Prof Vitaliy Kurlin: mathematics & computer science

News archive :
2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013

News stories in 2024 (in the reverse chronological order)

• October 2024 : warm congratulations to Dan Widdowson and Muizdeen Raji on successfully passing their PhD vivas.
• October 2024 : gave the talk The Crystal Isometry Principle at the mathematics seminar at Lancaster University, UK.
• May - September 2024 : serving as an area chair for the double blind review at the top CS conference NeurIPS 2024.
• September 2024 : gave the talk "Generic families of metric spaces with trivial 1D persistence" at ComPer, Graz, Austria.
• September 2024 : our group organised the 5th MACSMIN meeting on 9-13 September in the MIF, Liverpool, UK.
• August 2024 : warm congratulations to Olga on the 2nd prize for a public talk "The rise of AI after the fall of AI" in the Science Slam contest at ECM 2024, inspired by Vitaliy's Science Slam talk The rise and fall of deep learning in 2019.
• August 2024 : the European Crystallographic Meeting included 4 presentations from our group on the following topics.
  • "Ultra-fast detection of (near-)duplicate structures across major crystal databases" by Daniel Widdowson in MS22.
  • "Applications of generically complete isometry invariants on material property prediction" by Vitaliy Kurlin in MS33.
  • "Richard Feynman’s visual hint gave birth to a new area of continuous crystallography" by Olga Anosova in MS38.
  • "The Crystal Isometry Principle has made transparent the black boxes of structural databases" by Vitaliy Kurlin in MS39.
• August 2024 : invited to speak at the ICERM program workshop Geometry of Materials in April 2025.
• July 2024 : the European Congress of Mathematics included the mini-symposium MS-54 Geometric Data Science
  • "Topological features of data" by Pawel Dlotko (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
  • "Persistent Homology for Ellipsoid Complexes" by Sara Kalisnik Hintz (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
  • "Geographic-style maps for moduli spaces of clouds of unordered points" by Vitaliy Kurlin (MIF, Liverpool, UK)
  • "Continuous and generically complete isometry invariants of periodic crystals" by Daniel Widdowson (MIF, Liverpool, UK)
  • Speakers on Monday 15th July 2024 from left to right: Pawel Dlotko, Daniel Widdowson, Sara Kalisnik Hintz, Vitally Kurlin.
    
• June 2024 : the Royal Society awarded £12K for the project "Generative methods for materials design on geographic-style maps of crystals" between our DSTA group and Prof Yoshua Bengio (Mila institute, Montreal, Canada), the highest cited Computer Scientist and the winner of the 2018 Alan Turing award, the Computer Science equivalent of Nobel's prize.
• June 2024 : gave the talk "Can we geometrically sense the shape of a molecule?" at Biomolecular Topology, Singapore.
• June 2024 : hosted the talk Topological Analysis for the Exascale by Prof Hamish Carr (Leeds) at the CS seminar.
• June 2024 : warm congratulations to Daniel Widdowson as the first author of the paper Continuous invariant-based maps of the Cambridge Structural Database, accepted in the journal Crystal Growth & Design.
• May 2024 : organised the 4-hour mini-symposium "Computational Geometry and Graph Theory for Crystalline Materials" at the SIAM conference Mathematical Aspects of Materials Science in Pittsburgh (US): part 1 and part 2. Speakers from left to right: Vitaliy Kurlin, Nicholas Kotov, Mark Tuckerman, Simon Billinge, Jonathan Balasingham, Gregory McColm.
  
• May 2024 : warm congratulations to Olga as the first author of the paper The importance of definitions in crystallography, accepted in the IUCrJ (the International Union of Crystallography Journal).
• May 2024 : many thanks to the Head of Maths Prof Daniel Colquitt for organising a 1-day workshop with our DSTA group.
• April 2024 : warm congratulations to Dr Phil Smith as the first author of the paper Generic families of finite metric spaces with identical or trivial 1-dimensional persistence, accepted in the Journal of Applied and Computational Topology.
• April 2024 : presented the Crystal Isometry Principle at the Computer Science Colloquium in the University of Leeds.
• April 2024 : warm congratulations to PhD student Jonathan Balasingham as the first author of the paper Accelerating Material Property Prediction using Generically Complete Isometry Invariants, accepted in the journal Scientific Reports.
• March 2024 : PhD student Daniel Widdowson gave the talk "Ultra-fast detection of (near-)duplicate structures across major crystal databases" at the annual meeting of the British Crystallographic Association on 26-28 March in Leeds, UK.
• March 2024 : congratulations to Dr Katerina Vriza, who became a permanent scientist at the Argonne National Lab (US).
• March 2024 : the EPSRC announced the CDT in Digital and Automated Materials Chemistry including me as a co-I.
• March 2024 : warm congratulations to Phil Smith as the first author of the paper A data-driven analysis of HDPE post-consumer recyclate for sustainable bottle packaging, accepted in the journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling.
• March 2024: invited to give a talk at Biomolecular Topology: Modelling and Data Analysis in June, Singapore.
• March 2024 : tutorials and seminars in Chile and the US
  • A complete and continuous isometry invariant of Euclidean clouds of points at the University of Chicago colloquium.
  • A mathematical analysis of GNoME and other materials databases at the Materials Informatics workshop in IMSI.
  • The Crystal Isometry Principle at the Center for Nanoscale Materials seminar in the Argonne national laboratory.
  • 1.5-hour tutorial Geometric Data Science at the Foundational Aspects of Neuro-Symbolic Computing in Santiago.
• February 2024 : warm congratulations to PhD student Jonathan Balasingham as the first author of the paper Material Property Prediction using Graphs based on Generically Complete Isometry Invariants, accepted in the journal IMMI.
• February 2024 : the EPSRC announced the £12M hun AI for chemistry (with Imperial College) including me as a co-I.
• January 2024 : gave the following seminars in the United States and Canada.
  • Unique representations of atomic clouds under rigid motion, organized by David Prendergast, Molecular Foundry, US.
  • Crystal Isometry Principle, organized by Ram Seshadri, Materials Research Lab, University of California, Santa Barbara.
  • A complete and continuous isometry invariant of Euclidean clouds, hosted by Paul Atzberger, math seminar, UCSB, US.
  • Geographic-style maps for a continuous universe of periodic crystals, organized by Yoshua Bengio's group, Mila, Canada.
  • Persistence vs easier, faster, and stronger invariants, organized by Iosif Polterovich, University of Montreal, Canada.
• January 2024 : gave several talks at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco, US.
  • Continuous metrics on moduli spaces of lattices
    (AMS Contributed Paper Session on Geometry, January 4, 10.30-10.45 am)
  • The Crystal Isometry Principle
    (SIAM-USNCTAM Minisymposium on Mathematical Modeling of Complex Materials Systems, January 4, 11-11.30 am)
  • A complete and continuous isometry invariant of Euclidean clouds of unordered points
    (AMS Special Session on Mathematics of Computer Vision, January 4, 4.30-5 pm)
  • Continuous maps of the high-dimensional universe of protein structures
    (AMS Special Session on Geometry and Topology of High-Dimensional Biomedical Data, January 5, 8.30-8.55 am)
  • Geometric Data Science: old challenges and new solutions
    (AMS Special Session on Applied Topology: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications, January 5, 10-10.30 am)
• January 2024 : European Congress of Mathematicians 2024 approved the mini-symposium in Geometric Data Science.

News stories in 2023 (in the reverse chronological order)

• December 2023 : the colleagues who were still available in person in the last week before Christmas 2023 celebrated Matt's successful PhD viva in the MIF. From left to right: Matt Bright, Olga Anosova, Ziqiu Jiang, Will Jeffcott, Vitaliy.
  
