Dr Vitaliy Kurlin: mathematics & computer science

Welcome to the Data Science research using new topological methods for Materials Science, Computer Vision, Climate. If you are a potential postdoc, PhD student or intern with C++ or Python skills, please e-mail vitaliy.kurlin(at)gmail.com.

Topological data analysis: tools and applications

Videos of talks explaining key ideas, basic examples and various applications of Topological Data Analysis :

• Topological methods for a faster materials discovery (47 min) at Applied Topology, Bedlewo (Poland), June 2017.
• 1-min video spotlight at CVPR 2014 (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition), Columbus, Ohio (USA), June 2014.
• Applications of Topological Data Analysis to Computer Vision (1h), Microsoft Research, Cambridge (UK), February 2014.
• Reconstruction of plane graphs from noisy samples (1 hour), Informatics Forum, Edinburgh University, April 2013.

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Affiliations: current positions and connections

• Data Scientist at the Materials Innovation Factory (University of Liverpool) funded by Unilever, HEFCE, Leverhulme, ERC. MIF is a new £68 million institute spun out from the 1st Chemistry department in the UK for 4*/3* research (2nd overall).
• Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the 1st Computer Science department in the UK for 4*/3* research (10th overall).
• Leader of the Intel Parallel Computing Center funded via the Big Data Centre at the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, US.
• Main organiser of the LMS-funded network Applied Algebraic Topology including Liverpool, Southampton and Queen Mary.
• Management team member of the Topological Data Analysis centre between Universities of Oxford, Liverpool, Swansea.
• See other past and current admin posts. Many thanks to the following research sponsors and collaborators:
               

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News: awards, papers and invited lectures

• March 2018 : accepted the generous invitation to give a 6-hour tutorial with programming exercises in Python on Topological Data Analysis at the Data Science summer school in Ecole Polytechnique near Paris on 25-29 June 2018.
• March 2018 : with Prof Andy Jones I've organised the workshop "Big data Analytics and Machine Learning Meets Omics" to start funded collaborative projects between Computer Science and Institute of Integrative Biology at Liverpool, UK.
• March 2018 : awarded 2700 GBP by the EPSRC for a 10-week summer project of the 2nd year undergraduate Gee Jack at the University of Liverpool to work on visualising topological shapes of high-dimensional datasets in Materials Science.
• February 2018 : Naohiko Ban, Eris Tricker, Asim Munshi finished internships and gave great talks at the group seminar.
• February 2018 : Intel has continued to fund us (another gift of 40K USD for the 2nd year of Grzegorz Muszynski's PhD).
• February 2018 : the school of EEE&CS at Liverpool has funded a PhD studentship "Discovering hidden patterns in high-dimensional data for materials science" from October 2018 to be supervised by Dr Vitaliy Kurlin and Prof Andy Cooper.
• Since March 2013 : previous news stories are in the news archive.

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Awards (larger than 10K GBP in value), see also smaller grants

	EPSRC grant awarded under the call New Approaches to Data Science jointly with Principal Investigators Prof Ulrike Tillmann and Dr Heather Harrington from Oxford and a team from Swansea. The 100% budget is more than £3.5M over 2018 - 2022. I've led the Computer Science team at Liverpool with a budget over 715K GBP including Prof Andrew Cooper, Paul Spirakis, Igor Potapov. The success has led to the creation of the Centre for Topological Data Analysis and was higlighted in the University of Liverpool news. Title : Application-driven Topological Data Analysis (ref. EP/R018472/1).
	The Royal Society International Exchanges grant (12K GBP until December 2019) for bilateral visits between the TDA group at Liverpool (UK) and Prof Herbert Edelsbrunner's group at IST Austria.
	Intel gift (80K USD) for the first 2 years of Grzegorz Muszynski's PhD "Topological analysis of the Climate System" funded through the Berkeley lab (US) from April 2017 at the University of Liverpool, UK.
	Knowledge Transfer Secondments at Microsoft Research Cambridge with Dr Andrew Fitzgibbon. 2014 - 2016 : EPSRC gave about 24K GBP, Microsoft Research provided 75K GBP in-kind contribution. Title : Applications of Topological Data Analysis to Computer Vision. Covered visits to Prof Carlsson at Stanford University (US) and Ayasdi, to Prabhat at Lawrence National Laboratory in Berkeley (2016).
	EPSRC first grant (100K GBP) with post-doctoral assistant Dr Alexey Chernov, 2011 - 2013 Title : Persistent Topological Structures in Noisy Images (ref. EP/I030328/1), which continued as Knowledge Transefer Secondments at Microsoft Research Cambridge in 2014-2016.
	Marie Curie International Incoming Postdoctoral Fellowship (142K Euros) Combinatorial Knot Theory, University of Liverpool (UK), September 2005 - May 2007.
	Postdoctoral Fellowship (22K Euros) on Combinatorial Group Theory at University of Burgundy, Dijon (France), December 2003 - November 2004.

