[Colloq] Guest Speaker: "What can physics tell us about inference?" | Christopher Moore, Santa Fe Institute | 1/26/15 366WVH 10:30-11:30am

[Walker, Lashauna]

366WVH 10:30 - 11:30 AM Tue, 1/26/2015

Title: What can physics tell us about inference?
Speaker: Cristopher Moore, Santa Fe Institute

Abstract:
In physics, a "phase transition" describes a sudden jump in a system's behavior as it crosses some threshold.  When a block of iron is heated past its critical temperature, it suddenly loses its ability to hold a magnetic field.  In the same way, when data is too sparse or too noisy, it can suddenly become impossible to perceive patterns in it, no matter what algorithm we use.  I will give a friendly introduction to this analogy, and describe how it has led both to fundamental bounds on our ability to solve problems in data analysis-such as finding communities in networks, or clustering points in high-dimensional space-and to optimal algorithms for these problems.

Bio:
Cristopher Moore received his B.A. in Physics, Mathematics, and Integrated Science from Northwestern University, and his Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell. From 2000 to 2012 he was a professor at the University of New Mexico, with joint appointments in Computer Science and Physics. Since 2012, Moore has been a resident professor at the Santa Fe Institute; he has also held visiting positions at École Polytechnique, Université Paris 7, École Normale Superieure du Lyon, the University of Michigan, and Northeastern University. He has published over 120 papers at the boundary between physics and computer science, ranging from quantum computing, to phase transitions in NP-complete problems, to the theory of social networks and efficient algorithms for analyzing their structure. He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Mathematical Society. With Stephan Mertens, he is the author of The Nature of Computation from Oxford University Press.


Thank You.

LaShauna Walker
Events and Administrative Specialist
College of Computer and Information Science
Northeastern University
617-373-2763
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