• December 2023 : warm congratulations to Dan Widdowson, whose was funded by about £10K in the EEECS school to work on the impact case study with the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre in April - June 2024.
• December 2023 : warm congratulations to Dr Matt Bright, who earned a second PhD with minor corrections for the thesis "Continuous spaces of low-dimensional lattices". Many thanks to the examiners Marjorie Senechal and Greg McColm.
• October 2023 : warm congratulations to PhD student Dan Widdowson, who co-authored the paper Inorganic synthesis-structure maps in zeolites with machine learning and crystallographic distances, accepted in the journal Digital Discovery.
• October 2023 : the London Mathematical Society has continued funding our network Applied Geometry and Topology covering 3 meetings at the Universities of Liverpool, Queen Mary London, Southampton until September 2024.
• October 2023 : the seminar talk "The Crystal Isometry Principle" at the University of Leicester, UK.
• September 2023 : our group organised the 20th meeting of the LMS-funded network Applied Geometry and Topology.
• September 2023 : single-authored paper Polynomial-time algorithms for continuous metrics on atomic clouds of unordered points was accepted in the journal MATCH Communications in Mathematical and in Computer Chemistry.
• August 2023 : the Royal Society awarded the APEX fellowship replacing the teaching for 2 years to focus on the project "New geometric methods for mapping the space of periodic crystals".
• August 2023 : our group presented recent work on 8 topics at the IUCr 2023 congress in Melbourne (Australia):
  • A continuous map of the Cambridge Structural Database in meaningful coordinates, Vitaliy's invited talk in A023
  • Resolving the data ambiguity for periodic crystals and detecting (near-)duplicate structures, Dan's invited talk in A065
  • Continuous maps of molecules and atomic clouds in large databases, Dan Widdowson's contributed talk in A023
  • Continuous maps and real-valued G-chiral distances for 2D Lattices in large crystal datasets, Matt's invited talk in A065
  • A continuous map of 2.6+ million 2D lattices from the Cambridge Structural Database, Matt's contributed talk in A023
  • The Crystal Isometry Principle justifies a new data standard for all periodic crystals, Vitaliy's contributed talk in A104
  • Potential materials genome for mapping the continuous space of all periodic crystals, Vitaliy's poster presentation in A102
  • Continuous metrics can improve the PDB validation and protein folding prediction, Alexey Gorelov's poster in A014
• August 2023 : congratulations to Dr Thomas for passing his viva with the PhD thesis on programme synthesis!
• July 2023 : presented the paper A new near-linear time algorithm for k-nearest neighbor search using a compressed cover tree (joint with Yury Elkin) at ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning) in Honolulu, Hawaii (US).
• June 2023 : gave a talk on Geometric Data Science at the seminar of Prof Guowei Wei at Michigan State University during the visit to Prof Nick Kotov at the University of Michigan (US), funded by the Royal Society International Exchanges.
• June 2023 : gave a 1-hour keynote on complete and continuous invariants of Euclidean clouds of unlabeled points at TAG-PRA: Topology, Algebra, and Geometry in Pattern Recognition, and presented the underlying paper at CVPR, Vancouver.
• June 2023 : congratulations to Dr Krasen for passing his PhD viva in Geographic Data Science with minor corrections!
• May 2023 : warm congratulations to Matt Bright as the first author of the paper Continuous G-chiral distances for 2D lattices accepted in the journal Chirality.
• May 2023 : warm congratulations to Olga Anosova as the first author of the paper Density functions of periodic sequences of continuous events accepted in the Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision.
• May 2023 : our group organised the 4th MACSMIN: Mathematics and Computer Science for Materials Innovation.
• May 2023 : examined the PhD "Persistence-Based Summaries for Data Analysis with Applications to Cyber Security" of Thomas Davies, who passed his viva with minor corrections at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom.
• May 2023 : warm congratulations to Milo Torda on winning a 3-year postdoctoral position in Andy Cooper's group, MIF.
• April 2023 : gave the talk "Geometric Data Science: old challenges and new solutions" at the SQUIDS seminar "Statistics, inverse problems, uncertainty quantification and data science" at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom.
• April 2023 : warm congratulations to Yury Elkin as the first author of the paper A new near-linear time algorithm for k-nearest neighbor search using a compressed cover tree accepted at the International Conference on Machine Learning.
• April 2023 : visited IHES by invitation of Misha Gromov and Robert Penner to talk about a continuous map of proteins.
• April 2023 : congratulations to Dr Cameron for passing his PhD viva in Materials Science with minor corrections!
• April 2023 : gave the talk "The Crystal Isometry Space continuously extends Mendeleev’s table to all periodic materials" based on the NeurIPS 2022 paper at the annual meeting of the British Crystallographic Association in Sheffield (UK).
• March 2023 : the Royal Society awarded the £12K grant "Geometric invariants for interactions of proteins with inorganic nanoparticles" for bilateral visits between Nick Kotov's materials lab (University of Michigan, US) and our DSTA group.
• March 2023 : our group hosted the visit of Prof Nick Kotov, who gave the great in-person talk at our annual conference MACSMIN 2022 and was described by colleagues as "one of the most original and interesting chemists, an internationally leading figure in nanomaterials research with a huge scientific trajectory covering very diverse areas of applications".
• March 2023 : invited to participate in the long programme Data-Driven Materials Informatics at the IMSI, Chicago, US.
• March 2023 : Dan Widdowson, Viktor Zamaraev, Matt Bright, Vitaliy, Olga Anosova, Will Jeffcott, Jonathan Balasingham
  
• February 2023 : warm congratulations to Dan Widdowson, who co-authored Recognizing Rigid Patterns of Unlabeled Point Clouds by Complete and Continuous Isometry Invariants with no False Negatives and no False Positives accepted at CVPR.
• February 2023 : warm congratulations to Alessandro Gerada, who co-authored ChatGPT and antimicrobial advice: the end of the consulting infection doctor? published in Lancet Infectious Diseases and highlighted in the university news.
• February 2023 : warm congratulations to Dan Widdowson, who was awarded the IUCr bursary ($1400 AUD) to give an invited talk "Resolving the data ambiguity for periodic crystals and detecting (near-)duplicate structures" (based on our paper at NeurIPS 2022) in the microsymposium "Comparing Crystal Structures and Data" at the IUCr 2023 congress.
• January 2023 : warm congratulations to Milo Torda as the first author of the paper Entropic trust region for densest crystallographic symmetry group packings accepted for publication in SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing.
• January 2023 : gave the 1-hour talk "Geometric Data Science for unlabeled point clouds modulo Euclidean isometry" at the LMS workshop Applied topology and Robot Motion Planning, Queen Mary University of London, UK
• January 2023 : gave the 1-hour talk "The Crystal Isometry Principle justifies continuous maps of the Cambridge Structural Database" at the journal club of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (UK): summary (pdf).
• January 2023 : warm congratulations to Dr Milo Torda on his successful PhD viva based on the papers in PRE and SISC.
• January 2023 : gave the talk "Mapping the spaces of crystalline materials and proteins" at AstraZeneca's journal club.
• January 2023 : gave the talk Geometric Data Science: old challenges and new solutions in the session `Topology, Algebra, and Geometry in the Mathematics of Data Science' at Joint Mathematics Meetings 2023, Boston (US): summary (pdf), which was followed by long and fruitful discussions with Steven Gortler (Harvard), Justin Solomon (MIT), Tim Havel (MIT), Lorin Crawford (Microsoft), Egon Schulte (Northeastern University, Boston) and Mike Lesnick (University at Albany).

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News stories in 2022 (in the reverse chronological order)

