Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Non-smooth dynamics in the environment and data science

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, October 18, 2017 - 12:10 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Rachel KuskeGeorgia Tech
This talk will cover some recent and preliminary results in the area of non-smooth dynamics, with connections to applications that have been overlooked. Much of the talk will present open questions for research projects related to this area.

How to stretch taffy most efficiently?

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - 12:10 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Balazs StrennerGA Tech
Taffy pullers are machines designed to stretch taffy. They can modeled by surface homeomorphisms, therefore they can be studied by geometry and topology. I will talk about how efficiency of taffy pullers can be defined mathematically and what some of the open questions are. I will also talk about Macaw, a computer program I am working on, which does related computations and which will hopefully help answer some of the open questions.

How to stretch taffy most efficiently?

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - 12:10 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Balasz StrennerGeorgia Tech
Taffy pullers are machines designed to stretch taffy. They can modeled by surface homeomorphisms, therefore they can be studied by geometry and topology. I will talk about how efficiency of taffy pullers can be defined mathematically and what some of the open questions are. I will also talk about Macaw, a computer program I am working on, which does related computations and which will hopefully help answer some of the open questions.

Academic Webpage Workshop

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, September 20, 2017 - 12:10 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Tim DuffGA Tech
An academic webpage allows you to better communicate your work and help you become more recognizable in your research community. We'll talk about the very basics of how to set one up and what you should put on it----no prior experience necessary! Please bring a laptop if you can---as usual, refreshments will be provided.

Antibiotic Cycling: A Cautionary Tale

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - 12:10 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Howie WeissGA Tech
Antibiotics have greatly reduced morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases. Although antibiotic resistance is not a new problem, it breadth now constitutes asignificant threat to human health. One strategy to help combat resistance is to find novel ways of using obsolete antibiotics. For strains of E. coli and P. aeruginosa, pairs of antibiotics have been found where evolution of resistance to one increases, sometimes significantly, sensitivity to the other. These researchers have proposed cycling such pairs to treat infections. Similar strategies are being investigated to treat cancer. Using systems of ODEs, we model several possible treatment protocols using pairs and triples of such antibiotics, and investigate the speed of ascent of multiply resistant mutants. Rapid ascent would doom this strategy. This is joint work with Klas Udekwu (Stockholm University).

Summer Program for Operations Research Technology (SPORT)

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - 12:10 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Virginia AhaltDoD
SPORT is a 12-week *PAID* summer internship offered by the National Security Agency (NSA) that provides 8 U.S. Citizen graduate students the opportunity to apply their technical skills to current, real-world operations research problems at the NSA. SPORT looks for strong students in operations research, applied math, computer science, data science, industrial and systems engineering, and other related fields. Program Highlights: -- Paid internship (12 weeks, late May to mid-August 2018) -- Applications accepted September 1 - October 31, 2017 -- Opportunity to apply operations research, mathematics, statistics, computer science, and/or engineering skills -- Real NSA mission problems -- Paid annual and sick leave, housing available, most travel costs covered -- Flexible work schedule -- Opportunity to network with other Intelligence Agencies

Random Discrete Structures: a teaser

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - 12:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Lutz WarnkeGeorgia Tech
In Fall 2017 I will teach `Random Discrete Structures', which is an advanced course in discrete probability and probabilistic combinatorics. The goal of this informal lecture is to give a brief outline of the topics we intend to cover in this course. Buzz-words include Algorithmic Local Locasz Lemma, Concentration Inequalities, Differential Equation Method, Interpolation method and Advanced Second Moment Method.

What is Heegaard Floer homology?

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - 12:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Jen HomGeorgia Tech
Defined in the early 2000's by Ozsvath and Szabo, Heegaard Floer homology is a package of invariants for three-manifolds, as well as knots inside of them. In this talk, we will describe how work from Poul Heegaard's 1898 PhD thesis, namely the idea of a Heegaard splitting, relates to the definition of this invariant. We will also provide examples of the kinds of questions that Heegaard Floer homology can answer. These ideas will be the subject of the topics course that I am teaching in Fall 2017.

Groups Actions on Spanning Trees II

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - 12:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Chi Ho YuenGeorgia Tech
I will continue the discussion on the group actions of the graph Jacobian on the set of spanning trees. After reviewing the basic definitions, I will explain how polyhedral geometry leads to a new family of such actions. These actions can be described combinatorially, but proving that they are simply transitive uses geometry in an essential way. If time permits, I will also explain the following surprising connection: the canonical group action for a plane graph (via rotor-routing or Bernardi process) is related to the canonical tropical geometric structure of its dual graph. This is joint work with Spencer Backman and Matt Baker.

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