SIAM Student Chapter Seminar

• When: Most Friday at 11:30am
• Where: 901 Van Vleck Hall
• Organizers: Xiao Shen
• Faculty advisers: Jean-Luc Thiffeault, Steve Wright
• To join the SIAM Chapter mailing list: email [join-siam-chapter@lists.wisc.edu].

Fall 2019

date	speaker	title
Sept. 27, Oct. 4	Xiao Shen (Math)	The corner growth model
Oct. 11	no seminar
Oct. 18	Bhumesh Kumar (EE)	Non-stationary Stochastic Approximation
Oct. 25	Max Bacharach (Math)	Coalescent with Recombination
Nov. 1	no seminar
Nov. 8

Abstracts

Sep 27, Oct 4: Xiao Shen (Math)

The corner growth model

Imagine there is an arbitrary amount of donuts attached to the integer points of Z^2. The goal is to pick an optimal up-right path which allows you to eat as much donuts as possible along the way. We will look at some basic combinatorial observations, and how specific probability distribution would help us to study this model.

Oct 18: Bhumesh Kumar (EE)

Non-stationary Stochastic Approximation

Abstract: Robbins–Monro pioneered a general framework for stochastic approximation to find roots of a function with just noisy evaluations.With applications in optimization, signal processing and control theory there is resurged interest in time-varying aka non-stationary functions. This works addresses that premise by providing explicit, all time, non-asymptotic tracking error bounds via Alekseev's nonlinear variations of constant formula.

Reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07759 (To appear in Mathematics of Control, Signals and Systems)

Oct 25: Max Bacharach (Math)

Coalescent with Recombination

I will talk about the continuous time coalescent with mutation and recombination, with a focus on introducing key concepts related to genetic distance and evolutionary relatedness. The talk will be informal and accessible.

Past Semesters

• Fall 2018