Newsletter: Events at Clare Hall, Summer 2024
Dear Clare Hall members and friends,
Please find below a list of events taking place this week and beyond, to which you are warmly invited.
Dates for your Diary
17 July – 18 September 2024 at 6pm
Clare Hall Summer Seminars
We are delighted to invite you to the 2024 Clare Hall Summer Seminar Series. This is an opportunity for Clare Hall Fellows, Visiting Fellows and Life Members to share topics of their research with the Clare Hall audience. This event will take place in the Clare Hall Meeting Room from 6 to 7 pm right before Wednesday Formal Halls. Each talk will last about 20 minutes followed by comments and questions amidst drinks. The Summer Seminar Series has been organised by Li Tang. The full list of speakers can be found here.
The next speaker, on 18 September, is Prof Frances Spalding, Emeritus Fellow, Chair of Clare Hall Art Committee, speaking on ‘A Brief look at Bloomsbury Group and its Shifting Reputation’.
28 September 2024 from 11am-12pm
Alumni Festival: An AI assistant for football tactics
The Alumni Festival is a weekend of discovery, intellectual adventure and reconnection. Rediscover your connection with this remarkable city as you hear the latest insights from some of Cambridge’s leading academics. Explore their current research through a collection of talks, panel discussions and tours, and learn how your fellow alumni are pioneering solutions to global challenges.
As part of the festival, Clare Hall Associate Dr Petar Velickovic will be giving a talk in the Richard Eden Suite on using AI for football tactics.
Abstract: Identifying key patterns of tactics implemented by rival teams, and developing effective responses, lies at the heart of modern football. However, doing so algorithmically remains an open research challenge.
To address this unmet need, we propose TacticAI, an AI football tactics assistant developed and evaluated in close collaboration with domain experts from Liverpool FC. We focus on analysing corner kicks, as they offer coaches the most direct opportunities for interventions and improvements. TacticAI incorporates both a predictive and a generative component, allowing the coaches to effectively sample and explore alternative player setups for each corner kick routine and to select those with the highest predicted likelihood of success. We validate TacticAI on a number of relevant benchmark tasks: predicting receivers and shot attempts and recommending player position adjustments. The utility of TacticAI is validated by aqualitative study conducted with football domain experts at Liverpool FC. We show that TacticAI’s model suggestions are not only indistinguishable from realtactics, but also favoured over existing tactics 90% of the time, and that TacticAI offers an effective corner kick retrieval system. TacticAI achieves these results despite the limited availability of gold-standard data, achieving data efficiency through geometric deep learning.
5 October 2024 at 7:30pm
L’Isola | Roma: Il Palazzo
Join us for the first Music Committee concert of the 2024-2025 season, featuring the Cambridge-based musical group, L’Isola.
Secular music from 16th C Rome. Composers including de Macque, Locatelli, Zoilo, Ferrabosco, Marenzio, Anerio. L’Isola always aim to sing directly from original 16th Century partbooks. Much of this repertoire is likely never to have been heard on the concert platform in the UK, prior to this performance.
The Roman Compagnia were an informal association (effectively an Italian academy) in the 1580s which included many of the finest musicians present in Rome during this period. Italian academies allowed artistic patrons and enthusiasts the opportunity to hear, discuss or analyse music in the finest houses and palaces; an environment not too dissimilar from our collegiate one nowadays. The Compagnia are specifically referenced in a 1589 print (Le Gioie) but the academic consensus is that the group existed in a more informal manner from the 1570s onwards. This concert will include brief talks about the ensemble, their music, and the cultural conditions of its time and place.
Current Exhibitions
Ongoing
The Bell Collection of British Studio Pottery, 1920-1980
A rotating display of some 320 pieces of studio ceramics. Learn more at https://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/bellcollection/
Activities and Societies
Monday 7 October, 8pm in the Meeting Room
Clare Hall Book Club
Join the College’s Book Club for their next meeting, where they will be reading The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li.
All College members are welcome to attend in-person, meeting in Clare Hall’s Meeting Room, or via Zoom. If you are not on the mailing list and would like to be, please send an email to gloria.carnevali@icloud.com, confirming your Clare Hall connection and putting the following as the email title: I would like to join the Book Club mailing list.
11 September – 4 December 2024 at 12:15pm
Lunchtime Yoga Sessions
We are delighted to host regular lunchtime yoga sessions on Wednesdays in the Richard Eden Suite, starting from 11 September, from 12:15-12:45pm. Sessions will continue through the Michaelmas term, read more and sign up here.
8 July – 16 September 2024 at 12:15pm
Lunchtime Pilates Sessions
We are delighted to host lunchtime Pilates classes during the summer. Pilates is a form of low-impact exercise that aims to strengthen muscles while improving postural alignment and flexibility. The sessions will be held on Mondays from 12:15-13:00 (see below for exact locations and dates). Please bring your own mat, and arrive 5-10 minutes early to help prepare the room.
Check out the full list of dates and the link to sign up on this page.
Various Dates
Choir Practice
A reminder that Clare Hall Choir practice takes place in Robinson College Chapel every Monday (in term-time, but not always restricted to the official Cambridge term dates) from 7:30-9pm. New members are always welcome, and no previous singing or musical experience is necessary. The only requirement is that you want to sing and have fun doing it! If you are interested in joining, please email Ben de Souza, the Choir’s Director, who is a Clare Hall Associate, freelance choral conductor and accordionist: bd402@cam.ac.uk.
Recent recordings of the choir can also be found on our YouTube channel.