Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
A sample of topics that have caught my eye in recent years.
(a) Prediction tournaments are like sports in that a higher-ranked player will likely score better than a lower-ranked one. But paradoxically, under a reasonable model the winner of a tournament is relatively less likely to be a top-ranked player, maybe clouding the interpretation of multimillion dollar IARPA-sponsored projects.
(b) At the back of a long queue at airport security, you stand still until a wave of motion reaches you; a non-standard model gives quantitative predictions for such waves.
(c) Spatial networks give rise to intriguing questions. For instance, suppose (as a bizarre fantasy) that an eccentric multi-billionaire proposes to solve traffic congestion in a huge metropolitan region by digging underground tunnels through which cars can move very fast; where to dig the tunnels?
(d) As a hard technical question, epidemic models combine a model for a contact network with a model for transmission between contacts, with various parameters including an infectiousness parameter $\rho$. Intuitively, there is always a critical value $\rho_c$ such that, starting with a sprinkling of $o(n)$ infectives, there will w.h.p. be a pandemic if $\rho > \rho_c$ but w,h,p. not if $\rho < \rho_c$. This is true in familiar specific models for the contact network, but can we prove this for all contact networks?
