OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Cells must reliably coordinate responses to noisy external stimuli for proper functionality whether deciding where to move or initiate a response to threats. In this talk I will present a perspective on such cellular decision making problems with extreme statistics. The central premise is that when a single stochastic process exhibits large variability (unreliable), the extrema of multiple processes has a remarkably tight distribution (reliable). In this talk I will present some background on extreme statistics followed by two applications. The first regards antigen discrimination – the recognition by the T cell receptor of foreign antigen. The second concerns directional sensing – the process in which cells acquire a direction to move towards a target. In both cases, we find that extreme statistics explains how cells can make accurate and rapid decisions, and importantly, before any steady state is reached.
