• Diffusion, Social Networks, and Logic (Pavel Naumov, CMC)

    Emmy Noether Room, Millikan 1021, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, California

    Once a new commercial product, technology, political opinion, or social norm is adopted by a few people, these few often put peer pressure on others to consider adopting it as well. Those who adopt next put even more pressure on the rest of the population. This cascading “epidemic” effect is often called diffusion in social […]

  • Agent-Based and Continuous Models of Locust Hopper Bands: The Role of Intermittent Motion, Alignment, Attraction and Repulsion (Andrew J. Bernoff, HMC)

    Emmy Noether Room, Millikan 1021, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, California

    Locust swarms pose a major threat to agriculture, notably in northern Africa and the Middle East. In the early stages of aggregation, locusts form hopper bands. These are coordinated groups that march in columnar structures that are often kilometers long and may contain millions of individuals. We propose a model for the formation of locust […]

  • Minimal Gaussian Partitions, Clustering Hardness and Voting (Steven Heilman, USC)

    Emmy Noether Room, Millikan 1021, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, California

    A single soap bubble has a spherical shape since it minimizes its surface area subject to a fixed enclosed volume of air.  When two soap bubbles collide, they form a "double-bubble" composed of three spherical caps.  The double-bubble minimizes total surface area among all sets enclosing two fixed volumes.  This was proven mathematically in a […]

  • Digital sequences for frequency hopping CDMA systems (Lenny Fukshansky, CMC)

    Emmy Noether Room, Millikan 1021, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, California

    Frequency hopping is a method of transmitting signals by rapidly switching between many frequency channels, following some sequence of frequencies known to the transmitter and the receiver. This technique is used in the CDMA (code division multiple access) systems, and has many civilian and military applications. For successful transmission minimizing signal interference, we want to use sets […]

  • A Martingale Approach to the Question of Fiscal Stimulus (Michael Imerman, CGU)

    Emmy Noether Room, Millikan 1021, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, California

    Joint work with Larry Shepp & Philip Ernst In this paper we develop a mathematical model to address an ongoing politico-economic debate between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats in the US say that government spending can be used to “grease the wheels’ of the economy, create wealth, and increase employment; the Republicans say that government spending […]

  • Transfinite $\zeta$-metrics (Zair Ibragimov, CMC)

    Emmy Noether Room, Millikan 1021, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, California

    I will discuss the concept of transfinite ζ-metrics. In some details I will discuss transfinite Apollonian metric in the settings of semi-metric spaces. I will discuss specific examples of domains where the transfinite Apollonian metric can be computed explicitly. This is a preliminary work.

  • Models of Biological Tissue Electrostatics and Molecular Transport (Jim Sterling, KGI)

    Emmy Noether Room, Millikan 1021, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, California

    In this presentation, some fundamentals of electrostatics in biology will be discussed with focus on the fact that most biological macromolecules including nucleic acids, carbohydrates, and proteins are negatively-charged. Electroneutrality […]

  • Data Science / Statistics Seminar: Ana Maria Kenney (UC Irvine)

    Roberts North 15, CMC 320 E. 9th St., Claremont, United States

    Speaker: Ana Maria Kenney, Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics, UC Irvine Title: Distilling heterogeneous treatment effects: Stable subgroup estimation in causal inference Abstract: Recent methodological developments have introduced new black-box approaches to better estimate heterogeneous treatment effects; however, these methods fall short of providing interpretable characterizations of the underlying individuals who may be most at […]