Past Events
Scientific, Colloquia
UBC Mathematics of Information Colloquium: Sinho Chewi
February 3, 2023
University of British Columbia
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...
Scientific, Seminar
USask PIMS Geometry and Physics (GAP) Seminar: Matthew B. Young
February 2, 2023
University of Saskatchewan
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...
Scientific, Seminar
SFU Discrete Math and OR Seminar: Dimitri Leemans
February 2, 2023
Simon Fraser University
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...
Scientific, Colloquia
PIMS MSS Colloquium: Stefan Steinberger
February 2, 2023
University of Alberta
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...
Scientific, Seminar
UVic Dynamics and Probability Seminar: Will Perkins
February 1, 2023
University of Victoria
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...
Scientific, Seminar
UBC Math Bio Seminar: Jonah Brooks Hall
February 1, 2023
University of British Columbia
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...
Scientific, Seminar
UBC Mathematics of Information Seminar: Ahmet Alacaoglu
February 1, 2023
University of British Columbia
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...
Scientific, Seminar
UBC Probability Seminar: János Engländer
February 1, 2023
University of British Columbia
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...
Scientific, Seminar
L-functions in Analytic Number Theory: Wanlin Li
February 1, 2023
University of Lethbridge
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...
Scientific, Seminar
The PIMS Postdoctoral Fellow Seminar: Nabarun Deb
February 1, 2023
University of British Columbia
In recent years, the problem of optimal transport has received significant attention in statistics and machine learning due to its powerful geometric properties. In this talk, we introduce the optimal transport problem and present concrete...