Winter 2025 Computing Seminars

The School of Computing holds weekly Computing seminars each term, where external speakers from industry and academia, as well as academics and research students from the School present their work to peers and staff, offering insights into cutting-edge technologies and current research. Open to all computing students, these seminars are part of the vibrant research environment in Computing at Buckingham that foster collaboration, in-depth discussion and intellectual exchange.

Madara Premawardhana, presenting her research findings on Digital Twins towards Net-zero realisation

The Winter Term’s seminars started off with Madara Premawardhana, a third year PhD student, presenting her research on ‘Digital Twins towards the realisation of Net Zero’. Being a regular contributor to the Computing Seminar series, her work sparked interest among audiences and was a great start to the series. She explored the use of Digital Twins to simulate real world energy generation using photovoltaic solar panels and her presentation featured experiment results of simulations demonstrating how Digital Twins could impact positively towards a greener and sustainable ecosystem. Her research always brings about intriguing questions and discussions from the audience and her presentation at the Winter seminar series was no exception.

The following week featured an insightful presentation by Leonard Onyiriuba, a recent graduate from the MSc Applied Data Science programme at Buckingham, on ‘Enhancing Loan Default Prediction Using Topological Data Analysis’. His talk dwelled into the challenges in large financial datasets and the construction of Topological Data Analysis (TDA)-derived features. He demonstrated experimental results involving traditional and machine learning models on two datasets, comparing default and tuned parameters.

Dr Neetu Sigger, then a final-year PhD candidate, presented her research on ‘Motion-Adaptive Video Compression via Dual Excitation and Hyperprior Integration’. She began by outlining the background and limitations of motion-aware video compression, followed by her research contributions. Her presentation included model training, testing, visualisations, and results, concluding with proposed future work. The seminar prompted a highly engaged discussion, with Neetu responding to audience questions with clarity.

Dr Neetu Sigger presenting her work on Motion-Adaptive Video Compression via Dual Excitation and Hyperprior Integration

Rashmi Perera, a second-year PhD student at the School of Computing, presented her research on the use of AI in viva-voce exams. She focused on how large language models could help automate assessments to ensure fairer, unbiased evaluations. Her talk included a thorough literature review, highlighted research gaps, and emphasized AI’s role in modernising traditional methods. Rashmi also outlined the historical evolution of education and the transformative potential of AI in academic evaluation. The presentation led to engaging discussions and insightful questions, demonstrating the significance and future impact of her work in reshaping assessment practices in higher-education.

Rashmi Perea, presenting her first-year PhD research findings of AI in Education

The Winter Term’s final Computing Seminar featured an external speaker, Jordan Legg from takara.ai, who presented SwarmFormer—a novel transformer model using local swarm updates and global attention to reduce complexity without sacrificing accuracy. He highlighted its strong NLP performance despite fewer parameters than models like BERT, sparking a lively and insightful Q&A.

Industry speaker, Jordan Legg from takara.ai, presenting his research on SwarmFormer: Local-Global Hierarchical Attention via Swarming Token Representations.

The Computing Seminars of the winter term was packed with emerging trends that broadened the scope of research and learning. It was more than just presentations but served as a space for intellectual exchange. These stimulating seminars aim at encouraging diversity and inclusivity with a focus on societal impact. They are vital part of the university academic tradition. As we begin the Spring term, the students and staff await another wave of insightful seminars and academic engagement of innovative ideas.