Condensed Matter Seminar: "Clogging and anti-clogging in biological networks"
Marcus Roper (UCLA)
Clogging, or congestion, is usually assumed to be the enemy of efficient transport, and a lot of energy is expended by human engineers to eliminate or tame clogging in transport networks -- whether they carry…
Astro Seminar: "The Challenge of Predicting the Clustering of Matter in the Era of High-Precision Cosmology"
Pier Stefano Corasaniti (LUTH, Observatoire de Paris)
In the future a new generation of galaxy surveys will probe the cosmic distribution of matter across an unprecedented range of scales and redshifts potentially shedding new light on the nature of the invisible…
Math-Bio seminar: "The Evolution of Distributed Sensing and Collective Computation in Animal Populations"
George Hagstrom, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University
Many animal groups exhibit rapid, coordinated collective motion. Yet, the evolutionary forces that cause such collective responses to evolve are poorly understood. Here we develop analytical methods and evolutionary…
Dissertation Defense: "A Structural Perspective on Disordered Solids"
Sam Schoenholz (UPenn)
Department Colloquium: "Challenges for Cosmology on Galaxy Scales"
Benoit Famaey (Strasbourg Observatory)
While there is indisputable observational evidence for a new degree of freedom behaving as a collisionless fluid of particles on large scales, i.e. dark matter, there is no such solid evidence on galaxy scales. On…
Math-Bio seminar: "Local Shape from Shading with a Generic Constraint"
Benjamin Kunsberg, Brown University
Humans have a remarkable ability to infer shape from shading (SFS) information. In computer vision this is often formulated with a Lambertian reflectance function, but it remains under-posed and incompletely solved…
Astro Seminar: "Probing Dark Energy with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME)"
Richard Shaw (University of British Columbia)
CHIME will use the 21cm emission line of neutral hydrogen to map large-scale structure between redshifts of 0.8 and 2.5. By measuring Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) we will place constraints on the dark energy…
Professor Gary Gibbons: "Introduction to Supergravity"
Gary Gibbons, Visiting Distinguished Professor (Cambridge, UK)
Supergravity is a theory of gravity incorporating a super-symmetry", that is a symmetry between Fermions and Bosons. The boson in question is the graviton which carries spin 2 and its fermionic partner is the…
Math-Bio seminar: "Predicting the evolution of influenza"
Michael Lässig, University of Cologne
The human flu virus undergoes rapid evolution, which is driven by interactions with its host immune system. We describe the evolutionary dynamics by a fitness model based on two phenotypes of the virus: protein…