This series covers the Strachey Lectures, a series of termly computer science lectures named after Christopher Strachey, the first Professor of Computation at the University of Oxford. Hosted by the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, the Strachey Lectures began in 1995 and have included many distinguished speakers over the years. The Strachey Lectures are generously supported by OxFORD Asset Management.
MT25 Strachey Lecture - Professor Rafail Ostrovsky: Advances in Garbled Circuits Nearly 40 years ago, Andy Yao proposed the construction of “Garbled Circuits,” which had an enormous impact on the field of secure computation -- both in theory and in practice. In Garbled Circuits, two parties agree on a Boolean circuit that they want to evaluate, where both parties have partial, disjoint inputs to…
Kevin Buzzard: Will Computers prove theorems? Will computers one day replace human mathematicians? Is this just around the corner, or decades away? Can neural networks spot patterns which humans have missed? Currently language models are great for brainstorming big ideas but are very poor when it comes to details. Can integrating a language model with a theorem prover like Lean solve these…
Leo De Moura: Formalizing the Future: Lean’s Impact on Mathematics, Programming, and AI How can mathematicians, software developers, and AI systems work together with complete confidence in each other’s contributions? The open-source Lean proof assistant and programming language provides an answer, offering a rigorous framework where proofs and programs are machine-checkable, shared, and extended…
Strachey Lecture: Privacy, Verification, Robustness: A Cryptographer's perspective on ML Cryptographic tools enable the safe use of technology platforms controlled by worst case computationally bounded adversaries.In this talk I will show how cryptographic paradigms and tools can be used to address trust issues in various phases of the machine learning pipeline. We will touch on approaches for…
Strachey Lecture: From probabilistic bisimulation to representation learning via metrics - Professor Prakash Panangaden Bisimulation is a fundamental equivalence relation in process theory invented by Robin Milner and with an elegant fixed-point definition due to David Park. In this talk I will review the concept of bisimulation and then discuss its probabilistic analogue. This was extended to…
The talk will emphasize the diversity of mathematical tools necessary for understanding blockchain protocols and their applications The talk will emphasize the diversity of mathematical tools necessary for understanding blockchain protocols and their applications (e.g., distributed computing, game theory, mechanism design, and continuous-time stochastic processes) and the immediate practical…
Professor Christel Baier delivers the Hillary Term 2024 Strachey Lecture Abstract: The classical stochastic shortest path (SSP) problems asks to find a policy for traversing a weighted stochastic graph until reaching a distinguished goal state that minimizes the expected accumulated weight. SSP problems have numerous applications in, e.g., operations research, artificial intelligence, robotics and…
In this term's Strachey lecture, Professor Monika Henzinger gives an introduction to differential privacy with an emphasis on differential private algorithms that can handle changing input data. Decisions are increasingly automated using rules that were learnt from personal data. Thus, it is important to guarantee that the privacy of the data is protected during the learning process. To formalize…
It’s said that Henry Ford’s customers wanted “a faster horse”. If Henry Ford was selling us artificial intelligence today, what would the customer call for, “a smarter human”? That’s certainly the picture of machine intelligence we find in science fiction narratives, but the reality of what we’ve developed is far more mundane. Car engines produce prodigious power from petrol. Machine intelligences…
An introduction to algorithmic aspects of symmetry and similarity, ranging from the fundamental complexity theoretic "Graph Isomorphism Problem" to applications in optimisation and machine learning Symmetry is a fundamental concept in mathematics, science and engineering, and beyond. Understanding symmetries is often crucial for understanding structures. In computer science, we are mainly…