# MSCS Seminar Calendar

Tuesday January 21, 2020
Special Colloquium
Tests for principal eigenvalues and eigenvectors
Xinghua Zheng (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
We establish central limit theorems for principal eigenvalues and eigenvectors under a large factor model setting, and develop two-sample tests for differences in either principal eigenvalues or principal eigenvectors. As an application, these tests can be used to detect structural breaks in large factor models. To the best of our knowledge, our tests are the first that can distinguish between individual eigenvalues and/or eigenvectors, and hence provide unique insights into the source of structural breaks.
Based on joint work with Jianqing Fan, Yingying Li and Ningning Xia.
Tea will be served at SEO 300, 4:00 - 4:30 PM.

Arithmeticity of hyperbolic manifolds with many totally geodesic submanifolds (after Bader, Fisher, Miller, Stover)
Alex Furman (UIC)
4:00 PM in 612 SEO
Wednesday January 22, 2020
Special Colloquium
Homology spheres, knots, and cobordisms
Linh Truong (Institute for Advanced Study)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
Homology 3-spheres, i.e. 3-dimensional manifolds with the same homology groups as the standard 3-sphere, play a central role in topology. Their study was initiated by Poincare in 1904, who constructed the first nontrivial example of a homology 3-sphere, and conjectured that the standard sphere is the only simply connected example. A century later, Poincare's conjecture was finally resolved by Perelman, but we are still far from understanding the general classification of homology 3-spheres.
This classification problem can be packaged in terms of the homology cobordism group, which is an abelian group formed by the set of all homology 3-spheres modulo a cobordism relation. I will survey what is known about this group, as well as discuss a closely related group classifying knots in the 3-sphere, including recent results joint with Irving Dai, Jennifer Hom, and Matthew Stoffregen.

Louise Hay Logic Seminar
Organizational Meeting (for real this time)
Matt DeVilbiss (UIC)
4:00 PM in 427 SEO

Groups of birational transformations of algebraic surfaces
Greg Taylor (UIC)
4:00 PM in 512 SEO
The collection of birational self-maps of an algebraic variety X forms a group Bir(X). When X is a surface, this group acts on an infinite hyperbolic space, constructed via divisors on blowups of the surface. In this talk, we introduce this construction and use it to understand Bir(X). Time permitting, we will discuss very recent work of Lonjou and Urech on Bir(X) for higher dimensional X. The main source for this talk is the paper "Sur les groupes de transformations birationnelles des surfaces" by Serge Cantat.
Thursday January 23, 2020
Quantum Topology Seminar
Introduction of Quandles
Louis H Kauffman (UIC)
3:00 PM in 1227 SEO
We will continue the introduction to quandles from the last meeting. This talk is self-contained and will review the previous talk quickly. An (involuntary) quandle is an algebraic structure Q with one binary operation satisfying a*a=a , (a*b)*b = a, (a*b)*c = (a*c)*(b*c) for all a,b,c in Q. Quandles can be used to make invariants of knots and links. Here is an algebraic example: Let G be a group with multiplication ab. Define a*b = ba^{-1}b and verify that this gives a quandle structure on G. This construction is related to the fundamental group of the double branched covering of a knot or link in the three sphere, and can be used to define a quandle invariant of knots that detects the unknot.
Friday January 24, 2020
Special Colloquium
Artin groups and non-positive curvature
Jingyin Huang (Ohio State University)
10:00 AM in 636 SEO
Artin groups emerged from the study of braid groups, complex hyperplane arrangements and Coxeter groups. Recently they also play an important role in the understanding of 3-manifolds. Despite the seemingly simple presentation of Artin groups, they have rather mysterious geometry with many basic questions widely open.
I will present a way of understanding certain Artin groups and Garside groups by building geometric models on which they act. These geometric models are non-positively curved in an appropriate sense, and such curvature structure yields several new results on the algorithmic, topological and geometric properties of these groups. No previous knowledge on Artin groups or Garside groups is required. Based on work with D. Osajda.

