Machine Learning
Positioning in challenging environments
From driving, to crop harvesting and timing in the financial markets, many aspects of our modern lives are reliant on GPS.
But, although they are everywhere, high frequency radio waves have a flaw. They are blocked by solid objects – like buildings – so they can’t reach everywhere.

Tingting Zhu
Dr. Tingting Zhu is a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow and Member of Faculty within the Department of Engineering Science, Oxford. She is an Associate Research Fellow of St. Hilda's College and a Stipendiary Lecturer at Mansfield College.

Min Chen
I was born in Shanghai, China. The majority of my school education took place during the infamous Cultural Revolution. There was no encouragement of academic achievement. Fortunately, the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, when I was 16, and it became normal again for teenagers to study and apply for university places.

Tom Hart
My research centres around how to monitor penguins and other marine predators in difficult environments such as Antarctica. Many of the most important environments on the planet are too data deficient to understand the changes occurring there, and the implications for global change, which in turn stalls effective management. I spend a lot of...

Fiona Jones
I have always been fascinated by the Polar Regions – the harsh but beautiful landscapes, the epic stories of human exploration, and – most of all – the animals that find their home there. These creatures don’t just survive in their environment, they thrive in it, perfectly adapted to the conditions.

Why does my phone battery suck?
Most people use their phones every single day for communicating with others, using the Internet, playing games via apps. But there’s nothing worse than looking down at your phone and realising the battery is running out of juice—or worse yet, that it’s already completely dead.
One of the most common problems with smart phones is a...

Seabird monitoring - witnesses in the wild
Seabirds – including penguins – are amongst the most threatened animals on the planet. They are also very useful indicators of wider environmental change. But how do you effectively monitor species which live in hard-to-reach places, such as Antarctica? A team of scientists at the University of Oxford has come up with a...

Learn about deep learning in these lectures from Prof Nando de Freitas
Professor Nando de Freitas is a machine learning professor who has made his Oxford lectures available to the public. This lecture series draws inspiration from neuroscience and statistics, introducing the basic background on neural networks, back propagation, Boltzmann machines, autoencoders, convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural...

What did Hollywood get right and wrong in these movies?
King Kong, PI, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind and Superman III. What do these 4 films have in common? SCIENCE! They caught attention of one film fan Edwin Davies. On this episode of the Big Questions podcast we are separating the fact and fiction and asking the question: What did Hollywood get right and wrong in these movies?

Learning and Efficiency of Outcomes in Games
Selfish behaviour can often lead to suboptimal outcome for all participants, a phenomenon illustrated by many classical examples in game theory. Over the last decade we developed good understanding on how to quantify the impact of strategic user behaviour on the overall performance in many games (including traffi c routing as well as online...