Past Events

Markov decision problems and reinforcement learning have been active research areas in the past decade. Compared with the rapid algorithmic developments, the linear/convex programming formulations of the Markov decision problem are less well-known...

Topological quantum field theories (TQFTs) are one of several mathematical approaches to quantum field theory in physics. They were introduced by Atiyah in the 1980s. The cobordism hypothesis, proposed by Baez and Dolan in the 1990s, is a statement...

The data association problem is the difficult part of the multi-object tracking problem. The problem is to: (i) classify measurements (e.g., position, shape, etc) as true positives or false positives, ( ii) classify tracked objects as observed (i.e...

Kummer theory is a classical theory about radical extensions of fields in the case where suitable roots of unity are present in the base field. Motivated by problems close to Artin's primitive root conjecture, we have investigated the degree of...

I will discuss my joint work with José Carrillo on a large family of Riesz-type singular interaction potentials with anisotropy in two dimensions. Their associated global energy minimizers are given by explicit formulas whose supports are determined...

Deep learning's success has revealed a number of phenomena that appear to conflict with classical inuitions in the fields of optimization and statistics. First, the objective functions formulated in deep learning are highly nonconvex but are...

First example of applying tensor optimization to combinatorial problems was shown in IPCO 1992: pages 406-420. We improve and strengthen those results in several ways and obtain computational results on three problems – graph partitioning...

The self-organization of ordered cortical microtubule arrays plays an important role in the development of plant cells.This is observed to emerge from a combination various factors such as microtubule-microtubule interactions, nucleation, and...

As the underlying configuration behind many elegant finite structures, partial difference sets have been intensively studied in design theory, finite geometry, coding theory, and graph theory. In the first part of this talk, I will showcase that...

In this talk we will talk about explicit estimates for character sums which have allowed us to find explicit estimates for the least quadratic non-residue and other related problems.