Number Theory Seminar
Integral points on algebraic varieties
Dylon Chow (Yau Math Sciences Center, Tsinghua University )
1:00 PM in 1227 SEO

Special Colloquium
Leveraging Digital Data for Clinical Research
Jessica Gronsbell (Alphabet's Verily Life Sciences)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
The widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHR) and their subsequent linkage to specimen biorepositories has generated massive amounts of routinely collected medical data for use in translational research. These integrated data sets enable real-world predictive modeling of disease risk and progression. However, data heterogeneity and quality issues impose unique analytical challenges on the development of EHR-based prediction models. For example, ascertainment of validated outcome information, such as the presence of a disease or treatment response, is particularly challenging because it requires manual chart review. Outcome information is therefore only available for a small subset of patients in the cohort of interest, unlike the traditional setting where this information is available for all patients. In this talk, I will discuss semi-supervised and weakly-supervised learning methods for predictive modeling in such constrained settings where the proportion of labeled data is very small. I demonstrate that leveraging unlabeled examples can improve the efficiency of model estimation and evaluation procedures, which in turn substantially reduces the amount of labeled data required for developing prediction models.

Mathematics of Collective Behavior Seminar
Organizational meeting. Models of collective behavior.
Roman Shvydkoy
3:00 PM in 427 SEO
Monday January 27, 2020
Special Colloquium
Statistical Inference in Large Discrete Graphical Models via Quadratic Programming
Zhao Ren (University of Pittsburgh)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
The high dimensional graphical model, a powerful tool for studying conditional dependency relationship of random variables, has attracted great attention especially in biological network analysis with different types of omics data. While significant progress has been achieved recently in computing confidence intervals and p-values of each edge for Gaussian graphical model (GGM), the usage of GGM on important discrete-type omics data can be statistically and biologically inappropriate. On the other hand, discrete-type graphical models were proposed to tailor the network analysis of count-valued data, but the statistical inference of these models is not well studied. In this talk, we investigate statistical inference of each edge for large Ising and modified Poisson-type graphical models. The key role in most existing inferential methods is played by a linear projection method to de-bias an initial regularized estimator. Major drawback of this approach in those discrete-type graphical models is that an extra sparsity assumption on the linear projection coefficient is required, which cannot be checked in practice. In addition, efficiency often is compromised by the usage of sample splitting in these methods. To solve these challenges, we first propose a novel estimator of each edge for Ising model via quadratic programming and show that our estimator is asymptotically normal without the above mentioned extra sparsity condition. Our proof applies a novel low dimensional maximum likelihood method for the de-bias procedure and a data swap technique to avoid loss of efficiency. In addition, we further show that whenever the extra sparsity condition is satisfied, our estimator is adaptively efficient and achieves the Fisher information. Otherwise, we still provide a restricted Fisher information as a lower bound. We then extend our approach to modified Poisson-type graphical models for both edge-wise and global statistical inference. The practical merit of the proposed method is demonstrated by an application to a novel RNA-seq gene expression data set in childhood atopic asthma in Puerto Ricans. Compared to sole estimation and statistical inference of GGM, our method provides more biologically meaningful results.
Tuesday January 28, 2020
Logic Seminar
Computability of the countable saturated differentially closed field.
David Marker (UIC)
3:00 PM in 427 SEO
It's been known since work of Harrington in the early 1970s that computable differential fields have computable differential closures. Recently Calvert, Frolov, Harizanov, Knight, McCoy, Soskova, and Vatev showed that the countable saturated differentially closed field is computable. Their proof involves first creating an effective listing of all types and then using a result of Morley's on existence of computable saturated models. I will give a significant simplification of the enumeration result and, for completeness, sketch Morley's priority construction of a saturated model. Pillay has also given an alternative enumeration argument though ours seems more robust and generalizes to quantifier free types in ACFA.
Wednesday January 29, 2020
Special Colloquium
TBA
Vishesh Jain (MIT)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO

Nonparametric Interaction Selection
Yushen Dong
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
Variable selection has been well studied in the recent literatures due to the surge of enormous high dimensional data. Interaction between predictors is commonly expected to exist in all kinds of real applications. Recently some parametric interaction selection methods have been proposed. In this talk, we will present a new method to perform nonparametric interaction selection and screening, based on the measurement error selection likelihood approach. This method uses local constant smoothing and backfitting algorithm to perform main and interaction selection for additive model. Resulting solution path will exhibit the importance of predictors. Finite-sample simulation shows this method performs well.

