Oxford

Optimisation in 1D is far simpler than multidimensional optimisation and this is largely due to the notion of a bracket. A bracket is a trio of points such that the middle point is the one with the smallest objective function value (of the three). The existence of a bracket is sufficient to guarantee that a continuous function has a local minimum within the bracket. The most stable 1D optimisation methods, such as Golden Section or Brent's Method, make use of this fact. The mentality behind these methods is to maintain a bracket at all times, all the while finding smaller brackets until the local minimum can be guaranteed to lie within a sufficiently small range. For smooth functions, Brent's method in particular converges quickly with a minimum of function evaluations required. However, when applied to a piece-wise smooth functions, it achieves its realistic worst case convergence rate. In this presentation, I will present a new method which uses ideas from Brent and Golden Section, while being designed to converge quickly for piece-wise smooth functions.

Supergravity backgrounds are an essential ingredient in string theory or field theories via AdS/CFT. The simplest example of a 4d, N=1 background is the product of four-dimensional Minkowski space with a seven-dimensional manifold with G_2 holonomy in M-theory. For more complicated backgrounds where we allow non-zero fluxes, the supersymmetry conditions can be rephrased in terms of G-structure data. The geometry of these backgrounds is often complicated and their general features are not well understood.

In this talk, I will define the analogue of G_2 geometry for generic 4d, N=1 backgrounds with flux in both type II and eleven-dimensional supergravity. The geometry is characterised by a G-structure in 'exceptional generalised geometry' that includes G_2 structures and Hitchin's generalised geometry as subcases. Supersymmetry is then equivalent to integrability of the structures, which appears as an involutivity condition and a moment map for diffeomorphisms and gauge transformations. I will show how this works in a few simple examples and discuss how this can be used to understand general properties of supersymmetric backgrounds.

 

The notion of a higher Segal object was introduces by Dyckerhoff and Kapranov as a general framework for studying (higher) associativity inherent
in a wide range of mathematical objects. Most of the examples are related to Hall algebra type constructions, which include quantum groups. We describe a construction that assigns to a simplicial object S a datum H(S)  which is naturally interpreted as a "d-lax A-infinity algebra” precisely when S is a (d+1)-Segal object. This extends the extensively studied d=2 case.

Fireshape is a shape optimization library based on finite elements. In this talk I will describe how Florian Wechsung and I developed Fireshape and will share my reflections on lessons learned through the process.

Neural Network algorithms have achieved unprecedented performance in image recognition over the past decade. However, their application in real world use-cases, such as self driving cars, raises the question of whether it is safe to rely on them.

We generally associate the robustness of these algorithms with how easy it is to generate an adversarial example: a tiny perturbation of an image which leads it to be misclassified by the Neural Net (which classifies the original image correctly). Neural Nets are strongly susceptible to such adversarial examples, but when the architecture of the target neural net is unknown to the attacker it becomes more difficult to generate these examples efficiently.

In this Black-Box setting, we frame the generation of an adversarial example as an optimisation problem solvable via derivative free optimisation methods. Thus, we introduce an algorithm based on the BOBYQA model-based method and compare this to the current state of the art algorithm.

We prove that every rational homology cobordism class in the subgroup generated
by lens spaces contains a unique connected sum of lens spaces whose first homology embeds in
any other element in the same class. As a consequence we show that several natural maps to
the rational homology cobordism group have infinite rank cokernels, and obtain a divisibility
condition between the determinants of certain 2-bridge knots and other knots in the same
concordance class. This is joint work with Daniele Celoria and JungHwan Park.

In a recent paper, Basterra, Bobkova, Ponto, Tillmann and Yeakel defined
topological operads with homological stability (OHS) and proved that the
group completion of an algebra over an OHS is weakly equivalent to an
infinite loop space.

In this talk, I shall outline a construction which to an algebra A over
an OHS associates a new infinite loop space. Under mild conditions on
the operad, this space is equivalent as an infinite loop space to the
group completion of A. This generalises a result of Wahl on the
equivalence of the two infinite loop space structures constructed by
Tillmann on the classifying space of the stable mapping class group. I
shall also talk about an application of this construction to stable
moduli spaces of high-dimensional manifolds in thesense of Galatius and
Randal-Williams.

We derive sharp bounds for the accuracy of approximate eigenvectors (Ritz vectors) obtained by the Rayleigh-Ritz process for symmetric eigenvalue problems. Using information that is available or easy to estimate, our bounds improve the classical Davis-Kahan sin-theta theorem by a factor that can be arbitrarily large, and can give nontrivial information even when the sin-theta theorem suggests that a Ritz vector might have no accuracy at all. We also present extensions in three directions, deriving error bounds for invariant subspaces, singular vectors and subspaces computed by a (Petrov-Galerkin) projection SVD method, and eigenvectors of self-adjoint operators on a Hilbert space.

Many time-dependent PDEs -- KdV, Burgers, Gray-Scott, Allen-Cahn, Navier-Stokes and many others -- combine a higher-order linear term with a lower-order nonlinear term.  This talk will review the method of exponential integrators for solving such problems with better than 2nd-order accuracy in time.