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Group in Topological Data Analysis

	PhD student Mr Graham Briggs (since October 2017) is jointly supervised with Prof Andy Cooper (director of the MIF) and Dr Edward Pyzer-Knapp (IBM). Project : Towards a Cognitive Assistant for Computational Chemistry. Investigating automatable methods to analyse the output of simulations.
	PhD student Mr Yury Elkin (since November 2017) is supervised by Dr Vitaliy Kurlin (80%) and Dr Esther Garcia-Tunon, funded by the school of EEE&CS at Liverpool. Project : Topological analysis of colloids.
	PhD student Mr Fraser Holloway (since October 2017) is supervised by Dr Laura Harkness-Brennan and Dr Vitaliy Kurlin (50%), funded by the Big Data Science Centre for Doctoral Training in Physics at Liverpool. Project : Topological Data Analysis methods for AGATA (a gamma-ray detector).
	PhD student Mr Grzegorz Muszynski (since April 2017) is supervised by Dr Vitaliy Kurlin (80%) and the Senior Staff Scientist Michael Wehner (Berkeley lab, US), funded by the Intel Parallel Computing Center. Project : Topological Analysis of the Climate System.
	PhD student Mr Krasen Samardzhiev (since October 2017) is supervised by Dr Daniel Arribas-Bel, Dr Vitaliy Kurlin (40%) and Prof Alex Singleton, funded by the Data Analytics and Society CDT at Liverpool. Project : A Topological Data Analysis of Big Spatio-Temporal Urban Data.
	PhD student Mr Philip Smith (since October 2017) is supervised by Dr Vitaliy Kurlin (80%) and Dr Igor Potapov, funded by the Leverhulme Centre at the Materials Innovation Factory in Liverpool. Project : New Computational Methods for a Faster Materials Discovery.

In December 2017 - February 2018 the visiting intern students were Naohiko Ban, Asim Munshi, Eris Tricker.

From left to right: Naohiko Ban, Asim Munshi, Eris Tricker, Krasen Samardzhiev, VK, Grzegorz Muszynski, Phil Smith.

The group offers the opportunity to give informal talks at the regular TDA seminar.

You could also explore the former students and postdocs of the TDA group.

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Join the group in Topological Data Analysis

