Petrov,
Francisco Girbal, Fazl Barez, Joshua Loo
Recording of the seminar can be viewed here.
  • Wolfson College
    05:00 PM - 07:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Engineering Science Department, Thom Building
31
Jan 2024
Multi-Agent Security
Christian Schroeder
Recording of the seminar can be viewed here.
  • Wolfson College
    05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
24
Jan 2024
Speech recognition from brain scans
Dulhan Jayalath
Recording of the seminar can be viewed here.
  • Wolfson College
    05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
17
Jan 2024
MORAL UNCERTAINTY IN AUTONOMOUS AGENTS
Jázon Szabó
Recording of the seminar can be viewed here.
  • Wolfson College
    06:00 PM - 07:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
06
Dec 2023
Physics-informed generative networks
Dr Fabio Pizzati
  • Wolfson College
    01:00 PM - 02:30 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
30
Nov 2023
Bridging Millennia: Machine Learning's Impact on Assyriology
Ms Émilie Pagé-Perron
  • Wolfson College
    01:00 PM - 02:30 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
23
Nov 2023
Embeddings for Knowledge Graphs and Multimodal Representations
Dr Nitisha Jain
  • 01:00 PM - 02:30 PM
  • Wolfson College
    Wolfson College
25
Oct 2023
Some applications of AI in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
Dr Andrei Constantin
  • 01:00 PM - 02:30 PM
  • Wolfson College
13
Jun 2023
Personalised Treatment for Mental Health
Dr Qiang Liu
  • 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
  • Wolfson College
2
Jun 2023
INNOVATING IN MEDICAL DEVICE DEVELOPMENT
Dr Miguel Xochicale
  • 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
26
May 2023
Towards Safe & Robust AI for Image-Guided Diagnosis and Intervention
Dr Mobarakol Islam
  • 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
19
May 2023
Feature Attribution for Neural Network Explanation & Diversified Dynamic Routing for Vision Tasks
Csaba Botos & Ashkan Khakzar
  • 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
13
Mar 2023
Intelligence, artificial or not: conversations between developmental neuroscience and AI
Dr. Martin Frasch
Recording of the seminar can be viewed here.
More information: FraschLab.org
  • 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
21
Feb 2023
How Do Language Models Like ChatGPT Process Complex Words?
Mr. Valentin Hofmann
Recording of the seminar can be viewed here.
  • 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
9
Feb 2023
Advances in Sentiment Analysis of the Large Mass-Media Documents
Dr. Nicolay Rusnachenko
  • 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
19
Jan 2023
An Arms Race in Intellectual Property Protection of Deep Learning Models
Dr Youcheng Sun
  • 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
12
Jan 2023
GENERATING PATIENT RECORDS USING DIFFUSION MODELS
Dr Taha Ceritli
  • 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
12
Dec 2022
LEVERAGING MACHINE LEARNING TO IDENTIFY BLOOD CANCER TYPES
Ms Helen Theissen
  • 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
  • Wolfson College
21
Jun 2022
Application of deep learning in fetal heart rate monitoring
Dr Daniel Asfaw
  • 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
  • Florey Room, Wolfson College
30
jun 2022
Deep learning strategies for ultrasound in pregnancy
Dr Yi Yin
  • 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
  • Florey Room, Wolfson College
15
jul 2022
Predicting activity patterns of regulatory elements in zebrafish using ML
Ms Andrea Rodriguez Delherbe
  • 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
26
jul 2022
Agent-based modelling of accent retraction in Balto-Slavic
Mr Toby Hudson
  • 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
About Us
A vision for an open, cross-disciplinary machine learning network
Founded in 2019 by Dr Stephen Suryasentana (now at University of Strathclyde) and Dr Yaling Hsiao (now at Birmingham University), OxfordXML (where XML stands for Cross-disciplinary Machine Learning) is a research cluster based in Wolfson College that aims to provide a cross-disciplinary platform for researchers across different disciplines to come and share their experience on how machine learning or artificial intelligence has impacted on their research. Furthermore, it hopes to provide an open community for researchers across different departments to connect and initiate interdisciplinary collaboration.
Committee
  • Prof Antoniya Georgieva (Cluster Head) - Research focus on Health ML/AI
  • Prof Konstantinos Kamnitsas (Governing Body Fellow Overseeing the Cluster) - Research focus on Health ML/AI
  • Dr Yi Yin (Lead Organiser) - Research focus on Health ML/AI
  • Dr George Barker (Treasurer) - Research focus on Economics, Finance, Law, Public Policy & ML/AI
Cluster Affiliates
  • Dr Csaba Botos (Member of Events Organisation Team) - Industry Affiliate
To join our mailing list: CLICK HERE
Please fill in this form if you're interested in joining as a student affiliate.
Contact us below if you are interested in speaking at our events