SBP - Seminar Dr. J. Barbier- April 27, 2017, at 16:00 hrs - SISSA, Via Bonomea

[QLS]

Speaker: *Dr. Jean Barbier *(EPFL, Lausanne)

Title: *Tackling phase transitions in inference*

Thursday, April 27, 2017 @ 04:00 p.m.

Venue: room 128-129, SISSA, Via Bonomea 265


ABSTRACT:
Phase transitions, i.e. a global change of a system under some variation 
of an external parameter, are not restricted to physical systems. Indeed 
during the last decades it has become apparent that they also appear in 
information processing systems. In this talk, I will discuss some recent 
progresses on analytic and algorithmic approaches for locating and 
tackling phase transitions separating easy/hard/impossible resolvability 
regimes in inference problems, namely problems where the aim is « to 
extract the signal from the noise » in a broad sense. I particular, I 
will focus on the use of « spatial coupling », related to the nucleation 
phenomenon in physics, as well as new interpolation methods allowing to 
rigorously prove the validity of mean-field approaches (such as the 
replica method) for computing the mutual information (or free energy) in 
such problems.


-- 
Erica Sarnataro
Group Secretary
Quantitative Life Sciences
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Trieste,  Italy
Tel. +39-040-2240623
e-mail: qls at ictp.it