Save the dates: Invitation to 2020 Salam Distinguished Lectures Series, on 27, 28 and 29 January 2020

[ICTP/director - Makkawi Zina]

_*ICTP 2020 Salam Distinguished Lecture Series: *_

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

Three talks in the Salam 2020 lecture series are scheduled:
*
Lecture 1: Monday 27 January at 16.30 hrs: "Artificial Intelligence: 
success, limits, myths and threats".**
*Abstract: **Artificial Intelligence is about to have a dramatic impact 
on many sectors of human activity. In the last ten years, thanks to the 
development of machine learning in “deep networks”, we have experienced 
spectacular breakthroughs in diverse applications such as automatic 
interpretation of images, speech recognition, consumer profiling, or go 
and chess playing. Algorithms are now competing with the best 
professionals at analyzing skin cancer symptoms or detecting specific 
anomalies in radiology; and much more is to come. Worrisome perspectives 
are frequently raised, from massive job destruction to autonomous 
decision-making “warrior” robots. This talk will  open the black box of 
deep networks and explore how they are programmed to learn from data by 
themselves. This will allow to understand their limits, to question 
whether their achievements have anything to do with “intelligence”, and 
to reflect on the foundations of scientific intelligence
For more information, see also: http://indico.ictp.it/event/9269/

*Lecture 2: 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. This 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 most welcome to attend.

Best regards,

Office of the Director, ICTP