Academic
Monday, March 6, 2017
Proving and Using Pseudorandomness
Workshop | March 6 – 10, 2017 every day | Calvin Laboratory (Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing)
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
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
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
Madeleine Flint
Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)
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
Graduate Student Seminar
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
Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), Berkeley APEC Study Center, Center for Korean Studies (CKS), East Asian Foundation
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
Center for Middle Eastern Studies
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
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 >
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
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
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
Industrial Engineering & Operations Research
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
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS)
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
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, College of Chemistry
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
Christina Ahmadjian, Professor, Hitotsubashi University
Steven Vogel, Professor, Political Science, UC Berkeley
Center for Japanese Studies (CJS)
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
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS)
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
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
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 >