Combinatorics and Probability Seminar
Polynomial to exponential transition in Ramsey theory
Dhruv Mubayi (UIC)
3:00 PM in 1227 SEO
After a brief introduction to classical hypergraph Ramsey numbers, I will focus on the following problem. What is the minimum t such that there exist arbitrarily large k-uniform hypergraphs whose independence number is at most polylogarithmic in the number of vertices and every s vertices span at most t edges? Erdos and Hajnal conjectured (1972) that this minimum can be calculated precisely using a recursive formula and Erdos offered a \$500 prize for a proof. For$k = 3$, this has been settled for many values of s, but it was not known for larger k. Here we settle the conjecture for all k at least 4. Our method also answers a question of Bhat and Rodl about the maximum upper density of quasirandom hypergraphs. This is joint work with Alexander Razborov. Friday January 31, 2020 Special Colloquium Probabilistic Approaches to Machine Learning on Tensor Data Qing Mai (Florida State University) 3:00 PM in 636 SEO In contemporary scientific research, it is often of great interest to predict a categorical response based on a high-dimensional tensor (i.e. multi-dimensional array). Motivated by applications in science and engineering, we propose two probabilistic methods for machine learning on tensor data in the supervised and the unsupervised context, respectively. For supervised problems, we develop a comprehensive discriminant analysis model, called the CATCH model. The CATCH model integrates the information from the tensor and additional covariates to predict the categorical outcome with high accuracy. We further consider unsupervised problems, where no categorical response is available even on the training data. A doubly-enhanced EM (DEEM) algorithm is proposed for model-based tensor clustering, in which both the E-step and the M-step are carefully tailored for tensor data. CATCH and DEEM are developed under explicit statistical models with clear interpretations. They aggressively take advantage of the tensor structure and sparsity to tackle the new computational and statistical challenges arising from the intimidating tensor dimensions. Efficient algorithms are developed to solve the related optimization problems. Under mild conditions, CATCH and DEEM are shown to be consistent even when the dimension of each mode grows at an exponential rate of the sample size. Numerical studies also strongly support the application of CATCH and DEEM. Finally, we discuss how these developments in tensor data advance vector data analysis, such as differential network analysis. Tuesday February 4, 2020 Logic Seminar TBA James Freitag (UIC) 3:00 PM in 427 SEO Logic Seminar Highly transitive group actions James Freitag (UIC ) 3:00 PM in 427 SEO It is a classical result (combining results of Tits and Hall) that there is no sharply 4-transitive action of a group on an infinite set. For algebraic groups acting on (infinite) varieties, there is no 4-transitive group action. Things get more interesting when we loosen the requirements slightly and merely demand that the action has a "large" orbit for a suitable notion of large. In this talk we will discuss some conjectures in this area and the current prospects for solving them. We will also talk about the connection between conjectures in this area and some notions from geometric stability theory. Wednesday February 5, 2020 Combinatorics and Probability Seminar Erdos-Hajnal conjecture for graphs with bounded VC-dimension Andrew Suk (UCSD) 3:00 PM in 1227 SEO The Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension (in short, VC-dimension) of a graph is defined as the VC-dimension of the set system induced by the neighborhoods of its vertices. In this talk, I will sketch a proof showing that every$n$-vertex graph with bounded VC-dimension contains a clique or an independent set of size at least$e^{(\log n)^{1 - o(1)}}$. The dependence on the VC-dimension is hidden in the$o(1)$term. This improves the general lower bound,$e^{c\sqrt{\log n}}$, due to Erdos and Hajnal. This result is almost optimal and nearly matches the celebrated Erdos-Hajnal conjecture, according to which one can always find a clique or an independent set of size at least$e^{\Omega(\log n)}\$ If time permits, I will also discuss a multicolor Ramsey theorem for graphs with bounded VC-dimension. This is joint work with Jacob Fox and Janos Pach.
Monday February 10, 2020
Analysis and Applied Mathematics Seminar
A PDE Interpretation of Prediction with Expert Advice
4:00 PM in 636 SEO
Prediction with expert advice is an area of online machine learning, which aims to synthesize advice from different experts. We consider the case of a stock prediction problem with an investor who relies on history-dependent experts, and an adversarial market. This forms a two-person game, and we are interested in the optimal strategies of the market and the player when the game is played over a long time. We prove that the discrete value function converges to the unique solution of a nonlinear parabolic PDE, which determines asymptotically optimal strategies.