• December 2022 : warm congratulations to Dr Yury Elkin, who started the postdoc in the EPSRC New Horizons grant.
• December 2022 : gave the 1-hour talks "Geometric Data Science: old challenges and new solutions" at the AIM (Applied Interdisciplinary Mathematics) seminar in the Mathematics Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (US) and at the Simons Center for Computational Physical Chemistry followed by seven 1-1 meetings in the New York University.
• November 2022 : presented the paper Resolving the data ambiguity for periodic crystals in New Orleans (US) at NeurIPS : Neural Information Processing Systems, a top conference in the entire subject of Computer Science: NeurIPS paper link.
• November 2022 : warm congratulations to Cameron as the first author of A Database of Experimentally Measured Lithium Solid Electrolyte Conductivities Evaluated with Machine Learning accepted in the journal npj Computational Materials.
• November 2022 : gave the talk "Geometric Data Science" at the Statistics and Data Science seminar in QMUL, UK.
• October 2022 : Olga presented the paper Density functions of periodic sequences at DGMM 2022, Strasbourg (France).
• October 2022 : the paper Mathematics of 2-dimensional lattices has been accepted by Foundations Comp. Mathematics.
• October 2022 : gave a talk based on our paper with Yury Elkin about Compressed Cover Trees at TopoInVis 2022.
• October 2022 : warm congratulations to Milo Torda as the first author of the paper Densest plane group packings of regular polygons accepted in Physical Review E.
• October 2022 : the London Mathematical Society has continued funding our network renamed as Applied Geometry and Topology covering 3 meetings at the Universities of Liverpool, Queen Mary London, Southampton until September 2023.
• October 2022 : warm congratulations to Matt Bright as the first author of Geographic-style maps for 2D lattices accepted in Acta Crystallographica Section A.
• October 2022 : gave the 20-min talk "Geometric Data Science challenges and solutions" at the Fall Workshop in Computational Geometry organised by Don Sheehy at North Carolina State University (US) : summary (pdf).
• October 2022 : gave the talk "A potential materials genome for periodic crystals" hosted by Prof Yaroslava Yingling in the department of Materials Science and Engineering at the North Carolina State University, Raleigh (US) : summary (pdf).
• October 2022 : the Computer Science department awarded £1000 to host the visit of Prof Nicholas Kotov in May 2023.
• October 2022 : gave the 20-min talk based on our paper with Phil about higher degree Voronoi domains at ISVC 2022.
• September 2022 : warm congratulations to Dr Katerina Vriza as the first author of the paper Molecular Set Transformer: Attending to the co-crystals in the Cambridge Structural Database accepted in the Digital Discovery journal.
• September 2022 : gave the 10-min online talk "Generic families of finite sets with identical 1-dimensional persistence" at the hybrid workshop on Topological Data Analysis and Machine Learning organised at Heidelberg (Germany) : summary.
• September 2022 : presented the Crystal Isometry Principle at the CCDC workshop, Cambridge (UK) : summary.
• September 2022 : EPSRC announced New Horizons projects including our grant "Inverse design of periodic crystals" (£250K, 2022-2024) with co-I MIF director Prof Andy Cooper FRS, which was also highlighted in the university news.
• September 2022 : warm congratulations to Dan on the paper Resolving the data ambiguity for periodic crystals accepted at NeurIPS 2022 : Neural Information Processing Systems, a top conference in the entire subject of Computer Science.
• September 2022 : our group presented the Crystal Isometry Principle at the LRC symposium, Liverpool (UK) : summary.
• September 2022 : warm congratulations on the successful PhD viva to Dr Yury Elkin whose TopoInVis paper exposed important gaps in the past attempts to prove a near-linear time complexity for nearest neighbours in metric spaces.
• September 2022 : we organised the 3rd conference MACSMIN as a satellite of the European Crystallographic Meeting.
• August 2022 : many thanks to Daniel Widdowson for his great presentation about the Crystal Isometry Principle at ECM33 (European Crystallographic Meeting) in Versailles, France. Here are the other papers presented by our group members :
  • Mapping the Space of Two-Dimensional Lattices (led by Matt)
  • Algorithms for automated detection of (near-)duplicate periodic crystals (led by Olga)
  • The Pointwise Distance Distribution is stronger than the Pair Distribution Function (led by Dan)
• August 2022 : warm congratulations to Phil as the first author of the paper A practical algorithm for degree-k Voronoi domains of three-dimensional periodic point sets accepted at ISVC 2022 : International Symposium on Visual Computing.
• August 2022 : congratulations to Grzegorz on the paper Topological Methods for Pattern Detection in Climate Data accepted as a chapter in the book Big Data Analytics in Earth, Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences, to be published by Wiley.
• August 2022 : served as an external examiner in the department of Computer Science at Oxford University, UK. Warm congratulaions to Dr Dan Shiebler on his PhD "Compositionality and Functorial Invariants in Machine Learning".
• August 2022 : congratulations to Yury on the paper Counterexamples expose gaps in the proof of time complexity for cover trees introduced in 2006 accepted at TopoInVis 2022 : Workshop on Topological Data Analysis and Visualization.
• August 2022 : presented the Crystal Isometry Principle at the GRC conference, Sunday River (Maine, US) : summary.
• July 2022 : warm congratulations on the successful PhD viva to Dr Marco Mosca whose CRaT paper was the first publication (January 2020) in the new area of Periodic Geometry, now extended to the wider Geometric Data Science.
• July 2022 : gave the 25-min talk on easily computable chiral distances of 2D lattices at Chirality in Chicago : summary.
• July 2022 : gave the 50-min talk on Geometric Data Science at Applied Topology in Frontier Sciences (online) : summary.
• July 2022 : gave the 15-min talk Geometric Data Science at the ICM geometry and topology section : summary.
• July 2022 : gave the 45-min talk Geometric Data Science challenges and solutions at Applied Topology : summary.
• June 2022 : presented the latest research "Persistence vs easier, faster, and stronger invariants" at ATMCS : summary.
• June 2022 : invited to the Dagstuhl Seminar Topological Data Analysis and Applications on 7-12 May 2023, Germany.
• June 2022 : congratulations to Olga as a co-author of Density functions of periodic sequences accepted at DGMM 2022.
• June 2022 : invited to present "Practical classifications of periodic structures require thinking outside the cell" at Tangling.
• June 2022 : gave the 30-min invited talk at the Computational Topology workshop in the CGWeek in Berlin : summary.
• May 2022: invited to the programme committee of TopoInVis: Workshop on Topological Data Analysis and Visualization.
• May 2022 : congratulations to Dan as a key contributor to the paper "Analogy Powered by Prediction and Structural Invariants: Computationally-Led Discovery of a Mesoporous Hydrogen-Bonded Organic Cage Crystal" published in JACS.
• May 2022 : congratulations to Dan on winning the travel bursary to give an oral presentation on the Crystal Isometry Principle (first mentioned in MATCH) at the European Crystallographic Meeting on 23-27 August in Versailles, France.
• May 2022 : the IUCr 2023 approved the micro-symposium on crystal comparisons co-chaired with Marjorie Senechal.
• April 2022 : presented the Crystal Isometry Principle at the LIV.DAT seminar in the Physics department at Liverpool, UK.
• April 2022 : congratulations to PhD student Will Jeffcott on completing the 179km cycling Tour of Flanders in Belgium!
• April 2022 : presented the Crystal Isometry Principle at the British Crystallographic Association conference: summary.
• April 2022 : warm congratulations to Dr Katerina Vriza on the PhD viva and starting her postdoctoral position in Leeds!
• March 2022 : presented the Crystal Isometry Principle at the Applied Mathematics Colloquium in the Open University, UK.
• March 2022 : presented the Crystal Isometry Principle at the annual conference of the AI3SD network, Southampton, UK.
• February 2022 : Phil presented our recent preprint "Families of point sets with identical 1D persistence" at the TDA centre meeting in Oxford University. The latest pdf extends early results in arxiv:2202.00577 to arbitrary simplicial complexes.
• January 2022 : gave the invited talk at the group seminar of Prof Gabor Csanyi at Cambridge University, UK.
• January 2022 : the ECM33 organizers approved the satellite "Mathematics and Computer Science for Materials Innovation: Crystal-Lattice Classifications" co-organized with Prof Mois Aroyo on 5-9 September 2022, continuing the past MACSMIN.

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News stories in 2021 (in the reverse chronological order)

• Christmas group dinner (left to right): Caroline, Jonathan, Danny, Katerina, Phil, Olga, Vitaliy, Will, Matt.
  
• December 2021 : warm congratulations to Dr Fraser Holloway on the successful PhD viva right before Christmas 2021!
• December 2021 : co-chaired the annual workshop AI for Future Digital Health at the International Conference on AI 2021.
• December 2021 : served as an external examiner for the PhD thesis "Characterising the Geometry of Image Space of Nanostructures for Inferential Analysis of Dewetting Processes and Computational Models" by Steff Farley, Loughborough.
• December 2021 : congratulations to our former PhD student Marco on a permanent job at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
• November 2021 : gave the 1-hour talk "Mathematical Data Science for solid crystals" at the LSE Data Science seminar.
• October 2021 : the London Mathematical Society has extended their funding for our network Applied Algebraic Topology.
• October 2021 : gave the 20-min talk on the paper Fast predictions of lattice energies by continuous isometry invariants of crystal structures at DAMDID (Data Analytics and Management in Data Intensive Domains).
• October 2021 : completed the 6-month Heilbron leadership programme with a presentation on ambassadorial leadership for the Vice-Chancellor. The programme is for future senior leaders, see the university news about the previous cohort.
• September 2021 : warm congratulations to Dr Matt Bright, who was selected for a 1-year position as a University Teacher to replace all my teaching and project supervision in the academic year 2021-2022 due to the RAEng fellowship below.
• September 2021 : the Royal Academy of Engineering Industry Fellowship at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre was announced in the university news with the support from the Executive Pro-Vice Chancellor Prof Wiebe Van Der Hoek.
  Title : Data Science for Next Generation Engineering of Solid Crystalline Materials (2021-2023, reference IF2122\186).
• September 2021 : group walk to Hilbre island, which joins the coast at low tide. The names below are from left to right.
  
