Bake Your Thesis

Date: 21 February 2024

On the 21st of February, we returned for the second year of the Bake Your Thesis competition within the School of Mathematics and the School of Computer Science. Unlike the usual format of presenting research, in this competition, participants create a bake for their research theme, a particular result, or their research discipline. To judge the bakes we invited members of staff from Mathematics and the School of Computer Science, two from each school, for the primary vote. Fellow PhD students and members of staff were also invited to attend and cast an audience vote.

We had five judges, two for each of the schools and the winner from last years competition - Dr Thomas Woolley, Dr Ana Ros Camacho, Dr Martin Caminada, Dr Kathryn Jones, and Layla Sadeghi Namaghi.

Bakes were entered by the following PhD Students:

• Straight flush: Using millionaire shortbread to visualise model feature importance – Jack Furby
• Quantum Error Correcting Cake - Naomi Wray
• Towards real world Super Resolution trained on synthetic images generated by Stable Diffusion - Stephen Miles
• Pack a Punch - Vasilis Ieropoulos
• Algebra Object Chocolate Hunt - Sam Hannah
• Meringue Matrix Magic: A Sweet Solution to Mathematical Cravings - Alesia Zverovich
• Determining fixed-length paths in edge-weighted bakes - Daniel Hambly
• Complex system of systems - Jenny

All the bakes were amazing, but there can only be one winner per category. This year the winners were:

• Star Baker - Sam Hannah
• Runner up - Naomi Wray
• Audience vote - Alexandra Zverovich
• Honourable mentions - Jenny and Vasilis Ieropoulos