Past Events

Random high-dimensional cost functions and random probability distributions arise in a number of applied fields. For instance, in high-dimensional statistics, an M-estimator is the solution of a random optimization problem (the randomness being...

Sampling is a fundamental and widespread algorithmic primitive that lies at the heart of Bayesian inference and scientific computing, among other disciplines. Recent years have seen a flood of works aimed at laying down the theoretical underpinnings...

Chern-Simons theory, as introduced by Witten, is a three dimensional quantum gauge theory associated to a compact simple Lie group and a level. The mathematical model of this theory as a topological quantum field theory was introduced by Reshetikhin...

Abstract polytopes are a combinatorial generalisation of classical objects that were already studied by the greeks. They consist in posets satisfying some extra axioms. Their rank is roughly speaking the number of layers the poset has. When they have...

Curvature is one of the fundamental ingredients in differential geometry. People are increasingly interested in whether it is possible to think of combinatorial graphs as manifolds and a number of different notions of curvature have been proposed. I...

The Perceptron model was proposed as early as the 1950's as a toy model of a one-layer neural network. The basic model consists of a set of solutions (either the Hamming cube or the sphere of dimension n) and a set of constraints given by independent...

VRC01, VRC01LS, and VRC07-523LS are broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) that target the CD4 binding site of gp120 on the HIV-1 envelope. VRC01LS and VRC07-523LS are enhanced modifications of the VRC01 and VRC07 antibodies. Phase 1 clinical trials...

Stochastic variance reduction techniques have been influential for developing algorithms for minimization problems in the last decade whereas their use in more general problem templates has been limited. This talk will present a first order algorithm...

We investigate a self-interacting random walk, in a dynamically evolving environment, which is a random tree built by the walker itself, as it walks around. At time n=1,2,…n=1,2,…, right before stepping, the walker adds a random number (possibly zero...

A Dirichlet character over Fq(t) corresponds to a curve over Fq. Using this connection to geometry, we construct families of characters whose L-functions vanish (resp. does not vanish) at the central point. The existence of infinitely many vanishing...