  First : Phil, Danny, Vitaliy, Olga, Adam, Matt, Alessandro. Second : Adam, Matt, Vitaliy, Olga, Phil, Danny, Alessandro.
• September 2021 : we organised the annual meeting of the UK centre for Topological Data Analysis and MACSMIN 2021.
• September 2021 : warm congratulations to the PhD student Yury Elkin as the first author of the paper Isometry invariant shape recognition of projectively perturbed point clouds by the mergegram extending 0D persistence, which has substantially extended the earlier MFCS 2020 conference paper and is now published in the journal Mathematics.
• August 2021 : warm congratulations to the PhD student Matt Bright as the first author of the paper "A formula for the linking number in terms of isometry invariants of straight line segments", which extended the earlier NumGrid conference paper and is now accepted in the journal CMMP: Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Physics.
• August 2021 : gave talks at the IUCr congress. Videos : A unique and continuous code of all periodic crystals (16 min) and Introduction to invariant-based machine learning for periodic crystals (20 min).
• August 2021 : warm congratulations to the PhD student Dan Widdowson as the first author of Average Minimum Distances of periodic point sets accepted in MATCH Communications in Mathematical and in Computer Chemistry.
• August 2021 : warm congratulations to the recent BSc graduate Jakob Ropers as the first author of the 15-page paper Fast predictions of lattice energies by continuous isometry invariants of crystal structures based on his final year project and accepted in the Proceedings of DAMDID (Data Analytics and Management in Data Intensive Domains).
• July 2021 : warm congratulations to the PhD students Marco Masco, Matt Bright, Daniel Widdowsown, Jonathan McManus on passing their annual reviews.
• July 2021 : gave the invited 20-min talk "Geometric tools for designing safer crystalline drugs" at the showcase of the EPSRC-funded Liverpool Centre for Mathematics in Healthcare.
• June 2021 : group walk in Sefton park. The names below are from left to right (a nearly reversed order is accidental :-).
  
  First : Teddy, Katerina, Matt, Phil, Hannah, Olga, Vitaliy. Second : Olga, Vitaliy, Hannah, Phil, Matt, Katerina, Teddy.
• June 2021 : gave the 30-min talk Introduction to Periodic Geometry and Topology at the Geometric Topology Workshop.
• June 2021 : Alessandro Gerada was selected as a new PhD student, to be co-supervised with Prof William Hope.
• June 2021 : invited as a consultant to join the IUCr commission on Mathematical and Theoretical Crystallography.
• June 2021 : congratulations to my former PhD student Dr Philip Smith, who has passed his viva with minor corrections. Here is the praise from the PhD examiners: "We believe that the degree is well-deserved and wish all the best to Phil with his next challenges!" Phil started the postdoctoral position funded by the NERC grant led by Dr Thomas McDonald.
• May 2021 : co-organised the mini-symposium Computational Geometry, Topology and Symmetry meet Materials Science at SIAM MS 2021 featuring our group members Olga Anosova, Phil Smith, Marco Mosca, Matt Bright, Dan Widdowson.
• May 2021 : presented the paper An isometry classification of periodic point sets published in proceedings of DGMM.
• May 2021 : gave the invited talk "Introduction to Periodic Geometry and Topology" (44-min video) at the workshop Geometry and Topology behind fabrics at multiple scales (online).
• April 2021 : Jonathan Balasingham was selected as a new PhD student, to be co-supervised with Dr Viktor Zamaraev.
• April 2021 : organised with Pawel Dlotko the mini-symposium Mathematics for Materials Science at BMC/BAMC 2021.
• March 2021 : served as an external PhD examiner for Gabriele Beltramo, who has passed his viva with minor corrections.
• March 2021 : Adam Coxson was selected as a new PhD student, to be co-supervised with Prof Alessandro Troisi.
• March 2021 : started the 6-month Heilbron leadership programme aimed at staff in academic and professional services roles who aspire to senior level leadership in academic career, here is the university news about the previous cohort.
• February 2021 : congratulations to PhD student Phil Smith as a co-author of "Skeletonisation Algorithms with Theoretical Guarantees for Unorganised Point Clouds with High Levels of Noise" (arXiv:1901.03319) accepted in Pattern Recognition.
• February 2021 : congratulations to Dr Olga Anosova as the first author of "An isometry classification of periodic point sets" accepted by the Discrete Geometry and Mathematical Morphology.
• February 2021 : Danny Ritchie was selected as a new PhD student, to be co-supervised with Prof Matt Rosseinsky FRS.
• February 2021 : congratulations to PhD student Phil Smith co-authoring "The density fingerprint of a periodic point set" (with Herbert Edelsbrunner, Teresa Heiss, Mathijs Wintraecken) accepted by the Symposium on Computational Geometry.
• January 2021 : congratulations to my former PhD student Dr Grzegorz Muszynski, who has passed his viva with minor corrections. Here is the praise from co-supervisor Michael Wehner: "I really enjoyed working with Grzegorz. He is a rare talent" and external examiner Prof Gabi Hegerl FRS: "It was a pleasure, really nice thesis, good work, very knowledgeable candidate!" Grzegorz started a full time Data Science job in the AI lab of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK.

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News stories in 2020 (in the reverse chronological order)

• December 2020 : despite the ongoing pandemic, our group celebrated Christmas online, here are some individual photos. From left to right: Phil, Vitaliy, Marco, Marjan.
• December 2020 : congratulations to PhD student Katerina Vriza as the first author of the paper "One class classification as a practical approach for accelerating co-crystal discovery" published in the high profile journal Chemical Science.
• December 2020 : co-chaired the workshop AI for Future Digital Health at the 40th SGAI International Conference on AI.
• December 2020 : joined the editorial board of the journal Pattern Recognition, which has an impact factor of about 7.2.
• December 2020 : congratulations to PhD student Cameron Hargreaves as the first author of the paper "The Earth Mover’s Distance as a Metric for the Space of Inorganic Compositions" published in the high profile journal Chemistry of Materials.
• November 2020 : congratulations to PhD student Matt Bright as the first author of the paper "A proof of the invariant-based formula for the linking number and its asymptotic behaviour", which Matt presented at NumGrid (Numerical Geometry, Grid Generation, Scientific Computing), to appear in Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering.
• November 2020 : NERC awarded £965K to the project led by Dr Thomas McDonald over 2021-2023 to improve plastic packaging, which is highligted in the university news. I am responsible for a data analysis of plastic materials properties.
• October 2020 : 2nd year PhD student Thomas Welsch has successfully passed his annual review.
• September 2020 : 30-min invited talk "Introduction to Periodic Geometry" at the Second Symposium on Machine Learning and Dynamical Systems organised by the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (Toronto, Canada).
• September 2020 : the first international MACSMIN conference hosted 12 online talks with most videos now available.
• August 2020 : Yury Elkin's paper The mergegram of a dendrogram and its stability has been accepted for peer-reviewed proceedings of the conference Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science 2020, see the 24-min video and blog post.
• July 2020 : PhD students Matt Bright, Yury Elkin and Marco Mosca have given their presentations for annual reviews.
• July 2020 : congratulations to Yury on the paper A fast approximate skeleton with guarantees for any cloud of points in a Euclidean space accepted for Springer post-proceedings of TopoInVis 2019 (Topology-based methods In Visualization).
• July 2020 : congratulations to Grzegorz on starting the permanent Data Science job in the AI lab of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK.
• June 2020 : congratulations to Yury on the paper The mergegram of a dendrogram and its stability accepted by MFCS (Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science).
• June 2020 : congratulations to Grzegorz on the paper Atmospheric Blocking Pattern Recognition in Global Climate Model Simulation Data accepted by ICPR (International Conference on Pattern Recognition), postponed to 10-15 January 2021.
• June 2020 : 30-min recorded talk about image skeletonization at the SIAM mini-symposium Topological Image Analysis.
• June 2020 : new MSc students (Daniel Widdowson, Nikolaos Theofilis, Musah Shaibu, Ameneh Irankhah) and 2nd year students (Yuzhao Chen, Jiahui An, Yueling Jiang, Yuqing Yang, Chengxi Li) have joined our group for summer projects.
• May 2020 : congratulations to PhD student Matthew Bright whose paper Encoding and Topological Computation on Textile Structures has been accepted in the journal Computers & Graphics with an oral presentation at the SMI 2020.
• April 2020 : Daniel Widdowson was selected as a new PhD student on the project "A rigorous identification of all metastable polymorphs for better and safer drugs" supervised by Vitaliy Kurlin, Andy Cooper, Angeles Pulido (CCDC).
• April 2020 : Jonathan McManus was selected as a new PhD student on the project "Towards prediction of synthetically accessible organic molecular crystals" supervised by Vitaliy Kurlin, Andy Cooper, Angeles Pulido, Jason Cole (CCDC).
• March 2020 : congratulations to PhD student Thomas Welsch whose paper Synthesis through Unification Genetic Programming has been accepted at GECCO : The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference on 8-12 July 2020.
• March 2020 : invited to give a talk at the Galway Topology Colloquium (postponed to 2021 because of COVID-19).
• February 2020 : invited to give a talk at Structure of Materials, Berlin, Germany (cancelled because of COVID-19).
• January 2020 : paper Voronoi-based similarity distances between arbitrary crystal lattices joint with PhD student Marco Mosca was accepted in a special issue of the journal Crystal Research and Technology for the MaThCryst conference.
• January 2020 : gave an invited talk in the track AI & Topology at the Applied Machine Learning Days, EPFL, Switzerland.
• January 2020 : paper Persistence-based resolution-independent meshes of superpixels with Grzegorz Muszynski was published in the journal Pattern Recognition Letters, an extended version of the earlier conference paper at CTIC 2019.
• January 2020 : invited to give a 6-hour tutorial on Topological Data Analysis at the Data Science summer school on 2-3 July 2020 in Ecole Polytechnique near Paris (later postponed because of COVID-19).
• January 2020 : paper Polygonal Meshes of Highly Noisy Images based on a new Thinning Algorithm with Theoretical Guarantees joint with Arshad Siddiqui (self-funded intern in May-November 2018) has been accepted in Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications VISAPP 2020 with a 25-min oral presentation.

