This week I was in London, attending the New Fellows Seminar at the Royal Society. This was a fairly low-key event preceding the formal admissions ceremony; for instance, it is not publicised on their web site. The format was very interesting: they had each of the new Fellows of the Society give a brief (15 minute) presentation of their work in quick succession, in a manner which would be accessible to a diverse audience in the physical and life sciences. The result was a wonderful two-day seminar on the state of the art in many areas of physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, medicine, and mathematics. For instance, I learnt

  • How the solar neutrino problem was resolved by the discovery that the neutrino had mass, which did not commute with flavour and hence caused neutrino oscillations, which have since been detected experimentally;
  • Why modern aircraft (such as the Dreamliner and A380) are now assembled using (incredibly tough and waterproofed) adhesives instead of bolts or welds, and how adhesion has been enhanced by nanoparticles;
  • How the bacterium Helicobacter pylori was recently demonstrated (by two Aussies :-) ) to be a major cause of peptic ulcers (though the exact mechanism is not fully understood), but has also been proposed (somewhat paradoxically) to also have a preventative effect against esophageal cancer (cf. the hygiene hypothesis);
  • How recent advances in machine learning and image segmentation (including graph cut methods!) now allow computers to identify and track many general classes of objects (e.g. people, cars, animals) simultaneously in real-world images and video, though not quite in real-time yet;
  • How large-scale structure maps of the universe (such as the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey) combine with measurements of the cosmic background radiation (e.g. from WMAP) to demonstrate the existence of both dark matter and dark energy (they have different impacts on the evolution of the curvature of the universe and on the current distribution of visible matter);
  • … and 42 other topics like this. (One strongly recurrent theme in the life science talks was just how much recent genomic technologies, such as the genome projects of various key species, have accelerated (by several orders of magnitude!) the ability to identify the genes, proteins, and mechanisms that underlie any given biological function or disease. To paraphrase one speaker, a modern genomics lab could now produce the equivalent of one 1970s PhD thesis in the subject every minute.)

I myself gave a presentation on “structure and randomness in the prime numbers” – basically, a highly abridged (and more colourful) version of my UCLA talk on the same subject (slides and video of which are available here). It’s the second time I’ve used Powerpoint (this is the first); I myself am most comfortable with good old-fashioned chalk and blackboard, but now that I see how the other disciplines (in particular the life sciences) use computer slides, I have to concede that there are some useful features of this medium, particularly for very short, high-level, general-audience presentations.

Now that I have participated in my first interdisciplinary conference, I can strongly recommend the experience. Unfortunately, such conferences seem to be extremely rare; the only other examples I know of are the annual conferences for Packard Foundation fellows (which I now greatly regret not attending while I was supported by them). The Royal Society is talking about webcasting the New Fellows Seminar for 2008, though.