Algebraic Geometry Seminar
TBA
Kenny Ascher (Princeton University)
4:00 PM in 427 SEO
Tuesday February 11, 2020
Logic Seminar
TBA
Filippo Calderoni (UIC)
3:00 PM in 427 SEO
Monday February 17, 2020
Geometry, Topology and Dynamics Seminar
TBA
Richard Derryberry (Perimeter Institute)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
TBA

Analysis and Applied Mathematics Seminar
Computational nonimaging optics: Monge-Ampere.
Gerard Awanou (UIC)
4:00 PM in 636 SEO

Algebraic Geometry Seminar
TBA
Maksym Fedorchuk (Boston College)
4:00 PM in 427 SEO
Wednesday February 19, 2020
Statistics and Data Science Seminar
Improved Shrinkage Prediction under a Spiked Covariance Structure
Trambak Banerjee (University of Southern California)
4:00 PM in 636 SEO
We develop a novel shrinkage rule for prediction in a high-dimensional non-exchangeable hierarchical Gaussian model with an unknown spiked covariance structure. We propose a family of commutative priors for the mean parameter, governed by a power hyper-parameter, which encompasses from perfect independence to highly dependent scenarios. Corresponding to popular loss functions such as quadratic, generalized absolute, and linex losses, these prior models induce a wide class of shrinkage predictors that involve quadratic forms of smooth functions of the unknown covariance. By using uniformly consistent estimators of these quadratic forms, we propose an efficient procedure for evaluating these predictors which outperforms factor model based direct plug-in approaches. We further improve our predictors by introspecting possible reduction in their variability through a novel coordinate-wise shrinkage policy that only uses covariance level information and can be adaptively tuned using the sample eigen structure. We extend our methodology to aggregation based prescriptive analysis of generic multidimensional linear functionals of the predictors that arise in many contemporary applications involving forecasting decisions on portfolios or combined predictions from dis-aggregative level data. We propose an easy-to-implement functional substitution method for predicting linearly aggregative targets and establish asymptotic optimality of our proposed procedure. We present simulation experiments as well as real data examples illustrating the efficacy of the proposed method.
Friday February 21, 2020
Departmental Colloquium
Women and Science and the Gender Gap Worldwide
Colette Guillope (Universite de Paris)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
Monday February 24, 2020
Geometry, Topology and Dynamics Seminar
TBA
Sebastien Picard (Harvard)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO

Algebraic Geometry Seminar
TBA
Kristin DeVleming (University of California San Diego)
4:00 PM in 427 SEO

Analysis and Applied Mathematics Seminar
TBA
David Goluskin (University of Victoria)
4:00 PM in 636 SEO
Tuesday February 25, 2020
Logic Seminar
TBA
Noah Schoem (UIC)
3:00 PM in 427 SEO
Wednesday February 26, 2020
Statistics and Data Science Seminar
TBA
Hyun-Jung Kim (IIT)
4:00 PM in 636 SEO
TBA
Monday March 2, 2020
Geometry, Topology and Dynamics Seminar
TBA
Carlo Scarpa (SISSA)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO

Analysis and Applied Mathematics Seminar
TBA
4:00 PM in 636 SEO
TBA

Algebraic Geometry Seminar
TBA
Michael Kemeny (University of Wisconsin Madison)
4:00 PM in 427 SEO
Wednesday March 4, 2020
Combinatorics and Probability Seminar
TBA
Liana Yepremyan (UIC / LSE)
3:00 PM in 1227 SEO

Statistics and Data Science Seminar
TBA
Qi Feng (USC)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
TBA

Statistics and Data Science Seminar
TBA
Chuanshu Ji (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
4:00 PM in 636 SEO
Monday March 9, 2020
Analysis and Applied Mathematics Seminar
TBA
Andrej Zlatos (University of California, San Diego)
4:00 PM in 636 SEO

Algebraic Geometry Seminar
TBA
Dennis Tseng (Harvard University)
4:00 PM in 427 SEO
Wednesday March 11, 2020
Combinatorics and Probability Seminar
TBA
Le Chen (Emory )
2:00 PM in TBA
TBA