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News stories in 2019 (in the reverse chronological order)

• December 2019 : we have had great Christmas dinner with all available students, many thanks to Katerina for organising!
  
  Group dinner in December 2019 from left to right: Cameron, Milo, Sam, Shiyam, Katerina, Phil, Matt, Marco, Vitaliy.
• December 2019 : congratulations to Grzegorz on the paper published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.
• December 2019 : the network seminar MIF++ has had 10 great talks in the first year 2019 and will be continued in 2020.
• November 2019 : PhD student Miloslav Torda and I gave talks at the annual conference of the EPSRC network+ AI3SD (Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Intelligence for Automated Investigations for Scientific Discovery), Winchester, UK.
• November 2019 : the SIAM conference Mathematical aspects of Materials Science has approved our proposal with colleagues from the IUCr commission on Mathematical and Theoretical Crystallography to co-locate the symposium "Computational Geometry, Topology and Symmetry meet Materials Science" on 18-22 May 2020 in Bilbao, Spain.
• November 2019 : the London Mathematical Society has continued funding our network Applied Algebraic Topology covering 3 meetings per year at the Universities of Liverpool, Queen Mary London, Southampton until September 2020.
• October 2019 : the photo of the DSTA group : Cameron Hargreaves, Matt Bright, Vitaliy Kurlin, Georg Osang (visitor from IST Austria), Philip Smith, Cristian Badoi, Yury Elkin, Katerina Vriza, Miloslav Torda, Marco Mosca, Thomas Welsch.
   
  
• October 2019 : 2nd year PhD student Thomas Welsch has successfully passed his annual review.
• October 2019 : Georg Osang (IST Austria) has visited our group on 21-25 October and have given two talks, one at the MIF++ seminar and one at our group seminar.
• October 2019 : PhD student Phil Smith has given the 20-min talk about his first paper Resolution-independent meshes of superpixels at ISVC 2019, published in LNCS proceedings, v.11844, p. 194-205.
• October 2019 : Milo has represented our group at the workshop Soft Packings, Nested Clusters, and Condensed Matter, where he gave the 45-min talk "Dense periodic packings in the light of crystal structure prediction" in Oaxaca, Mexico.
• October 2019 : my former MSc student Matthew Bright started his PhD "Geometry and topology for a continuous similarity between crystals" co-supervised with the MIF director Prof Andy Cooper.
• September 2019 : new PhD student Sam Carruthers co-supervised with Prof Andy Cooper has joined our group.
• September 2019 : the joint British Pure/Applied Mathematical Colloquium (BMC/BAMC) has approved our proposal with Pawel Dlotko to organise the mini-symposium Mathematics for Materials Science on 6-9 April 2020 in Glasgow, UK.
• August 2019 : after the two workshops in March 2016 and August 2018, our group has hosted the 3rd annual workshop Mathematics for Materials Sciences in the MIF jointly with the group of Prof Herbert Edelsbrunner from IST Austria.
• August 2019 : received the Science Slam award (scanned) for the TED-style talk "The rise and fall of deep learning" for the public audience including more than 1000 participants of the European Crystallographic Meeting in Vienna (Austria).
• August 2019 : gave the 30-min contributed talk "How to correctly sample unit cells in simulations of crystals" at the MathCryst (Mathematical and Theoretical Crystallography) meeting on 16-18 August 2019 in Vienna (Austria).
• July 2019 : gave the 45-min invited talk "Topological Data Analysis: theory and applications with examples" at the workshop Mechanisms for Extreme Event Generation on 8-12 July 2019 in the Lorentz centre, Leiden (Netherlands).
• July 2019 : gave the 40-min invited talk "Mathematical challenges and potential solutions for solid crystalline materials" at the CECAM workshop Accelerating material discovery by smart high-throughput computations on 3-5 July at Liverpool.
• June 2019 : 2nd year PhD student Phil Smith has given a talk on our joint paper Skeletonisation Algorithms with Theoretical Guarantees for Unorganised Point Clouds with High Levels of Noise at the Young Researchers Forum, Symposium on Computational Geometry 2019, Portland, US.
• June 2019 : PhD students Phil Smith and Marco Mosca have successfully passed their annual reviews.
• June 2019 : PhD student Katerina Vriza co-supervised with Matthew Dyer gave the talk "Data driven discovery of functional molecular co-crystals" at the annual Science day in the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, which has celebrated the 1000000-th crystal deposited in the Cambridge Structural Database containing most existing crystals.
• June 2019 : served as an external examiner for PhD student Teresa Heiss in Prof Edelsbrunner's group at IST Austria, which celebrated their 10th year anniversary with great presentations by several world leading experts on 4-6 June 2019.
• May 2019 : 2nd year PhD student Yury Elkin has successfully passed his annual review.
• May 2019 : the paper "Topological Methods for Pattern Detection in Climate Data" (joint with Grzegorz Muszynski, Dmitriy Morozov, Michael Wehner, Karthik Kashinath, Prabhat) has been accepted for publication in AGU Wiley books.
• May 2019 : gave the talk "Mathematical challenges for solid crystalline materials" at the TDA grant meeting in the ATI.
• April 2019 : the research of our group has been highlighted as the case study "The shape of spaces" in the MIF.
• April 2019 : chaired the session "Mathematical and statistical physics" and gave the talk "A continuous approach to a classification of solid crystalline materials" at the British Applied Mathematical Colloquium (BAMC 2019), Bath, UK.
• April 2019 : my former MSc student Matthew Bright was selected as the PhD student from October 2019 on the project "Geometry and topology for a continuous similarity between crystals" co-supervised with MIF director Prof Andy Cooper.
• March 2019 : Grzegorz Muszynski has been invited to give a plenary talk "Topological Data Analysis and Machine Learning methods for pattern detection in spatiotemporal climate data" in Session 7 (Statistical and machine learning in climate science) at the International Meeting on Statistical Climatology (IMSC 2019) on 24-28 June 2019 in Toulouse, France.
• March 2019 : multi-billion company Unilever has agreed to top-up the PhD bursary (£6K per year over 3 years) for Thomas Welsh, who has done a great MSc thesis in 2018 for Unilever and continues working on Unilever's projects.
• March 2019 : PhD student Marco has published his first paper "Dot2dot: Accurate Whole-Genome Tandem Repeats Discovery" (with F.Geraci, L.Genovese, M. Pellegrini) in Bioinformatics, v.35, p.914–922.
• March 2019 : PhD student Phil Smith has presented his poster "Computational Methods for a Faster Materials Discovery" on our joint work during the poster day in the Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Liverpool.
• March 2019 : gave the 45-min invited talk "Potential Solutions to Mathematical Challenges for Solid Crystalline Materials" at the AI for Materials Discovery Workshop on 19th March 2019 at Southampton, UK.
• February 2019 : gave the invited 1-hour talk "Polygonal meshes of superpixels for image over-segmentations based on topological skeletons" at the seminar in the School of Computing at the University of Buckingham, United Kingdom.
• January 2019 : launched the MIF++ network of bi-weekly seminars with lunch to attract new collaborators to the MIF.
• January 2019 : presented the paper "A persistence-based approach to automatic detection of line segments in images" (joint with Grzegorz Muszynski) at CTIC 2019 (Computational Topology in Image Context), published in LNCS.
• January 2019 : paper "Topological Data Analysis and Machine Learning for Recognizing Atmospheric River Patterns in Climate Data" (with PhD student Grzegorz Muszynski, Karthik Kashinath, Michael Wehner, Prabhat) is accepted in GMD.
• January 2019 : Naohiko Ban has presented our 37-page paper "Development of a Reconstruction Method for Major Vortex Structure around Tandem Flapping Wing Object via Vortex Trajectory Method" (joint with Wataru Yamazaki) at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Science and Technology Forum and Exposition 2019, San Diego, US.

