ICTP 2020 Salam Distinguished Lecture Series:

ICTP is pleased to announce that Professor Marc Mézard, will deliver this year’s Salam Distinguished Lecture Series on 27, 28 and 29 January 2020 in the Budinich Lecture Hall, Leonardo Building, ICTP.

Professor Marc Mézard, Director of l’École normale supérieure, Paris, France, is a theoretical physicist. He received a PhD from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, followed by a post-doc in Rome, and became the head of the statistical physics group in Paris-Sud University. He has been the director of École normale supérieure since 2012. His main field of research is the statistical physics of disordered systems and its use in various branches of science - biology, economics and finance, information theory, computer science, statistics, and signal processing. In recent years his research has focused on information processing in neural networks. He has received the Lars Onsager prize from the American Physical Society, the Humboldt-Gay-Lussac prize, the silver medal of CNRS and the Ampere prize of the French Academy of Science. He is a member of the European Academy of Science.

Lecture 2: TODAY, Tuesday 28 January at 16.30 hrs: "The spin glass cornucopia"
Abstract: Motivated originally by some anomalies in the magnetic response of some magnetic alloys, spin glass theory has developed in the last 40 years into a vast research field. Apart from providing a theoretical framework for understanding glassy phases in various physical systems, it has also provided a corpus of concepts and methods, like the replica and the cavity method, that have found applications in various other branches of science, where one is interested in emerging properties in systems built from many interacting elementary components: computer science, information theory, economy, biology, etc.
The talk will review some of the basic concepts and methods originating from spin glass theory, and present some aspects of their relevance to other fields.
For more information, see also: http://indico.ictp.it/event/9275/

Lecture 3: Wednesday 29 January at 11.00 hrs: "Statistical physics of inference and machine learning"
Abstract: A major challenge of contemporary statistical inference is the large-scale limit, where one wants to discover the values of many hidden parameters, using large amount of data. In recent years, ideas from statistical physics of disordered systems, notably the cavity method, have helped to develop new algorithms for important inference problems, ranging from error correcting codes in information theory to compressed sensing, machine learning and generalized linear regression. The talk will review these developments and explain how they can be used, together with the replica method, to identify phase transitions in benchmark statistical ensembles of inference problems.
For more information, see also: http://indico.ictp.it/event/9276/

The lecture series will also be livestreamed from the ICTP website at:  http://video.ictp.it/livestream

The Abdus Salam Distinguished Lecture Series receives generous support from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS). For more information see: https://kfas.ictp.it/

You are all warmly invited to attend.

Best regards,

Office of the Director, ICTP