Statistics and Data Science Seminar
Likelihood inference for a large causal network
Xiaotong Shen (University of Minnesota )
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
Inference of causal relations between interacting units in a directed acyclic graph (DAG), such as a regulatory gene network, is common in practice, imposing challenges because of a lack of inferential tools. In this talk, I will present constrained likelihood ratio tests for inference of the connectivity as well as directionality subject to nonconvex acyclicity constraints in a Gaussian directed graphical model. Particularly, for testing of connectivity, the asymptotic distribution is either chi-squared or normal depending on if the number of testable links in a DAG model is small; for testing of directionality, the asymptotic distribution is the minimum of d independent chi-squared variables with one-degree of freedom or a generalized Gamma distribution depending on if d is small, where d is the number of breakpoints in a hypothesized pathway. Computational methods will be discussed, in addition to some numerical examples to infer a directed pathway in a gene network. This work is joint with Chunlin Li and Wei Pan of the University of Minnesota.
Monday March 16, 2020
Geometry, Topology and Dynamics Seminar
TBA
Maggie Miller (Princeton University )
3:00 PM in 636 SEO

Algebraic Geometry Seminar
TBA
4:00 PM in 427 SEO

Analysis and Applied Mathematics Seminar
Some existence results for mean field games
David Ambrose (Temple University)
4:00 PM in 636 SEO
When considering N-player differential games, making the approximation that there are instead infinitely many agents leads to the mean field games system of PDEs. This system has two unknowns, the probability distribution of the players, and the value function being optimized by a representative agent. One of these satisfies a forward parabolic equation and the other satisfies a backward parabolic equation. The forward parabolic equations comes with initial data while terminal data (at a fixed time T>0) is specified for the backward parabolic equation. We will describe some existence results for this coupled forward-backward system, including for a specific system which has been given as a model of household wealth.
Wednesday March 18, 2020
Combinatorics and Probability Seminar
TBA
Michael Damron (Georgia Tech)
3:00 PM in 1227 SEO
Monday March 30, 2020
Geometry, Topology and Dynamics Seminar
TBA
Nikita Nikolaev (Université de Genève)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
Wednesday April 1, 2020
Statistics and Data Science Seminar
TBA
Ivan Nourdin (Universite du Luxembourg)
4:00 PM in 636 SEO
TBA
Friday April 3, 2020
Algebraic Geometry Seminar
TBA
Jesse Wolfson (University of California Irvine)
10:00 AM in 427 SEO

Departmental Colloquium
TBA
Jesse Wolfson (UC Irvine)
3:00 PM in 612 SEO
Monday April 6, 2020
Geometry, Topology and Dynamics Seminar
TBA
Olivia Dumitrescu (Michigan State)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
TBA
Wednesday April 8, 2020
Statistics and Data Science Seminar
TBA
Lanju Zhang (AbbVie Inc.)
4:00 PM in 636 SEO
Friday April 10, 2020
Departmental Colloquium
TBA
Laszlo Lempert (Purdue)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
Monday April 13, 2020
Geometry, Topology and Dynamics Seminar
TBA
Ingmar Saberi (Universität Heidelberg)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO

Algebraic Geometry Seminar
TBA
Mihnea Popa (Northwestern University)
4:00 PM in 427 SEO
Tuesday April 14, 2020
Logic Seminar
TBA
Assaf Shani (Carnegie Mellon University)
3:00 PM in 427 SEO
Wednesday April 15, 2020
Statistics and Data Science Seminar
TBA
Rina Foygel Barber (University of Chicago)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
Friday April 17, 2020
Departmental Colloquium
TBA
Jacob Fox (Stanford)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
Monday April 20, 2020
Geometry, Topology and Dynamics Seminar
TBA
Anders Karlsson (University of Geneva)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
TBA

Analysis and Applied Mathematics Seminar
TBA
Carme Calderer (University of Minnesota)
4:00 PM in 636 SEO
TBA
Tuesday April 21, 2020
TBA
Anders Karlsson (Geneva University)
4:00 PM in 612 SEO
TBA
Wednesday April 22, 2020
Combinatorics and Probability Seminar
TBA
Yu Gu (CMU)
3:00 PM in 1227 SEO
TBA
Friday April 24, 2020
Departmental Colloquium
TBA
Bob Kohn (NYU)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
Monday April 27, 2020
Geometry, Topology and Dynamics Seminar
TBA
3:00 PM in 636 SEO

Analysis and Applied Mathematics Seminar
TBA
Yan Guo (Brown University)
4:00 PM in 636 SEO
TBA
Wednesday April 29, 2020
Statistics and Data Science Seminar
TBA
Peng Zeng (Auburn University)
4:00 PM in 636 SEO
Friday May 1, 2020
Departmental Colloquium
TBA
Hugh Woodin (Harvard)
3:00 PM in 636 SEO
UIC LAS MSCS > persisting_utilities > seminars > seminar calendar