Jason Hartford -- Maths in the Life Sciences Seminar [ONLINE]
| Dates: | 24 November 2025 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 15:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Department of Mathematics |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Jason Hartford |
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this seminar will now take place online only**
Join us for this seminar by Jason Hartford (Manchester) as part of the Maths in the Life Sciences seminar series (and the online North West Seminar Series in Mathematical Biology and Data Sciences in collaboration with Liverpool Universities).
Title: Scaling Biological Representation Learning and Experimental Design
Abstract: High-throughput cellular assays now generate data at a scale that enables highly predictive phenotypic models, yet our ability to extract mechanistic insight from these systems remains limited. I will discuss our recent work on scaling masked-autoencoders on microscopy images and show that the resulting representations are surprisingly effective at recovering known biological structure. I will then describe our work on mechanistic interpretability techniques for decomposing these embeddings into interpretable, biologically aligned features. Finally, I will discuss experimental design in the context of these large models. I will formalize a hierarchy of interaction models—ranging from scalar viability readouts to full distributional predictions—to characterize when single-perturbation information is sufficient to generalize to combinations. This perspective leads to an efficient experimental-design strategy: treat non-interaction as the default, use additive composition to generate predictions, and focus measurements on identifying failures of this assumption.
The talk will be streamed via Teams, please contact carl.whitfield@manchester.ac.uk or igor.chernyavsky@manchester.ac.uk for the zoom link, or sign up to the mailing list.
To subscribe to the mailing list for this event series, please send an e-mail with the phrase “subscribe math-lifesci-seminar” in the message body to listserv@listserv.manchester.ac.uk
Speaker
Jason Hartford
Role: DKO Fellow
Organisation: University of Manchester
Travel and Contact Information