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News stories in 2018 (in the reverse chronological order)

• December 2018 : our research with PhD student Grzegorz Muszynski funded by Intel through the Big Data Center at the Berkeley lab (US) has been highlighted in the HPC wire news Topology Can Help Us Find Patterns in Weather.
• November 2018 : the blog post how to join the research group advises potential intern students, PhD candidates and postdoctoral fellows about the transparent and mumulti-stage selection of candidates who wish to join the TDA group.
• November 2018 : invited talk "A comparison of skeletonization algorithms for unorganized point clouds" at the workshop Trends in Persistent Homology in Queen's University Belfast (UK) to celebrate the appointment of Dr Florian Pausinger.
• November 2018 : the London Mathematical Society has continued funding our network Applied Algebraic Topology covering 3 meetings per year at the Universities of Liverpool, Queen Mary London, Southampton until September 2019.
• October 2018 : our Materials Innovation Factory was officially opened by Sir Venki, the president of the Royal Society.
• October 2018 : new PhD students joined the group: Marco Mosca, Miloslav Torda, Katerina Vriza, Cameron Hargreaves.
• September 2018 : PhD student Grzegorz Muszynski presented our paper "Towards a topological pattern detection in fluid and climate simulation data" (joint with Karthik Kashinath, Michael Wehner and Prabhat) at Climate Informatics 2018.
• September 2018 : we have attended the kick-off meeting of the EPSRC grant "Application-driven Topological Data Analysis" (2018-2023), which funded a few members of the group.
• September 2018 : the research of PhD student Grzegorz Muszynski was highlighted in HPC wire and Berkeley lab news.
• September 2018 : the Topological Data Analysis group started to work on the 5-year EPSRC grant "Application-driven Topological Data Analysis" (EP/R018472/1) until August 2023.
• August 2018 : our group has organised the Topological Data Analysis workshop combined with the 11th meeting of the Applied Geometry and Topology network meeting in the MIF, where Phil has given a good talk on skeletonisation algorithms.
• July 2018 : 30-min invited talk at the Big Data Summit in the Berkeley lab on the joint work with the 2nd year PhD student Grzegorz Muszynski funded by Intel.
• July 2018 : the 1st year PhD students Phil Smith and Yury Elkin have successfully delivered their annual presentations.
• July 2018 : the paper "A Higher-Dimensional Homologically Persistent Skeleton" (joint with Sara Kalisnik and Davorin Lesnik) has been accepted by the journal Advances in Applied Mathematics.
• June 2018 : new summer students joined our group, namely MSc students Thomas Welsch, Cameron Hargreaves, Gemma Cook; 2nd year students Antoine Rohmer, Di Liu; and visiting student Arshad Suddiqui from India.
• June 2018 : gave the invited 6-hour tutorial on Topological Data Analysis (with my PhD student Krasen Samardzhiev) at the Data Science summer school in Ecole Polytechnique near Paris.
• June 2018 : attended the HerbertFest (devoted to 60th birtday celebtrations of my co-author Prof Herbert Edelsbrunner) and presented the poster (joint with my PhD student Yury Elkin) "A fast recognition of branched shapes of micelles in colloids" at ATMCS8, IST Austria.
• June 2018 : Mr Nathaniel Shiyamjith was selected as a new PhD student co-supervised by Robert Page, Laura Harkness-Brennan and Vitaliy Kurlin (25%), funded by the Big Data Science Centre for Doctoral Training in Physics.
• June 2018 : invited 30-min presentation "Superpixels for image over-segmentation based on topological skeletons" at the SIAM Imaging Sciences, Bologna (Italy).
• June 2018 : our outline proposal (with Prof Frans Coenen) for the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence for Future Digital Health at the University of Liverpool was invited to the next stage of the competition.
• May 2018 : Mr Marco Mosca was selected as a new PhD student supervised by Vitaliy Kurlin (80%) and Andy Cooper (the MIF director) on the project "Discovering hidden patterns in high-dimensional data for materials science" funded from October 2018 by the EEE&CS school in the University of Liverpool.
• May 2018 : the paper "Atmospheric River Tracking Method Intercomparison Project (ARTMIP): Experimental Design and Project Goals" by Grzegorz with many co-authors was accepted in Geoscientific Model Development (impact factor 3.5).
• May 2018 : Mr Thomas Welsch was selected as a new PhD student supervised by Vitaliy Kurlin (80%) and Shan Luo on the project "New methods of Geometry and Topology for solving Computer Vision problems in Materials Science" funded from October 2018 by the EEE&CS school in the University of Liverpool.
• May 2018 : 1-hour talk on Skeletonization algorithms with theoretical guarantees for unorganized point clouds at the online seminar of the Applied Algebraic Topology Research Network.
• May 2018 : Ms Katerina Virza was selected as a new PhD student supervised by Matthew Dyer and Vitaliy Kurlin on the project "Data Driven Discovery of Functional Molecular Co-crystals" funded from September 2018 by the CCDC, LRC.
• May 2018 : Our Materials Innovation Factory at the University of Liverpool scoops Design Through Innovation award.
• April 2018 : Mr Miloslav Torda was selected as a new PhD student supervised by Yannis Goulermas, Vitaliy Kurlin (40%) and Graeme Day (Southampton) on the project "Analysis of energy landscapes of molecular crystal structures employing combinatorial and topological methodologies" funded from October 2018 by the EEE&CS school and the LRC.
• April 2018 : PhD student Grzegorz Muszynski talked at EGU 2018 (European Geophysical Union General Assembly) and I presented a poster at the ARTMIP meeting on our work "Topological Data Analysis and Machine Learning for Detection, Classification, and Characterization of Atmospheric Rivers" joint with Karthik Kashinath, Prabhat, Michael Wehner.
• March 2018 : Cameron Hargreaves was selected as a new PhD student on the project "Data Science and Machine Learning Applied to the Discovery of Solid Lithium Ion Conductors" supervised by Matthew Dyer and Vitaliy Kurlin (40%) from October 2018 and funded by the Faraday Battery Challenge.
• March 2018 : with Prof Andy Jones we'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 Vitaliy Kurlin and Andy Cooper.
• The photo below was taken in February 2018. Members from left to right: Naohiko Ban, Asim Munshi, Eris Tricker, Krasen Samardzhiev, Vitaliy Kurlin, Grzegorz Muszynski, Philip Smith.
  
• January 2018 : invited talk "A new solution to the data skeletonisation problem for 3D point clouds from micelles" at the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the Daresbury lab, given jointly with my PhD student Yury Elkin.
• January 2018 : the EPSRC awarded £2.8M to the project Application-Driven Topological Data Analysis in 2018 - 2022 (EP/R018472/1) at the Universities of Liverpool, Oxford, Swansea. I've led the Liverpool team with a budget over £715K.

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News stories in 2017 (in the reverse chronological order)

