Broad Spectrum of Lectures and Talks

In addition to my enrolled modules and the General Relativity lectures, I am also attending lectures on Special Relativity and Electromagnetism. This is one of the second year Maths modules, but because I have already used up all my credits for this year, this module cannot be part of my official syllabus. I find these lectures very interesting and I appreciate the fact that the subject is covered in more depth and from a more mathematical point of view than last year within Physics. This mathematical approach really suits me and makes Physics more attractive and comprehensible to me.

The university is also a venue for many scientific talks targeting students as well as the public. I attend mostly mathematics and physics oriented talks but besides those, my attention was also captured by a talk about the human brain. From the ones I attended this term, perhaps the most fascinating one, was a cosmological talk about computer simulations of the evolution of the Universe from its beginning until the present time. This talk provided an introduction to some areas of research performed at the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University.

Another notable event I attended was the Durham Artificial Intelligence Conference, organised by the student societies Entrepreneurs Durham and Durham Artificial Intelligence Society. Its main goal was to introduce current progress and development of artificial intelligence and some examples of its use. The program consisted of talks and a panel discussion on this topic. The most interesting part for me was a talk about ethical issues, fairness and trust in this field. I understood from this talk that in the present day there is no unified opinion about solving the ethical questions raised by artificial intelligence. It is important that intelligent systems should be unbiased in their decisions, something, which is, however, often complicated to achieve or even to assess. It should also be taken into account that these decisions and outputs can sometimes be incorrect, since technology is not errorless. The field of artificial intelligence is definitely very interesting and I would like to learn more about it in the future. This topic is quite promising from a mathematical viewpoint as well and I will definitely pursue any opportunity to get involved in this field in my future studies.