Dear Physics Community,
Please join us for The Morris Loeb Lectures in Physics 2014 at Harvard University
featuring a special guest Prof. Marc Mézard, Director, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
(
http://lptms.u-psud.fr/membres/mezard/)
Monday, April 28 @ 4:15pm, Colloquium in Jefferson 250, 17 Oxford Street, Cambridge (Tea
in the Physics Library, Jefferson 450 @ 3:30pm)
“The spin glass cornucopia”
For more than 30 years, the spin glass puzzle has stimulated a large activity in
statistical physics, and led to several breakthroughs. While the puzzle of spin glass
materials is still not fully solved, their theoretical analysis has created a very rich
conceptual framework, as well as powerful techniques, to study emergent properties of
strongly disordered and interacting systems. These have been successfully applied to a
broad spectrum of other disciplines, from finance to computer science and information
theory, where slow -glassy- dynamics and phase transitions play a key role. The talk will
survey this spin glass saga, focusing on its developments outside of physics.
Tuesday, April 29 @ 2:30pm, Jefferson 250, 17 Oxford Street, Cambridge
“Phase transitions in hard computer science problems”
A new field of research is rapidly expanding at the crossroad between statistical
physics, information theory and combinatorial optimization. It deals with problems which
are very important in each of these fields, likespin glasses, error correction, or
satisfiability. In recent years, it has been realized that physical phenomena, familiar
from glass phenomenology, occur in large classes of algorithms that have been developed to
study some of the hardest computer science problems. Realizing that extreme slowdown and
glassy phase transitions occur in computer programs is interesting both theoretically, as
it opens new perspectives to the study of algorithmic complexity, as well as practically
: it allows to develop new kind of efficient algorithms, inspired from insights obtained
through the “replica method” and the “cavity method’’. This talk will survey these recent
developments, focusing on the conceptual leap induced by the use of spin glass theory in
hard constraint satisfaction problems.
Wednesday, April 30 @ 2:00pm, Science Center Hall A, One Oxford Street, Cambridge
“Occam’s razor in massive data acquisition: a statistical physics approach”
Science is facing several challenges related to data explosion. How to acquire a large
amount of information in short time? How to extract significant data? In recent years,
studies in compressed sensing have triggered very interesting developments on these
issues. Compressed sensing consists in sampling a sparse signal at low rate, and later
using computational power for its exact reconstruction, so that only the necessary
information is measured. Currently used reconstruction techniques are, however, limited to
acquisition rates larger than the true density of the signal. We shall describe new
procedures, based on a statistical physics analysis, which is able to reconstruct exactly
the signal with a number of measurements that approaches the theoretical limit for large
systems.
Please contact me if you have any questions. We’re looking forward to seeing you at the
lectures.
Kind regards,
Monika
Monika Bankowski | Administrator to the Chair | Department of Physics| Harvard
University
17 Oxford St.| Jefferson Lab. Room 370 | Cambridge, MA 02138 | Tel: (617) 495-2866
Edward Farhi
farhi(a)mit.edu
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