• • If you know C++ or Python, and wish to join as an intern, PhD or postdoc, e-mail vitaliy(dot)kurlin(at)gmail(dot)com. Here is an overview of available positions with links to more details below.
  • 5-year postdoc in Computational Geometry and Topology for Materials Science, deadline 14 May 2018
  • 3-year PhD, New methods of Geometry and Topology for solving Computer Vision problems, deadline 1 May 2018
  • 3-year PhD, Discovering hidden patterns in high-dimensional data for materials science, deadline 1 May 2018
  • 3-year PhD, Analysis of energy landscapes of molecular crystal structures, deadline 1 May 2018
  • 3.5-year PhD, Data Driven Discovery of Functional Molecular Co-crystals, deadline 31 July 2018
  • The note for non-EU candidates: unfortunately all available PhD positions are funded up to £20K per year covering tuition fees only for EU/UK students (£4260 per year) and a bursary (minimum £14777 per year, in practice 20000-4260=15740), which is tax free. However the tuition fees for international students are much higher (almost £20K per year). If you have external funds for your living expenses in Liverpool (much cheaper than in London), e-mail me, also see the scholarships.
  • For students from a country, where a non-English language is spoken, the typical English language requirement is IELTS (6.5 overall, min 6 in each component). However, you need to pass the test only before starting a PhD, not necessarily before applying, because you could get an offer conditional on IELTS.
• 14 May 2018 deadline : 5-year postdoc in Computational Geometry and Topology for Materials Science.
  Salary: with annual increments starting from £32958 per year (up to £37075). Start date : September 2018.
  Description. You will work on research to be carried out as part of the new Centre for Topological Data Analysis funded by the EPSRC grant Application-driven Topological Data Analysis (EP/R018472/1, jointly with the Universities of Oxford and Swansea). The research will take place under the direction of Dr Vitaliy Kurlin within the Department of Computer Science and the Materials Innovation Factory at the University of Liverpool. The other co-Investigators at Liverpool are Prof Andy Cooper, Paul Spirakis and Igor Potapov. The project will involve significant collaboration across a range of universities (for example, Oxford and Swansea), disciplines (Computational Geometry, Materials Chemistry) and industrial partners (Unilever, CCDC, STFC). The research will involve developing, extending and applying tools related to Topological Data Analysis. Though the expected background of an ideal candidate is Computer Science or Mathematics or Statistics, your communication skills and ability to learn quickly will be important for our collaboration with chemists.
  How to apply : e-mail me as soon as possible to discuss details.
• 1 May 2018 deadline: PhD studentship for UK/EU students funded for 3 years from October 2018 by the EEECS school.
  Project : New methods of Geometry and Topology for solving Computer Vision problems in Materials Science.
  Description. This project will help the multi-billion company Unilever to design better washing products for people and homes. A typical colloidal product is a mixture of two or more substances whose concentrations determine physical properties and customers’ perceptions. It is slow to physically test many combinations one by one, hence a fast analysis of outputs from computer simulations is needed. One potential direction of this PhD is to link geometric configurations of colloidal particles with physical properties, e.g. by using machine learning. The first example is the microbial growth, i.e. tracking how colonies of bacterias grow and merge. The second example is predicting stability of products faster than simply waiting for months. Another possible direction is to quantify clusters or more complicated structures of active components on fabric in microscopic images. Environment. The student will be based in the Department of Computer Science or the new £68M research institute MIF (Materials Innovation Factory) within the University of Liverpool, UK. The project can be considered as a part of the new Centre for Topological Data Analysis (joint with the Universities of Oxford and Swansea) funded by the recent £2.8M EPSRC grant Application-driven Topological Data Analysis.
  Requirements. Applications are welcomed from students with a 2:1 or higher (60% grade point average) masters or BSc degree or equivalent in Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science or Computational Chemistry. The essential requirements are programming experience (preferably C/C++, or Python, Java, Matlab, R) and excellent communication skills to work in a large team. The project will involve a close collaboration with colleagues from different areas and industry partners, e.g. Unilever, IBM Research UK (Hartree centre in the Daresbury lab), STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council). Supervisor : Dr Vitaliy Kurlin. How to apply : e-mail me as soon as possible to discuss details.
• 1 May 2018 deadline: PhD studentship for UK/EU students funded for 3 years from October 2018 by the EEECS school.
  Project : Discovering hidden patterns in high-dimensional data for materials science.
  Supervisors : Dr Vitaliy Kurlin and Prof Andy Cooper.
  Description. Chemists are dreaming about discovering nanoporous materials with desired properties. Past methods seem a slow search for a needle in a haystack, because the space of hypothetical materials is huge. The Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) has more than 900K existing crystals. To visualise the CSD shape, we will identify clusters of similar crystals and explore higher level patterns, e.g. circular chains of clusters or longer branches leading to exotic materials. The student will design and implement an interactive tool with a slider interface to vary similarity thresholds and find hidden patterns, which will guide a further more efficient search. Environment. The student will be based in the new £68M research institute MIF (Materials Innovation Factory) within the University of Liverpool, UK. The project can be considered as a part of the new Centre for Topological Data Analysis (joint with the Universities of Oxford and Swansea) funded by the recent £2.8M EPSRC grant Application-driven Topological Data Analysis.
