Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We are often forced to make important decisions with imperfect and incomplete data. In model-based inference, our efforts to extract useful information from data are aided by models of what occurs where we have no observations: examples range from climate prediction to patient-specific medicine. In many cases, these models can take the form of systems of PDEs with critical-yet-unknown parameter fields, such as initial conditions or material coefficients of heterogeneous media. A concrete example that I will present is to make predictions about the Antarctic ice sheet from satellite observations, when we model the ice sheet using a system of nonlinear Stokes equations with a Robin-type boundary condition, governed by a critical, spatially varying coefficient. This talk will present three aspects of the computational stack used to efficiently estimate statistics for this kind of inference problem. At the top is an posterior-distribution approximation for Bayesian inference, that combines Laplace's method with randomized calculations to compute an optimal low-rank representation. Below that, the performance of this approach to inference is highly dependent on the efficient and scalable solution of the underlying model equation, and its first- and second- adjoint equations. A high-level description of a problem (in this case, a nonlinear Stokes boundary value problem) may suggest an approach to designing an optimal solver, but this is just the jumping-off point: differences in geometry, boundary conditions, and otherconsiderations will significantly affect performance. I will discuss how the peculiarities of the ice sheet dynamics problem lead to the development of an anisotropic multigrid method (available as a plugin to the PETSc library for scientific computing) that improves on standard approaches.At the bottom, to increase the accuracy per degree of freedom of discretized PDEs, I develop adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) techniques for large-scale problems. I will present my algorithmic contributions to the p4est library for parallel AMR that enable it to scale to concurrencies of O(10^6), as well as recent work commoditizing AMR techniques in PETSc.

An algorithm to compute chi-y genera of generic complete intersections in algebraic tori has already been known since the work of Danilov and Khovanskii in 1978, yet a closed formula has been given only very recently by Di Rocco, Haase, and Nill. In my talk, I will show how this formula simplifies considerably after an extension of scalars. I will give an algebraic explanation for this phenomenon using the Grothendieck rings of vector bundles on toric varieties. We will then see how the tropical Chern character gives rise to a refined tropicalization, which retains the good properties of the usual, unrefined tropicalization.

We prove a discrete Beurling estimate for the harmonic measure in a wedge in $\mathbf{Z}^2$, and use it to show that Diffusion Limited Aggregation (DLA) in a wedge of angle smaller than $\pi/4$ stabilizes. This allows to consider the infinite DLA as a finite time growth process and questions about the number of arms, growth and dimension. I will present some conjectures and open problems. This is joint work with Ron Rosenthal (Technion) and Yuan Zhang (Pekin University).