Cynthia Dwork will speak on Privacy in the Land of Plenty
Institution:
Microsoft Research
Time:
Monday, February 9, 2015 - 4:00pm
Location:
DBH 6011
The reading group won't meet this week, but participants are encouraged to attend the 4 pm talk on "Privacy in the Land of Plenty" in DB 6011 by Cynthia Dwork:
We will continue discussing the paper "Bivariate Polynomials Modulo Composites and their Applications" by Dan Boneh and Henry Corrigan-Gibbs https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/719.pdf
We will talk about aperiodic tilings (such as Penrose tilings) and quasicrystals, and will see how questions on spectral and quantum dynamical properties of quasicrystals lead to questions on Cantor sets, singular measures, and hyperbolic dynamical systems.
More than 30,000 papers are published each year
in which modern density functional calculations are performed.
However, there is presently no systematic route to finding useful
approximations. Over 40 years ago, Lieb and Simon demonstrated
that the original version of density functional theory, Thomas-Fermi
theory, becomes relatively exact in a very particular
non-relativistic limit of large electron number. I will explain why I believe this
holds the key to a systematic treatment of such approximations, and
what my group has done in the last 8 years to use this insight.
After discussing a few examples of herding and flocking, we review the mean field game paradigm as introduced by Lasry and Lions. Using a probabilistic reformulation of the problem, we demonstrate how the solutions of these models can be identified with solutions of forward - backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDEs) of McKean-Vlasov type. We give existence and uniqueness results for a large class of these FBSDEs and if time permits, we discuss the similarities and differences with the solutions of the optimal control of McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations
Metastable transitions are rare events, such as bistable switching, that occur under weak noise conditions, causing dramatic shifts in the expression of a gene. Within a gene circuit, one or more genes randomly switch between regulatory states, each having a different mRNA transcription rate. The circuit is self regulating when the proteins it produces affect the rate of switching between gene regulatory states. Under weak noise conditions, the deterministic forces are much stronger than fluctuations from gene switching and protein synthesis. A general tool used to describe metastability is the quasi stationary analysis (QSA). A large deviation principle is derived so that the QSA can explicitly account for random gene switching without using an adiabatic limit or diffusion approximation, which are unreliable and inaccurate for metastable events.This allows the existing asymptotic and numerical methods that have been developed for continuous Markov processes to be used to analyze the full model.
What can a computer do? Can it calculate any function? What if time and space are finite resources? What is the fastest-growing sequence of numbers and what does it have to do with all this? I will discuss the notion of a Turing machine and will answer some of these questions by explaining the theories of computability and complexity.