Reminder: Colloquium talk by Guido Sanguinetti

[Ugo Bruzzo]

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SISSA MATHEMATICAL COLLOQUIUM

Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - 14:00 to 15:30, 
Room: A-005

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Prof. Guido Sanguinetti, School of Informatics, University of  
Edinburgh, UK, will talk on

"Modelling conflict dynamics: a signal processing approach".

Abstract: Data availability is increasing exponentially in almost all  
fields of human endeavour. This is also true for conflicts: it is  
increasingly possible to gather large amounts of information through  
(social) media and remote sensing about events during conflicts. As a  
result, there have recently been efforts to adopt more quantitative  
methods to model and predict conflict dynamics. Here, I will describe  
a model-based signal processing approach to model the Afghan War  
Diary, the collection of war logs released by Wikileaks in July 2010.  
I will give a high level overview of the methodology (there will be  
equations though!), and show how this approach allowed us to achieve a  
surprisingly high predictive power using rather simple modeling  
assumptions.

Reference: A. Zammit-Mangion et al, Point Process Modelling of the  
Afghan War Diary, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA  
(PNAS) 109(31) (2012). Awarded the 2012 Cozzarelli Prize for  
outstanding paper in Engineering and Applied Science by the National  
Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.

Bio: Guido Sanguinetti is a reader (associate professor) in the School  
of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He has a degree in  
Physics from the University of Genova, and a DPhil in Mathematical  
Physics from the University of Oxford. His interests focus on the  
interface of machine learning, systems biology, and dynamical systems.