<< Monday, March 06, 2017 >>

## Monday, March 6, 2017

### Proving and Using Pseudorandomness

Workshop | March 6 – 10, 2017 every day |  Calvin Laboratory (Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing)

One theme of this workshop will be how to leverage weak pseudorandomness properties, fooling simple classes of tests, in order to derive stronger pseudorandomness properties related to more complex tests. In the setting of additive combinatorics, what is the minimal set of tests that primes have to satisfy in order to guarantee that they contain arithmetic progressions (or other structures)? For...   More >

### New Topological States of Matter: Platform for Emergent Dirac, Majorana and Weyl Fermions

Colloquium | March 6 | 1 LeConte Hall

Zahid Hasan, Princeton & LBL

Department of Physics

### Simons Institute Workshop: Proving and Using Pseudorandomness, 3/6--3/10

Seminar | March 6 | 9 a.m.-5 p.m. | Calvin Laboratory (Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing), Auditorium

Various, Various

Department of Mathematics

One theme of this workshop will be how to leverage weak pseudorandomness properties, fooling simple classes of tests, in order to derive stronger pseudorandomness properties related to more complex tests. In the setting of additive combinatorics, what is the minimal set of tests that primes have to satisfy in order to guarantee that they contain arithmetic progressions (or other structures)? For...   More >

### Civil and Environmental Engineering Departmental Seminar: Performance-Based Engineering: From Earthquakes to Durability and Multi-Hazards

Seminar | March 6 | 10-11 a.m. | 542 Davis Hall

Responding to engineering challenges of the magnitude created by climate change requires bridging disciplinary divides in assessing structural performance. The PEER framework for performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) is one example of a decision-oriented approach that combines efficient treatment of uncertainty with advanced models for structural performance.

### Seminar 251, Labor: “Migration, Commuting and Local Joblessness”

Seminar | March 6 | 12-2 p.m. |  2521 Channing Way (Inst. for Res. on Labor & Employment) | Note change in date, time, and location

Alan Manning, LSE

Department of Economics

Seminar | March 6 | 12-1:30 p.m. | 489 Minor Hall

Rachel Albert, O’Brein Lab; Paul Cullen, Flanagan Lab

### The Politics of Impeachment, Presidential Election, and Prospects for Foreign Policy in South Korea

Colloquium | March 6 | 12 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Chung-in Moon, Distinguished University Professor, Yonsei University

South Korea is mired in an imbroglio. Amidst the process of President Park Geun-hye’s impeachment, the 2017 presidential race has begun. Meanwhile, its foreign policy is in a total disarray. Whereas the Trump shock has produced an uncertain future for ROK-US alliance, inter-Korean relations hit rock bottom. Furthermore, China-South Korean relations soured over the issue of deployment of...   More >

### The Native and the Refugee

Presentation | March 6 | 12-1:30 p.m. | 340 Stephens Hall

Malek Rasamny

Please join the CMES for a talk by Malek Rasamny, a researcher, writer, filmmaker and programmer based in New York and Lebanon. Rasamny was a founding member of the Red Channels Film Collective and the LERFE space in Harlem, New York. He is the co-founder of The Native and the Refugee along with his collaborator Matt Peterson.

The Native and the Refugee is a multi-media film and research...   More >

### Differential Geometry Seminar: Ricci flow on manifolds with almost non-negative curvature operator

Seminar | March 6 | 1:10-2 p.m. | 939 Evans Hall

Richard Bamler, Berkeley

Department of Mathematics

A celebrated result of Boehm and Wilking states that a Ricci flow starting from a metric whose curvature operator is everywhere positive definite preserves the property of positive curvature operator and converges, modulo rescaling, to a quotient of the round sphere. In contrast, the condition of almost non-negative curvature operator — for example the condition that its smallest eigenvalue is...   More >

### Seminar 231, Public Finance: "Targeting with In-Kind Transfers: The Case of Medicaid Home Care"

Seminar | March 6 | 2-3:30 p.m. | 648 Evans Hall

Lee Lockwood, Northwestern

### Seminar 211, Economic History: "Nature Versus Nuture in Social Mobility: Evidence from 7 Generations in England, 1750-2016"

