(CRM-, Joint-) Colloquium Fridays 3:30pm, Room B005, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Ottawa Supported by

Coffee: Common Room, before the colloquium at 3pm.

(Carleton-uOttawa shuttle information)     (Colloquiums - Fall 2010)

Schedule:

Jan 28 (UOttawa) - Joint Colloquium

• Speaker: Anne Broadbent (Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo)
• Title: Entanglement in Quantum Protocols
• Abstract: Entanglement is one of the most powerful and mysterious quantum phenomena. In this talk, we discuss uses of entanglement in some quantum protocols. In a pseudo-telepathy game, a group of players sharing entanglement has a winning strategy, whereas classical players (not sharing entanglement) do not. Another application is the famous teleportation protocol, in which a quantum system in one location is disassembled, transported via entanglement, and re-assembled at a distant location. Finally, we will also show how teleportation, combined with a resource called anonymous entanglement, can be used for the anonymous transmission of quantum messages.

March 4 (UOttawa) - General interest

• Speaker: Robert Smith? (UOttawa)
• Title: The impact of media coverage on the transmission dynamics of human influenza
• Abstract: There is an urgent need to understand how the provision of information influences individual risk perception and how this in turn shapes the evolution of epidemics. Individuals are influenced by information in complex and unpredictable ways. Emerging infectious diseases, such as the recent swine flu epidemic, may be particular hotspots for a media-fueled rush to vaccination; conversely, seasonal diseases may receive little media attention, despite their high mortality rate, due to their perceived lack of newness. We formulate a deterministic transmission and vaccination model to invetigate the effects of media coverage on the transmission dynamics of influenza. The population is subdivided into different classes according to their disease status. The compartmental model includes the effect of media coverage on reporting the number of infections as well as the number of individuals successfully vaccinated. A threshold parameter (the basic reproductive ratio) is analytically derived and used to discuss the local stability of the disease-free steady state. The impact of costs that can be incurred, which include vaccination, education, implementation and campaigns on media coverage, are also investigated using optimal control theory. A simplified version of the model with pulse vaccination shows that the media can trigger a vaccinating panic if the vaccine is imperfect and simplified messages result in the vaccinated mixing with the infectives without regard to disease risk. In conclusion, the effects of media on an outbreak are complex. Simplified understandings of disease epidemiology, propogated through media soundbites, may make the disease significantly worse. This talk will be accessible to a general audience.

March 11 (Carleton, Room 4351 Herz. Lab.) - Joint Colloquium

• Speaker: Peter Glynn (Stanford)
• Title: Decision-making in the Presence of Uncertainty
• Abstract: The need to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty is part of the human condition. Such decisions affect the actions we take at an individual level, and also manifest themselves in the engineering, scientific, financial, and political environment in which we live. In this talk, we will discuss some of the challenges, ranging from formulation to computation, that arise in building useful models in such decision settings.

  Short Bio:
  Peter W. Glynn received his B.Sc (Hon) from Carleton University in 1978 and his Ph.D in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1982. He then joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he held a joint appointment between the Industrial Engineering Department and Mathematics Research Center, and courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Mathematics. In 1987, he returned to Stanford, where he joined the Department of Operations Research. He is now the Thomas Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Management Science and Engineering, and also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering. From 1999 to 2005, he served as Deputy Chair of the Department of Management Science and Engineering, and was Director of Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering from 2006 until 2010. He is a Fellow of INFORMS and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, has been co-winner of Best Publication Awards from the INFORMS Simulation Society in 1993 and 2008, was a co-winner of the Best (Biannual) Publication Award from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society in 2009, and was the co-winner of the John von Neumann Theory Prize from INFORMS in 2010. His research interests lie in computational probability, queuing theory, statistical inference for stochastic processes, and stochastic modeling.

March 25 (Carleton, Room 4351 Herz. Lab.) - Fields Distinguished Lectures

• Speaker: Don Dawson (Carleton)
• Title: Spatial structures and universality classes in stochastic systems
• Abstract: The classical invariance principle establishes that the scaling limit of a large class of discrete stochastic processes is given by Brownian motion. Expanding on this, the idea that the large space and time scale behaviour of many physical systems can be classified into "universality classes" and that the structure of such classes is highly dimension-dependent is one of the great developments in statistical physics. In the realm of population processes, universality classes related to super-Brownian motion have emerged from a surprising range of particle systems and random combinatorial objects. This lecture will present a review some of these developments. I will also describe ongoing work using the idea of hierarchical mean-field limit as one approach to understanding this phenomenon as well as to identify multitype generalizations of these universality classes.

  Biographical Data:
  Donald Dawson received his B.Sc.(Hon.) in Mathematics and Physics from McGill University in 1958 and his doctorate from MIT in 1963. He taught at both McGill University and Carleton University. He first came to Carleton in 1970 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor in 1999. He served as Director of the Fields Institute from 1996-2000 and as the President of the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability for 2003-2005. He served as Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Statistics (1980-87), Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics (1988-1993) and on the editorial Boards of the Annals of Probability and Electronic Journal of Probability. Professor Dawson gave the 1991 Gold Medal Lecture of the Statistical Society of Canada, the 1994 Jeffery-Williams Lecture of the Canadian Mathematical Society, an invited lecture at the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich, a plenary lecture at the 1996 World Congress of the Bernoulli Society in Vienna, and the Fields Institute Distinguished Lecture Series in the Statistical Sciences in 2003. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Institute of Mathematical Statistics and International Statistical Institute and received a Max Planck Award of the for International Cooperation from the Humboldt Foundation in 1996 and the CRM-Fields prize in 2004. He received an honourary degree Dr. Sci. from McGill University in 2005. He was elected to the Royal Society (London) in 2010. His research interests include probability and stochastic processes and their applications to complex systems, statistical physics, genetics and evolutionary biology. He has published over 100 scientific papers and 7 monographs and has supervised 27 Ph.D. students and 30 postdoctoral fellows.

April 1 (UOttawa) - CRM Distinguished Lecture

• Speaker: Rostislav Grigorchuk (Texas A&M University)
• Title: Aspects of growth in algebra.
• Abstract: The talk will present a survey of results and open problems about growth in algebra. Mostly we will focus our discussion on the growth of finitely generated groups, but related topics about growth of semigroups, graphs, and graded algebras will be touched as well. We will present as (relatively) old results (known and not very well known) and recent results, of the speaker and of other researches. This talk will be accessible to a general mathematical audience/graduate students.

  Biographical Data (from Wikipedia)

April 15 (UOttawa) - CRM Colloquium

• Speaker: Sandrine Dudoit (University of California, Berkeley)
• Title: Statistical Methods and Software for High-Throughput Gene Expression Experiments Using mRNA-Seq
• Abstract: This talk concerns statistical methods and software for the analysis of high-throughput transcriptome sequencing (mRNA-Seq) data, with emphasis on mapped reads from the Illumina platform. Specifically, we will discuss experimental design, exploratory data analysis (EDA), normalization, expression quantitation, and the detection of differential expression. This work is motivated by collaborative projects on the evolution of transcription in Saccharomyces, the regulation of alternative splicing in Drosophila melanogaster, and the molecular characterization of cancer.

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