Past Events

We consider a random walk on the complete graph. The walk experiences competing self-repulsion and self-attraction, as well as a variable length. Variation of the parameters governing the self-attraction and the variable length leads to a rich phase...

A group is said to be torsion-free if it has no elements of finite order. An example is the group, under composition, of self-homeomorphisms (continuous maps with continuous inverses) of the interval I = [0, 1] fixed on the boundary {0, 1}. In fact...

Epithelial cells organize themselves into tubes for the necessary functions of gas and nutrient transport, and the production and secretion of hormones and enzymes. Such tubes result from the organization and collective motion of a flat sheet of...

In this talk I will introduce the quantum phase-estimation problem as well as the iterative algorithm by Kitaev that is commonly used to solve it. I show how Kitaev's algorithm can be modified to obtain an asymptotically minimal sampling complexity...

Let omega(n) denote the number of distinct prime divisors of n. Let W(m) be a random integer chosen uniformly from the set of natural numbers less than or equal to m. Let X(m) be omega(W(m)). The celebrated Erdos-Kac theorem asserts that if the...

The Combinatorial Potlatch is an irregularly scheduled, floating, one-day conference. It has been held for many years at various locations around Puget Sound and southern British Columbia, and is an opportunity for combinatorialists in the region to...

Many results in extremal graph theory can be formulated as inequalities on graph densities. While many inequalities are known,many more are conjectured. A standard tool to establish an inequality is to write the expression whose nonnegativity needs...

Swimming bacteria with helical flagella are self-propelled micro-swimmers in nature, and the swimming strategies of such bacteria vary depending on the number and the position of flagella on the cell body. In this talk, I will introduce two...

Deep learning lies at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution. Stunning successes has been achieved by deep learning for challenging tasks such as image classification. Yet, current deep learning implementations have a tendency to be...

There is no shortage of challenges in building self-driving cars and one of the key challenges is the data-availability. In this talk, we will address the challenges in data collection, management, labeling, and validation in the autonomous vehicle...