Seminar | March 6 | 2-3:30 p.m. | 639 Evans Hall

Greg Clark, University of California, Davis

Department of Economics

### Probabilistic Operator Algebra Seminar: Operators having bi-free central limit distributions

Seminar | March 6 | 3-5 p.m. | 736 Evans Hall

Wonhee Na, Texas A&M University

Department of Mathematics

In this talk, I will discuss joint work with Ken Dykema. From a bi-free central limit distribution, we have the completely non-normal operator l(h) + l(h)* + i (r(k) + r(k)*) on a subspace of the full Fock space F(H) ( h, k being vectors in H). We will find the principal function of this operator and its spectrum and essential spectrum as an application.

### “Evolution and the Dynamics of Prosocial Behavior”: Interdisciplinary Cognitive Science/Computational Cognition

Colloquium | March 6 | 3 p.m. | 5101 Tolman Hall

Alexander Stewart, University College London

Department of Psychology

### Xin Guo - Some recent progress on Mean Field Games

Seminar | March 6 | 3:30-5:30 p.m. | 3108 Etcheverry Hall

Xin Guo, University of California Berkeley

Mean Field Games (MFGs) is one of the most active research areas in stochastic controls and stochastic games, led by the pioneering works of Lasry and Lions (2007) and Huang, Malhame and Caines (2006). In this talk, I will provide a gentle introduction to this theory, with toy examples, together with some recent progress.

### BLISS Seminar: Graph information ratio

Seminar | March 6 | 4-5 p.m. | 400 Cory Hall

Lele Wang, Stanford University

Inspired by a problem in joint source-channel coding, we introduce a new notion of similarity between graphs, termed graph information ratio. We discuss various properties of this measure, including in particular metric structure and partial ordering of graphs, an information ratio power inequality, relations to graph homomorphism, algebraic identities and inequalities, and more.

### Revisiting the spliceosome

Seminar | March 6 | 4-5 p.m. | 106 Stanley Hall

Hiten Madhani, University of California, San Francisco

### Seminar 208, Microeconomics Theory: "The Simple Structure of Top Trading Cycles in School Choice: A Continuum Model"

Seminar | March 6 | 4-6 p.m. | 639 Evans Hall

Jacob Leshno, Columbia University

Department of Economics

### Corporate Governance Reform and the Toshiba Scandal: Did a New System Hide an Old Mess?

Colloquium | March 6 | 4-6 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Steven Vogel, Professor, Political Science, UC Berkeley

An ongoing financial reporting scandal has stunned and puzzled observers of Japanese corporate governance reform. Toshiba was one of the first companies to adopt so-called “US-style” corporate governance practices. How could a company that had seemed to think so carefully about good governance have ended up like this? Where was the board? This presentation considers the possibility that the...   More >

### Relaxing Bottlenecks for Fast Machine Learning

Seminar | March 6 | 4-5 p.m. | 306 Soda Hall

Christopher De Sa, Stanford University

In this talk, I will describe the mindful relaxation approach, and demonstrate how it can be applied to a specific bottleneck (parallel overheads), problem (inference), and algorithm (asynchronous Gibbs sampling).

### Seminar 271, Development: Mitigating the Risks of Financial Inclusion with Contract Terms: Evidence from Mexico

Seminar | March 6 | 4:10-5:30 p.m. | 648 Evans Hall

Aprajit Mahajan, UC Berkeley

Department of Economics

### Analysis and PDE Seminar: Asymptotic analysis of Fourier transform on the Heisenberg group when the vertical frequency tends to 0

Seminar | March 6 | 4:10-5 p.m. | 740 Evans Hall

Hajer Bahouri, Université Paris-Est Créteil

Department of Mathematics

In this joint work with Jean-Yves Chemin and Raphael Danchin, we propose a new approach of the Fourier transform on the Heisenberg group. The basic idea is to take advantage of Hermite functions so as to look at Fourier transform of integrable functions as mappings on the set $\tilde {\mathbb H}^d=\mathbb N^d\times \mathbb N^d\times \mathbb R\setminus \{0\}$ endowed with a suitable distance \$\hat...   More >