  Requirements. Applications are welcomed from students with a 2:1 or higher (60% grade point average) masters or BSc degree or equivalent in Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science or Computational Chemistry. The essential requirements are programming experiences (preferably C/C++, or Python, Java, Matlab, R) and excellent communication skills to work in a large team. The project will involve a close collaboration with colleagues from different areas and industry partners, e.g. Unilever, IBM Research UK (Hartree centre in the Daresbury lab), STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council). How to apply : e-mail me as soon as possible to discuss details.
• 1 May 2018 deadline: PhD studentship for UK/EU students funded for 3 years from October 2018 by the Leverhulme Research Centre for Functional Materials Design.
  Project : Analysis of energy landscapes of molecular crystal structures employing combinatorial and topological methodologies. Supervisors : Dr Yannis Goulermas, Dr Vitaliy Kurlin and Prof Graeme Day.
  Description. This is an opportunity for an exciting cross-disciplinary project at the interface between computer science, mathematics and materials chemistry. The work will involve the development of novel combinatorial and topological modelling and optimisation concepts for applications in chemistry. The models will be used to study crystal structure energy landscapes whose understanding requires an efficient search by combinatorial optimisation algorithms; the results of these calculations are used to guide the discovery of new, functional materials. These models will also be generically applicable to problems, such as modelling data knowledge and large-scale data visualisation, object ordering and graph matching. The supervisory team has a strong track record in the defining ingredients of the underlying work and will closely contribute to the research. Publications in top-tier theoretical and application-oriented venues will be expected.
  Requirements: The candidate should have at least a 2.1 BSc in Computer Science, Mathematics or related discipline, be proficient with linear algebra and calculus, knowledgeable in discrete and continuous optimisation methods, and also competent in scientific computer programming (Matlab, R, Python, or C++). How to apply : e-mail me to discuss.
• 31 July 2018 deadline: PhD studentship for UK/EU students funded for 3.5 years by the Leverhulme Research Centre for Functional Materials Design and the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre.
  Project : Data Driven Discovery of Functional Molecular Co-crystals.
  Supervisors : Dr Matthew Dyer, Dr Vitaliy Kurlin and Prof Matt Rosseinsky.
  Description. We propose to use the information stored within the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) to identify the best molecular candidates to form co-crystals with fullerides and polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Although few co-crystals involving fullerides and PAHs have been reported, there are many more co-crystals in the database which contain information about which pairs of molecules do form co-crystals together. The first step is to design a geometric code that is invariant under all rigid motions in and uniquely represents any periodic co-crystal structure. The second step is to define a similarity measure between resulting codes. The third step is to apply Topological Data Analysis for build a topological map of all existing co-crystals from the CSD. The fourth step is to use Machine Learning on a smaller subset of known co-crystals with good properties in this map as a guide for searching new co-crystals with better properties. As well as crystal structures, the CSD will also provide molecular identifiers of the molecules in co-crystals (e.g. InChI, SMILES). These will be used to compute descriptors and measures of molecular similarity commonly used in pharmaceutical research, which in turn become features in machine learning and data science algorithms.
  Requirements: Applications are welcomed from students with a 2:1 or higher masters degree or equivalent in Maths, Computer Science or Chemistry, particularly those with the skills relevant to the project outlined above. How to apply : e-mail me to discuss details of your application, because we can make an offer much earlier than July 2018.
• We may support your application for a PhD studentship or a postdoctoral fellowship listed below.
  • PhD scholarships at the University of Liverpool (different deadlines depending on your country and case).
  • Commonwealth PhD Scholarships (for low and middle income countries, deadlines in February/March).
  • AXA postdoctoral fellowships (deadlines in early April/October).
  • Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowships (deadlines in February-March).
  • EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellowships (no deadline, best submitted in January or July).
  • Royal Society Newton International Fellowships (deadlines in February-March, extra fellowships for candidates from Israel, China, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey).
• Newton Bhabha PhD Placements Programme for Indian PhD students (deadlines in August). Eligibility : strong C++ skills. Time of internship : 3 months at the University of Liverpool.
• For summer internships, e.g. for top students from India or China, we can host you for 10-12 weeks if you have funds from your university (about 2K GBP for accommodation plus visa and travel costs).

