Past

The InFoMM CDT Group Meetings will follow the format of the OCIAM group meetings. We hope they will facilitate good communication between the Academic and Student community so that the research activities remain closely connected, opportunities for additional interaction are easily identified, and cross-fertilisation of ideas can be catalysed. 

Tmoslav Plesa: Chemical Reaction Systems with a Homoclinic Bifurcation: An Inverse Problem, 25+5 min;

John Ockendon: Wave Homogenisation, 10 min + questions; 

Hilary Ockendon: Sloshing, 10 min + questions
 

Given a family $F$ of elliptic curves defined over $Q$, we are interested in the set $H(Y)$ of curves $E$ in $F$, of positive rank, and for which the minimum of the canonical heights of non-torsion rational points on $E$ is bounded by some parameter $Y$. When one can show that this set is finite, it is natural to investigate statistical properties of arithmetic objects attached to elliptic curves in the set $H(Y)$. We will describe some problems related to this, and will state some results in the case of families of quadratic twists of a fixed elliptic curve.

Motivated by the European sovereign debt crisis, we propose a hybrid sovereign default model which combines an accessible part which takes into account the movement of the sovereign solvency and the impact of critical political events, and a totally inaccessible part for the idiosyncratic credit risk. We obtain closed-form formulas for the probability that the default occurs at political critical dates in a Markovian CEV process setting. Moreover, we introduce a generalized density framework for the hybrid default times and deduce the compensator process of default. Finally we apply the hybrid model and the generalized density to the valuation of sovereign bond and explain the significant jumps in the long-term government bond yield during the sovereign crisis.

When assigned with the task of extracting information from given image data the first challenge one faces is the derivation of a truthful model for both the information and the data. Such a model can be determined by the a-priori knowledge about the image (information), the data and their relation to each other. The source of this knowledge is either our understanding of the type of images we want to reconstruct and of the physics behind the acquisition of the data or we can thrive to learn parametric models from the data itself. The common question arises: how can we customise our model choice to a particular application? Or better how can we make our model adaptive to the given data?

Starting from the first modelling strategy this talk will lead us from nonlinear diffusion equations and subdifferential inclusions of total variation type functionals as the most successful image modeltoday to non-smooth second- and third-order variational models, with data models for Gaussian and Poisson distributed data as well as impulse noise. These models exhibit solution-dependent adaptivities in form of nonlinearities or non-smooth terms in the PDE or the variational problem, respectively. Applications for image denoising, inpainting and surface reconstruction are given. After a critical discussion of these different image and data models we will turn towards the second modelling strategy and propose to combine it with the first one using a PDE constrained optimisation method that customises a parametrised form of the model by learning from examples. In particular, we will consider optimal parameter derivation for total variation denoising with multiple noise distributions and optimising total generalised variation regularisation for its application in photography.

I will illustrate how to build families of expanders out of 'very mixing' actions on measure spaces. I will then define the warped cones and show how these metric spaces are strictly related with those expanders.

Point-free topology can often seem like an algebraic almost-topology, 
> not quite the same but still interesting to those with an interest in 
> it. There is also a tradition of it in computer science, traceable back 
> to Scott's topological model of the untyped lambda-calculus, and 
> developing through Abramsky's 1987 thesis. There the point-free approach 
> can be seen as giving new insights (from a logic of observations), 
> albeit in a context where it is equivalent to point-set topology. It was 
> in that tradition that I wrote my own book "Topology via Logic".
> 
> Absent from my book, however, was a rather deeper connection with logic 
> that was already known from topos theory: if one respects certain 
> logical constraints (of geometric logic), then the maps one constructs 
> are automatically continuous. Given a generic point x of X, if one 
> geometrically constructs a point of Y, then one has constructed a 
> continuous map from X to Y. This is in fact a point-free result, even 
> though it unashamedly uses points.
> 
> This "continuity via logic", continuity as geometricity, takes one 
> rather further than simple continuity of maps. Sheaves and bundles can 
> be understood as continuous set-valued or space-valued maps, and topos 
> theory makes this meaningful - with the proviso that, to make it run 
> cleanly, all spaces have to be point-free. In the resulting fibrewise 
> topology via logic, every geometric construction of spaces (example: 
> point-free hyperspaces, or powerlocales) leads automatically to a 
> fibrewise construction on bundles.
> 
> I shall present an overview of this framework, as well as touching on 
> recent work using Joyal's Arithmetic Universes. This bears on the logic 
> itself, and aims to replace the geometric logic, with its infinitary 
> disjunctions, by a finitary "arithmetic type theory" that still has the 
> intrinsic continuity, and is strong enough to encompass significant 
> amounts of real analysis.

