Speaker: Andrea Montanari (Stanford) Title: A Mean Field View of the Landscape of Two-Layers Neural Networks Abstract: Multi-layer neural networks are among the most powerful models in machine learning and yet, the fundamental reasons for this success defy mathematical understanding. Learning a neural network requires to optimize a highly non-convex and high-dimensional objective (risk function), a problem which […]

Speaker: Ramesh Narayan, Department of Astronomy, Harvard University Title: Black Holes and Naked Singularities Abstract: Black Hole solutions in General Relativity contain Event Horizons and Singularities. Astrophysicists have discovered two populations of black hole candidates in the Universe: stellar-mass objects with masses in the range 5 to 30 solar masses, and supermassive objects with masses […]

Speaker: Pablo Parillo (MIT) Title: Graph Structure in Polynomial Systems: Chordal Networks Abstract: The sparsity structure of a system of polynomial equations or an optimization problem can be naturally described by a graph summarizing the interactions among the decision variables. It is natural to wonder whether the structure of this graph might help in computational algebraic geometry […]

Speaker: Washington Tayor (MIT) Title: On the fibration structure of known Calabi-Yau threefolds Abstract: In recent years, there is increasing evidence from a variety of directions, including the physics of F-theory and new generalized CICY constructions, that a large fraction of known Calabi-Yau manifolds have a genus one or elliptic fibration. In this talk I will describe […]