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Career highlights : achievements since 2005

• Mentoring : Dr Alexey Chernov (postdoc in 2011-2012) is a Senior Lecturer in Statistics at Brighton University, UK.
  Dr Marjan Safi-Samghabadi (PhD student in 2009-2013) is a lecturer at International Imam Khomeini University, Iran.
• Major collaboration with Prabhat leading the Big Data Centre funded by Intel at the Berkeley lab, US.
• Most prestigious grant : Marie Curie International Incoming Postdoctoral Fellowship (2005 - 2007).
• Keynote applied talk : Topological Computer Vision at Prospects in Data Science (January 2016).
• Best applied paper introducing the skeleton HoPeS in Computer Graphics Forum (August 2015).
• Best conference paper : V. Kurlin, Proceedings of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2014), a top 3 conference in entire Computer Science and the highest h-index conference in any field.
• Teaching award : one of 3 final nominees in the Science Faculty for a Lecturer of the Year award (2013).
• Best pure maths talk : 20-min oral at International Congress of Mathematicians 2006, Madrid.
• Best pure maths paper : V. Kurlin, Compressed Drinfeld associators, Journal of Algebra (2005).
• Best public talk : What can Deep Learning do with Big Data? at the Pint of Science festival in Liverpool on 17 May 2017.
• Largest admin success : as the MSc course director in 2011-2013, I doubled the enrolment by asking candidates to solve maths problems as an entrance exam, which brought extra 100K+ GBP to university.

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Education : PhD (2003), MSc×2 and PGCert

• PGCert : Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (2008 - 2009) and full membership of the Higher Education Academy, UK.
• PhD in Geometry and Topology, Moscow State University (Russia), November 2000 - October 2003
  Thesis : Basic embeddings of graphs and 3-page embeddings of graphs.
  Supervisors : Prof Victor Buchstaber and Prof Arkady Skopenkov.
• MSc in Mathematics, Independent University of Moscow (Russia), 1995 - 2002 (part-time)
  Thesis : Turaev-Viro invariants of compact 3-dimensional manifolds.
• MSc in Mathematics (grade point average 5.0/5), Moscow State University (Russia), September 1995 - June 2000
  Thesis : 3-page diagrams of spatial 3-valent graphs.
• Gold medal (top grades 5/5 in all subjects), Physical-Mathematical School N146, Perm (Russia), June 1995.
• Top grades in mathematics and physics in the 2-year distance course by Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (September 1993 - May 1995) whose famous graduates include recent Nobel laureates A. Geim and K. Novoselov.

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Experience : CV and job history since 2000

• Vitaliy Kurlin's curriculum vitae (pdf, 4 pages, 345K, last updated in September 2016)
• Current research : Topological Data Analysis for Materials Science, Computer Vision, Climate
• Past research : geometric topology, graph theory, singularity theory, non-commutative algebra
• Programming skills : C/C++ (industry level), Java, PHP, HTML5, CSS3, Matlab, Python, Javascript
• Since 2016 : senior lecturer (associate professor), Computer Science and Materials Innovation Factory, Liverpool
• 2014 - 2016 : visiting scientist in the Computer Vision group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK
• 2007 - 2013 : university lecturer (assistant professor) in Mathematics, United Kingdom
• June - September 2007 : research postdoc in Sensor Networks, University of Lancaster, UK
• September 2005 - May 2007 : research postdoc in Knot Theory, University of Liverpool, UK
• February - May 2005 : teaching postdoc in Knot Theory, Independent University of Moscow, Russia
• December 2003 - November 2004 : research postdoc in Combinatorial Group Theory, University of Burgundy, France
• November 2000 - October 2003 : PhD student in Geometry and Topology at Moscow State University, Russia
• October 2000 - June 2001 : C++ programmer in traffic recognition, TochMash Module, Moscow, Russia.

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