In recent years there has been amazing progress in building
practical protocols for Multi-Party Computation (MPC).
So much progress in fact that there are now a number of
companies producing products utilizing this technology. A major issue with existing solutions is the high round
complexity of protocols involving more than two players. In this talk I will survey the main protocols for MPC
and recent ideas in how to obtain practical low round
complexity protocols.

I will describe a construction of the Weinstein symplectic category of Lagrangian correspondences in the context of shifted symplectic geometry. I will then explain how one can linearize this category starting from a "quantization" of  (-1)-shifted symplectic derived stacks: we assign a perverse sheaf to each (-1)-shifted symplectic derived stack (already done by Joyce and his collaborators) and a map of perverse sheaves to each (-1)-shifted Lagrangian correspondence (still conjectural).

A "hole" in a graph is an induced subgraph which is a cycle of length > 3. The perfect graph theorem says that if a graph has no odd holes and no odd antiholes (the complement of a hole), then its chromatic number equals its clique number; but unrestricted graphs can have clique number two and arbitrarily large chromatic number. There is a nice question half-way between them - for which classes of graphs is it true that a bound on clique number implies some (larger) bound on chromatic number? Call this being "chi-bounded".

Gyarfas proposed several conjectures of this form in 1985, and recently there has been significant progress on them. For instance, he conjectured

• graphs with no odd hole are chi-bounded (this is true);
• graphs with no hole of length >100 are chi-bounded (this is true);
• graphs with no odd hole of length >100 are chi-bounded; this is still open but true for triangle-free graphs.

We survey this and several related results. This is joint with Alex Scott and partly with Maria Chudnovsky.

We discuss moments of $L$-functions in function fields, in the hyperelliptic ensemble, focusing on the fourth moment of quadratic Dirichlet $L$-functions at the critical point. We explain how to obtain an asymptotic formula with some of the secondary main terms.

The classical Gehring lemma for elliptic equations with measurable coefficients states that an energy solution, which is initially assumed to be $H^1$ - Sobolev regular, is actually in a better Sobolev space space $W^{1,q}$ for some $q>2$. This a consequence of a self-improving property that so-called reverse Hölder inequality implies. In the case of nonlocal equations a self-improving effect appears: Energy solutions are also more differentiable. This is a new, purely nonlocal phenomenon, which is not present in the local case. The proof relies on a nonlocal version of the Gehring lemma involving new exit time and dyadic decomposition arguments. This is a joint work with G. Mingione and Y. Sire. 

In dimension three, convex surface theory implies that every tight contact structure on a connected sum M # N can be constructed as a connected sum of tight contact structures on M and N. I will explain some examples showing that this is not true in any dimension greater than three.  The proof is based on a recent higher-dimensional version of a classic result of Eliashberg about the symplectic fillings of contact manifolds obtained by subcritical surgery. This is joint work with Paolo Ghiggini and Klaus Niederkrüger.

We consider several classes of sequences of random variables whose Laplace transform presents the same type of \textit{splitting phenomenon} when suitably rescaled. Answering a question of Kowalski-Nikeghbali, we explain the apparition of a universal term, the \textit{Gamma factor}, by a common feature of each model, the existence of an auxiliary randomisation that reveals an independence structure.
The class of examples that belong to this framework includes random uniform permutations, random polynomials or random matrices with values in a finite field and the classical Sathe-Selberg theorems in probabilistic number theory. We moreover speculate on potential similarities in the Gaussian setting of the celebrated Keating and Snaith's moments conjecture. (Joint work with R. Chhaibi)
 

Motivated by a theorem of Barbour, we revisit some of the classical limit theorems in probability from the viewpoint of the Stein method. We setup the framework to bound Wasserstein distances between some distributions on infinite dimensional spaces. We show that the convergence rate for
the Poisson approximation of the Brownian motion is as expected proportional to λ −1/2 where λ is the intensity of the Poisson process. We also exhibit the speed of convergence for the Donsker Theorem and extend this result to enhanced Brownian motion.

 

I will give an introductory account of the zeta-functions for one-parameter families of CY manifolds. The aim of the talk is to point out that the zeta-functions corresponding to singular manifolds of the family correspond to modular forms. In order to give this introductory account I will give a lightning review of finite fields and of the p-adic numbers.