• December 2017 : the Computer Science department at the University of Liverpool awarded the £1K visiting fellowship to invite Dr Vanessa Robins from ANU (Australian National University) for a visit to the TDA group on 11-15 June 2018.
• December 2017 : the Royal Society (UK) awarded £12K (International Exchanges programme) for bilateral visits (until December 2019) between the TDA group at Liverpool (UK) and Prof Herbert Edelsbrunner's group at IST Austria.
• November 2017 : the London Mathematical Society has awarded £1200 for the network Applied Algebraic Topology with 3 meetings per year at the Universities of Liverpool, Queen Mary (G.Bianconi, M.Farber), Southampton (J.Brodzki, J.Grbić).
• November 2017 : Yury Elkin started his PhD "Topological Analysis of Colloids" funded by the School of EEE and CS.
• October 2017 : the paper Superpixels Optimized by Color and Shape (joint with former final year project student Donald Harvey) was presented in a 20-min talk at EMMCVPR 2017 (Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) with a 14-page publication in LNCS, Springer.
• October 2017 : we have started the regular seminar of our group in the Materials Innovation Factory (office 36). Phil Smith has given the first two talks "Combinatorial graphs" and "Topological graphs".
• September 2017 : PhD student Grzegorz Muszynski (funded through the Intel Parallel Computing Centre at Liverpool) has won a Data Competition on recognising astronomical objects (Data Challenge #2: Astronomy Catalogs) at Berkeley.
• September 2017 : participated in the research programme on Topological Data Analysis in the HIM (Hausdorff Institute for Mathematics), Bonn (Germany).
• September 2017 : 30-min talk "Topological methods for a faster materials discovery" at the Mathematical Signal Processing and Data Analysis conference, Bremen (Germany).
• September 2017 : talk "Topological methods for a faster materials discovery" at the Leverhulme Research Centre workshop "Harnessing the exponential growth", Liverpool (UK).
• September 2017 : announced the NIPS 2017 workshop covering Topological Data Anaysis and referring to my blog.
• August 2017 : our group has established the partnership between Intel and the University of Liverpool (UK) as a part of Big Data Center at the Berkeley lab (US). Since April 2017 Intel sponsors the PhD of Grzegorz Muszynski on a Topological Analysis of the Climate System. The second supervisor at the Berkeley lab is the Senior Staff Scientist Michael Wehner.
• August 2017 : paper Convex Constrained Meshes for superpixel segmentations of images (joint with former final year project student Jeremy Forsythe) has been accepted in the SPIE Journal of Electronic Imaging.
• July 2017 : kick-off meeting of the LIV.DAT CDT on Big Data Science at the Physics department in Liverpool, where I'm co-supervising (50%) with Dr Laura Harkness-Brennan the PhD of Mr Fraser Holloway on Topological Data Analysis methods for AGATA (a gamma-ray detector).
• June 2017 : invited 45-min talk "Topological methods for a faster materials discovery" at Applied Topology, Poland.
• June 2017 : invited 20-min talk "Topological Data Analysis for Materials Science" at the networking event between Unilever and Materials Innovation Factory, Liverpool.
• May 2017 : Mr Fraser Holloway was selected as a PhD student in Big Data Nuclear Physics jointly supervised with Dr Laura Harkness-Brennan and funded by the LIV.DAT CDT at the Physics department in Liverpool from October 2017.
• May 2017 : Mr Krasen Samardzhiev was selected as a PhD student in Geographic Data Science jointly supervised with Dr Daniel Arribas-Bel and Prof Alex Singleton, funded by the Data Analytics and Society CDT in Liverpool from October 2017.
• May 2017 : invited 30-min talk "Topological Data Analysis for Materials Science" at the International workshop on machine learning and data analytics in advanced metals processing sponsored by Sir Henry Royce Institute, Manchester, UK.
• May 2017 : public talk "What can Deep Learning do with Big Data?" in a pub at the Pint of Science festival in Liverpool.
• May 2017 : many thanks for the positive evaluations of COMP315 taught for the first time in the new department.
• May 2017 : 20-min software demo "Line segment detector inspired by Topological Data Analysis" at ACAT (Applied and Computational Algebraic Topology), HIM Bonn, Germany.
• April 2017 : Mr Grzegorz Muszynski started his PhD on "Topological Analysis of the Climate System" at the University of Liverpool in April 2017 funded by Intel Corporation through the Big Data Centre at the Lawrence Berkeley lab (US).
• March 2017 : awarded 2700 GBP by the EPSRC for a summer 10-week project of Simon Hirst to work on coloured meshes of polygonal superpixels, which continues the Computer Vision project started with Microsoft Research.
• March 2017 : Mr Philip Smith was selected as a new PhD student to work on Computational Methods for a faster Materials Discovery funded by the Leverhulme Centre at the Materials Innovation Factory in Liverpool from October 2017.
• February 2017 : talk "Data Skeletonisation methods with theoretical guarantees" at the University of Brighton, UK.
• January 2017 : awarded 1800 GBP from the school impact fund for the 4-week internship of Grzegorz Muszynski to work on a new method for a straight line detection in 2D images, which contributes to the project with Microsoft Research.

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News stories in 2016 (in the reverse chronological order)

• December 2016 : joint paper Resolution-independent superpixels based on convex constrained meshes without small angles with Andrew Fitzgibbon (Microsoft) and Jeremy Forsythe (TU Wien) was presented in the 20-min oral at ISVC 2016: International Symposium on Visual Computing.
• December 2016 : 15-min presentation "Topological Methods for Pattern Detection in Climate Data" by my forthcoming PhD student Grzegorz Muszynski on our joint work with D.Morozov and Prabhat at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2016, Berkeley (US), the largest Earth and Space Science meeting in the world with about 25K participants.
• December 2016 : talk Topological Data Analysis (pdf slides, 40 pages, 2.7M) at the Statistics seminar, Nottingham, UK.
• November 2016 : talk on Data Skeletonisation at the Stochastic Topology seminar, Queen Mary University of London, UK.
• October 2016 : invited presentation at the Computational Materials Design workshop in the Leverhulme Research Centre.
• September 2016 : Mr Philip Smith has completed the summer project Superpixel meshes for faster image and video processing funded by the London Mathematical Society.
• September 2016 : talk "Topological Computer Vision" at the Computer Science department, University of Liverpool, UK.
• September 2016 : elected to the EPSRC Associate College of Peer Reviewers to serve the research community in the UK.
• September 2016 : started as a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) with research in the Materials Innovation Factory and teaching in the Computer Science department, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom.
• August 2016 : 1-hour keynote lecture "Graph reconstruction from noisy scans based on persistent homology" at BTM (British Topology Meeting 2016), Glasgow University, UK.
• July 2016 : 30-min demo "Graph reconstruction from noisy point samples" at ATMCS 8 (Applied Topology: Methods, Computation, Science, the main biannual conference in Applied Topology), Turin, Italy.
• July 2016 : 20-min oral presentation "Topological Computer Vision" at 7 ECM (European Congress of Mathematics, the main quadrennial European conference in Mathematics), Berlin, Germany.
• July 2016 : Mr Aryaman Patel from National Institute of Technology Karnataka (India) has completed his summer internship with me.
• July 2016 : Grzegorz Muszynski started his internship co-supervised by me until mid-December 2016 at Lawrence National Laboratory in Berkeley (US) and will continue as a PhD student funded by Intel at Liverpool, UK.
• June 2016 : visited Prof Gunnar Carlsson at Stanford University (US) and Ayasdi, and Prabhat at Lawrence National Laboratory in Berkeley (US), which was funded by the International Engagement Travel Grant (2K GBP).
• June 2016 : talk "Topological Data Analysis for Materials Science" at the University of Liverpool, UK.
• June 2016 : talk "Topological Data Analysis: theory and applications" at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
• May 2016 : the London Mathematical Society has awarded a summer bursary for Philip Smith (value 1.1K GBP) to work on our project Superpixel meshes for faster image and video processing in August - September 2016.
• May 2016 : talk "Topological Computer Vision" at the Biomathematics Seminar in Imperial College London, UK.
• April 2016 : talks "Topological Computer Vision" in Department of Computer Science at Middlesex University and at the Cambridge Image Analysis seminar of Dr Carola-Bibiane Schonlieb at Cambridge University, UK.
• April 2016 : 25-min talk at the symposium Today's Data Predicting Tomorrow, Loughborough University, UK.
• April 2016 : 20-min talk at BAMC 2016: British Applied Mathematical Colloquium, Oxford University, UK.
• March 2016 : won a travel grant of the London Mathematical Society to give the 20-min talk "Topological Computer Vision" in the section "Mathematical Image and Signal Processing" at 7ECM (European Congress of Mathematicians) at TU Berlin on 18-22 July 2016.
• March 2016 : many thanks for the positive evaluations of the service course Single Maths B.
• March 2016 : organised (jointly with Michael Grinfeld and Mark Haw) the ATI strategic workshop on 14 March 2016 : Topological Data Analysis in Materials Science and Engineering.
• March 2016 : talk "Topological Computer Vision" at Pure Colloquium in Leeds, UK.
• February 2016 : talk "Topological Computer Vision" at Brighton University, UK
• January 2016 : won a Christopherson/Knott fellowship at Institute of Advanced Study (left after moving to Liverpool).
• January 2016 : 20-min talk Topological Computer Vision at the ATI workshop Developing the Mathematical Foundations of Learning for non-Euclidean Objects (Alan Turing Institute, UK).
• January 2016 : 40-min talk "Topological Computer Vision" at Prospects in Data Science (Southampton, UK).

