University of Victoria

I'll begin by describing shifts of finite: topological dynamical systems based on some simple combinatorial data. These have played a fundamental role in hyperbolic dynamics. I will then describe a new construction of factors (quotients) of such...

Fairness in machine learning classification has been a topic of great interest given the increasing use of such classifiers in critical settings. There are many possible definitions of fairness and many potential sources of unfairness. Given this...

A Glass network is a system of first order ODEs with discontinuous right hand side coming from step function terms. The "ON/OFF" switching dynamics from the step functions makes Glass networks effective at modelling switching behaviour typical of...

This talk will introduce the topic of graph product structure theory. I will show that many graphs with bounded treewidth can be described as subgraphs of the strong product of a graph with smaller treewidth and a bounded-size complete graph. To this...

A spanning tree is a connected subgraph of a graph with no cycles. I will explain some well-known connection between such collection of trees and some Poissonian collection of loops, and a magical algorithm (known as Wilson's alorithm) to sample such...

Abstract: I will describe variational problems whose solutions imply statements about dynamical systems, as well as how relaxations of these variational problems often can be solved computationally using tools of polynomial optimization. The talk...

We prove that skew systems with a sufficiently expanding base have "approximate" statistical properties similar to random ergodic Markov chains. For example, they exhibit approximate exponential decay of correlations, meaning that the exponential...

The stochastic heat equation (driven space-time white noise) arises from interface growth dynamics via the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation and from the theory of disordered systems via continuum directed random polymers. Despite these physical relations...

In 1975, the physicists Imry and Ma predicted that the incorporation of a random field in low-dimensional spin systems leads to the rounding of first-order phase transitions. These predictions were rigorously established by Aizenman and Wehr in 1989...

I will present new, non-asymptotic bounds on the heights of random combinatorial trees and conditioned Bienaymé trees, as well as stochastic inequalities relating the heights of combinatorial trees with different degree sequences. The tool for most...