Bath Numerical Analysis seminar - upcoming

Fridays at 12.15 at Wolfson 4W 1.7. All talks will be broadcast on Zoom.

Link to Zoom meeting

Everyone is welcome at these talks.

Date Speaker Title
2 Oct 2026 NA+DS Group Members
NA+DS Research Meeting (staff only)
9 Oct 2026 Takeshi Koshizuka (RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project)
Connecting Distributions via Schrödinger Bridges: Which Path, and How to Learn It

Transporting one probability distribution to another is a fundamental problem arising in population dynamics inference, generative modeling, and sampling from energy functions. Since infinitely many paths can connect two distributions, two essential questions arise: which path should we choose, and how can we learn it stably? This talk addresses both questions through the variational principles underlying optimal transport (OT) and Schrödinger bridges (SB).

In the first part, we start from Monge-Kantorovich OT and move to its Benamou-Brenier dynamic formulation. We then extend the transport cost to general Lagrangian costs, leading naturally to the Lagrangian Schrödinger bridge framework. We show how incorporating physical structure into the Lagrangian can select plausible transport paths, and introduce our Neural Lagrangian Schrödinger Bridge method.

In the second part, we revisit SB from a path-space optimization perspective. Viewing SB as a KL projection provides a unified interpretation of Sinkhorn and iterative proportional fitting (IPF) as alternating KL projections, and connects IPF to mirror descent. Building on this perspective, we introduce a Trust-Region Schrödinger Bridge Sampler for targets specified only through an energy function. By adaptively controlling the mirror-descent step size through a trust-region constraint, the method mitigates mode collapse and training instability in existing approaches.
16 Oct 2026 Sam McCallum (University of Bath)
TBC
23 Oct 2026 Eviatar Bach (University of Reading)
TBC (joint 'NA+DS+Stats' seminar, so will start at 1:15pm)
30 Oct 2026 Sergey Dolgov (University of Bath)
TBC
6 Nov 2026 Federico Cornalba (University of Bath)
TBC
13 Nov 2026 NA+DS Group Members
Presenting project ideas to new SAMBa students
20 Nov 2026 Clara Hawkins (University of Bath)
TBC
27 Nov 2026 Luca Zanetti (University of Bath)
TBC
4 Dec 2026

MMath Students
Year-Long Projects
11 Dec 2026 Veronica Raffetto (University of Bath)
TBC
11 Dec 2026 Ben Dutton (University of Bath)
TBC
Subscribe to seminar calendar

You can subscribe to the NA calendar directly from your calendar client, including Outlook, Apple’s iCalendar or Google calendar. The web address of the calendar is this ICS link which you will need to copy.

To subscribe to a calendar in Outlook:

  1. In Calendar view, select “Add Calendar” (large green +)
  2. Select “From Internet”
  3. Copy paste the ICS link, click OK, and click Yes to subscribe.

To subscribe to a calendar in iCalendar, please follow these instructions. Copy paste the ICS link in “web address”.

To subscribe to a calendar in Google Calendar:

  1. Go to link.
  2. On the left side go to "Other Calendars" and click on the dropdown.
  3. Choose "Add by URL".
  4. Copy paste the ICS link in the URL of the calendar.
  5. Click on "Add Calendar" and wait for Google to import your events. This creates a calendar with a somewhat unreadable name.
  6. To give a readable name to the calendar, click on the three vertical dots sign next to the newly created calendar and select Settings.
  7. Choose a name for the calendar, eg. Numerical Analysis @ Bath, and click back button on top left.

How to get to Bath See here for instructions how to get to Bath. Please email James Foster (jmf68@bath.ac.uk) and Michael Murray (mjm253@bath.ac.uk) if you intend to come by car and require a parking permit for Bath University Campus for the day.
Tips for giving talks

Tips for new students on giving talks

Since the audience of the NA seminar contains both PhD students and staff with quite wide interests and backgrounds, the following are some guidelines/hints to make sure people don't give you evil looks at lunch afterwards.

Before too much time passes in your talk, ideally the audience should know the answers to the following 4 questions:

  • What is the problem you're considering?
  • Why do you find this interesting?
  • What has been done before on this problem/what's the background?
  • What is your approach/what are you going to talk about?

There are lots of different ways to communicate this information. One way, if you're doing a slide show, could be for the first 4 slides to cover these 4 questions; although in this case you may want to revisit these points later on in the talk (e.g. to give more detail).

Remember:

  • "vertebrate style" (structure hidden inside - like the skeleton of a vertebrate) = good for detective stories, bad for maths talks.
  • "crustacean style" (structure visible from outside - like the skeleton of a crustacean) = bad for detective stories, good for maths talks.