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News stories in 2015 (in the reverse chronological order)

• December 2015 : the secondment at Microsoft Research Cambridge was extended to 2016 - 2017, 20K GBP from EPSRC and 17K GBP from Microsoft for a postdoc, plus Microsoft's in-kind 45K GBP.
• December 2015 : with colleagues M.Grinfeld and M.Haw at Strathclyde University (UK) we have secured the grant of 3K GBP to run the workshop on Topological Data Analysis in Material Science and Engineering.
• December 2015 : Topology III has come to the 1st place in student questionnaires, see summary and comments.
• December 2015 : talk "Computing invariants of knotted graphs given by sequences of points in 3-dimensional space" (pdf slides, 24 pages, 1.4M) on TopoInVis 2015 paper at the seminar in the National University of Ireland (Galway).
• November 2015 : paper accepted at Pattern Recognition Letters (11 pages), journal impact factor 1.55.
• November 2015 : talks "Topological Computer Vision" at the Analysis Seminar in Loughborough University, at the Pure Mathematics Colloquium and a related talk at Statistics Seminar in Durham University (UK).
• October 2015 : 15-min software demonstration on the project HoPeS: cloud segmentations and persistent skeletons" at Computational Geometric and Algebraic Topology, MFO Oberwolfach, Germany.
• September 2015 : organised (with D.Schuetz) 4th meeting of the LMS-funded Applied Algebraic Topology network.
• September 2015 : 25-min talk Topological Computer Vision at the ATI workshop, University of Oxford, UK.
• September 2015 : paper "A Homologically Persistent Skeleton is a fast and robust descriptor of interest points" (pdf, 12 pages, 1.2M) was presented at CAIP 2015, published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, v.9256, 2015.
• August 2015 : M. Iglesias-Ham presented our accepted paper "Relaxed disk packing" (joint with H. Edelsbrunner) at CCCG 2015: Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, see abstract and pdf at arXiv:1505.03402.
• July 2015 : 30-min talk "Fast and stable topological profiles of noisy 2D images" at ACA 2015: Applications of Computer Algebra, Kalamata (Greece) extending results from CVPR and CTIC.
• July 2015 : 40-min talk (pdf, 32 pages, 4.7M) at ACAT 2015 in IST Austria on the paper (published in CGF) "A homologically persistent skeleton of an unstructured point cloud in a metric space" (pdf, 10 pages, 3.6M).
• July 2015: 30-min talk at SGP 2015 (Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing) in Graz, Austria on "A homologically persistent skeleton of an unstructured point cloud in a metric space" (pdf, 10 pages, 3.6M), which was published in Computer Graphics Forum, v.34, no.5 (2015), p.253-262.
• June 2015 : 30-min talk at DyToComp 2015 in Bedlewo (Poland) on the paper "A homologically persistent skeleton of an unstructured point cloud in an metric space" (pdf, 10 pages, 3.6M).
• May 2015 : 45-min talk Topological Data Analysis with applications to Computer Vision at the workshop MMMDS: Mathematical Methods for Massive Data Sets, Edinburgh University, United Kingdom.
• May 2015 : paper "Computing invariants of knotted graphs given by sequences of points in 3-dimensional space" presented at TopoInVis 2015: Topology-Based Methods in Visualization, Germany. Details are at the project page.
• April 2015 : 20-min talk "Topological Data Analysis" at the symposium Mathematics of Information at BMC/BAMC 2015: British Applied Mathematical Colloquium, Cambridge University, UK.
• March 2015 : three talks "Homologically persistent skeleton" at the seminar of Prof Herbert Edelsbrunner in IST (Institute of Science and Technology, Austria), seminar of Prof Walter Kropatsch in Pattern Recognition and Image Processing Group at TU Wien, geometry seminar of Prof Johannes Wallner in the Institute of Geometry at TU Graz (Austria).
• March 2015 : 30-min talk (pdf slides, 20 pages, 1.6M) on the paper "A linear time algorithm for visualizing knotted structures in 3 pages" (pdf, 12 pages, 2.7M) at the conference IVAPP 2015 in Berlin, Germany.
• February 2015 : grant awarded (1.7K euros) by ACAT (Applied and Computational Algebraic Topology) network of ESF (European Science Foundation) for a short visit to IST (Institute of Science and Technology, Austria).
• February 2015 : talk "Homologically persistent skeleton" at the workshop Algebraic Topology: Computation, Data Analysis, and Applications in Oxford Mathematical Institute.
• February 2015 : two talks Topological Data Analysis at the seminar organised by Prof Alexander Gorban at the University of Leicester (UK) and the seminar of Complexity Theory and Algorithmics Group, University of Liverpool (UK).
• January 2015 : three talks Topological Data Analysis at Applied Algebraic Topology network, Queen Mary University of London (UK), Transpennine Topology Triangle meeting, University of Sheffield (UK), Winter School on Low-dimensional Topology, La Llagonne, France.

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News stories in 2014 (in the reverse chronological order)

• December 2014 : talk "Configuration spaces of round robots moving in a metric graph" (slides in pdf, 32 pages, 460K) at the Mathematical Physics seminar in Bristol University, UK.
• December 2014 : talk on Topological Data Analysis at the Geometry and Topology seminar at Glasgow University, UK.
• December 2014 : talk "Auto-completion of contours based on topological persistence" at the seminar of Frédéric Chazal in the Geometrica Group at INRIA Saclay, France. Slides (pdf, 36 pages, 2.2M).
• November 2014 : poster (pdf, 1M) at DCAT: Discrete, Combinatorial and Algebraic Topology, Copenhagen.
• October 2014 : invited talk at the "Pathway to Impact" seminar, Durham, UK.
• September 2014 : invited talks (20 min each) at CTIC: Computational Topology in Image Context, Romania. Slides "Auto-completion of closed contours based on topological persistence" (pdf, 36 pages, 2.2M). Slides "Drawing a graph in 3 pages within its isotopy class in linear time" (pdf, 20 pages, 1.6M).
• September 2014 : invited talk (30 min) at the British Topology Meeting 2014, Southampton, UK.
• August 2014 : paper "Computing a skeleton of the configuration space of 2 round robots on a metric graph" (with M. Safi-Samghabadi) accepted at ICRoM 2014: International Conference on Robotics and Mechatronics.
• July 2014 : invited talk (45 min) at the Applied Algebraic Topology workshop, Castro Urdiales, CIEM, Spain.
• June 2014 : 1-min video spotlight at CVPR 2014 (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Columbus, Ohio, USA): "A fast and robust algorithm to count topologically persistent holes in noisy clouds" (poster in pdf, 2.2M, ID 1997).
• June 2014 : invited talk at the seminar of Roberto Cipolla in Engineering Department, Cambridge University, UK.
• May 2014 : invited talk at the research seminar in Engineering and Computing Sciences, Durham, UK.
• April 2014 : final version of "A fast and robust algorithm to count topologically persistent holes in noisy clouds" (1.6M) for proceedings of CVPR 2014: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, a top 3 conference in Computer Science.
• March 2014 : EPSRC KTS grant (20K GBP) awarded to spend the academic year 2014-2015 working on applications of Topological Data Analysis to Computer Vision at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK.
• March 2014 : Topology III module has been highly ranked by students again, summary & comments.
• February 2014 : talk "Topological Data Analysis: potential applications to Computer Vision", video at the Machine Learning and Perception seminar, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK.
• January 2014 : talk "Book embeddings of Reeb graphs in shape analysis" at Warwick University, UK.

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News stories in 2013 (in the reverse chronological order)

• December 2013 : Topology III module was highly ranked by students, summary and comments.
• December 2013 : talks "Introduction to Topological Data Analysis" at Durham and Aberdeen, UK.
• November 2013 : successfully passed the exam after the practical First Aid course (about 20 hours).
• October 2013 : 15 new students (who had passed the rigorous entrance exam) started the MSc course.
• September 2013 : paper How many wireless sensors are needed to guarantee connectivity of a 1-dim network with random inter-node spacings? (pdf, 200K, 24 pages) published at J Applied Probability and Statistics.
• August 2013 : interactive maths sessions (23 hours) organised for summer school students of age 15-16.
• July 2013 : invited lecture (40 min) at the international conference Applied Topology, Bedlewo, Poland.
• July 2013 : invited lecture (30 min) at Applied and Computational Algebraic Topology, Bremen, Germany.
• June 2013 : participated in major conferences COLT 2013 (Computational Learning Theory) in Princeton and ICML 2013 (International Conference in Machine Learning) in Atlanta, USA.
• June 2013 : first self-funded PhD student Marjan Safi-Samghabadi has successfully completed the thesis in algorithmic and topological robotics, the title is Collision-free motions of round robots in metric graphs.
• May 2013 : shortlisted by students as one of three final nominees for the Lecturer of the Year award by DSU (Durham Student Union) in the Faculty of Science at Durham University, United Kingdom.    
• April 2013 : video of the invited talk on a graph reconstruction at Edinburgh University, United Kingdom.
• March 2013: invited talk at the Computer Science Department, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom.
• March 2013: demo presentation at DGCI 2013: Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery, Seville (Spain).
• March 2013 : Topology III module was highly ranked by students, see the summary and comments.

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