Hertfordshire Branch
Hertfordshire Branch Meetings
Programme
2011 - 2012
We are continually trying to put together a programme which will appeal to the widest audience, so any suggestions as to subject matter or speakers we may contact, will be gratefully received.
Meetings generally begin at 8.00 pm. The "doors open" at, and refreshments are available from 7.30 pm. Do come along and do some networking, or just have a chat with other Society members. Unless otherwise stated, it is NOT necessary to book a place at any Branch meeting.
Guests and non-BCS members are very welcome.
Travelling instructions for our Steria venue, may be found on our "Find us" page.
Important information for attendees
Steria close the car park gates outside office hours.
Should you arrive for an event and find the gates closed, you will have to ask the security staff to open the gate. The inset picture shows what you will see (click to enlarge): the gate closed; a box mounted on a cranked pole about five yards from the gate, on the right of the driveway. The box is equipped with a call-button and an intercom. Press the button and tell the security officer that you have come for the "Steria-BCS meeting".
Neighbouring BCS branches may also have events of interest to members. Details of these events may be found on their branch websites. For links, see below:
Bedford -
Berkshire -
East Anglia -
Essex -
Guildford -
Kingston & Croydon -
Oxfordshire -
North London -
West London
Tuesday 22 May 2012
8.00pm at the offices of Steria Limited, Hemel Hempstead
Dynamic Feature Fusion Trees: a New, Simple and Flexible Approach to Statistical Pattern Matching
Nigel Sedgwick, Cambridge Algorithmica Ltd.
Pattern Matching plays an increasingly important part of modern life, in which machines are taking on additional roles. Examples include automatic speech recognition, biometric identification of people, monitoring of machines for faults or for automatic timing of maintenance; even radio and line communications.
This talk will describe a generalised approach, with benefits of simplicity and, often, improved performance. The approach is useful for quite large numbers of features, with nonlinear correlations between them; it also suits applications with medium numbers of features, that require more accurate matching than currently.
The approach has more intrinsic tolerance than many, of missing feature measurements, for both training data and for operational classification. It handles this in a unified way with noise modelling. It can incorporate many existing processing techniques, including those that have already been found successful in particular applications.
A key issue for such Pattern Matching is the advent of more powerful computer processors with significantly larger memory. This make practical, techniques in Statistical Pattern Matching that would not previously have been thought attractive.
As well as use with supervised training, the approach can also incorporate manual guidance of modelling to various extents, thereby covering supervised, unsupervised and semisupervised training. The approach is based on discriminative training; it uses improved modelling of Probability Density Functions (PDFs), including going well beyond Gaussian distributions, and even beyond Gaussian mixtures. It is useful for multisensor feature fusion and also for fusion of the outputs of prior multi-algorithmic analysis.
Evaluation of the technique will be shown, particularly using graphical performance measures based on Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves.
The talk will touch on some interesting though modest parallels with possible mechanisms in human brains, that go beyond those of Artificial Neural Networks.
Wednesday 20 June 2012
1.30pm. to 5.00pm. at Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, MK3 6EB
Visit to Bletchley Park National Codes Centre.
Join us for an afternoon visit to Bletchley Park, the Historic Site of secret British code breaking activities during WWII and the birthplace of the modern computer. Discover how the Bombes and Colossus, the first programmable computer, were used to decoded messages sent on Enigma and Lorenz machines. They helped reduce the time to decode German intercepts from several weeks to only a few hours. The visit will include a guided tour. Entrance is free for members, £13.95 for non members payable at the event. If you wish to attend, please book through HQ's online Events Booking system, which you can acess via this booking link.
Wednesday 12 September 2012
7.30pm at the Frogmore Mill, Fourdrinier Way, off Durrants Hill Road, Hemel Hempstead, Herts HP3 9RY
AGM & Visit to Paper Mill
Annual General Meeting
The AGM is open to all (only members may vote). We do urge you to attend so that you may participate in the election of your committee, whose main business to organise branch meetings and represent members through the Branches Congress.
Volunteers for the committee are always welcome; if you would like to join, please get in touch with Siva Niranjan, Branch Secretary (
).
Nominations to the positions of Chairman, Secretary and Treasurer should be with the Secretary 14 days in advance of the AGM; nominations for other members of the committee may be made at any time before the close of the elections phase of the AGM. Some of our most effective volunteers have put their hands up at the very last minute.
... the Annual General Meeting will be followed at 8.00pm, by ...
Wednesday 12 September 2012
8.00pm at the Frogmore Mill, Fourdrinier Way, off Durrants Hill Road, Hemel Hempstead, Herts HP3 9RY
Visit to Paper Mill
Our AGM is followed by a visit looking into the history of paper, something that many of us now take for granted. Frogmore paper mill was the birthplace of paper's industrial revolution. Paper has been made on this site since 1772 and small scale production is still taking place to this day. Our visit will include a short presentation, demonstration of hand papermaking, letterpress printing and tour of the mill. Entrance is free for members, £9 for non members payable at the event. If you wish to attend, please book through HQ's online Events Booking system, which you can acess via the Events Calendar.