Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. Spring Break - No Seminar (February 27, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42203 42203-9584891@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

CM-AMO Seminar

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 16 Aug 2017 12:16:11 -0400 2018-02-27T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-27T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: "Chimpanzees and the Evolution of Human Life History" (March 5, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/41329 41329-9141933@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 5, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

Among the most extraordinary features of our species are our life history characteristics. The great apes exhibit important precursors to many of these characteristics, such as long lifespan and extended juvenile periods, and are thus critical for understanding the evolution of these traits. My research investigates the physiological, ecological, and behavioral mechanisms that regulate life history trajectories in wild chimpanzees. This research reveals factors that constrain development, reproduction, and survival, providing clues as to how these features may have evolved in the hominin lineage.

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Mon, 05 Feb 2018 12:19:19 -0500 2018-03-05T15:00:00-05:00 2018-03-05T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Lecture / Discussion West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Hunting Dark Matter Axions and other Exotic Creatures (March 5, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49856 49856-11555016@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 5, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The nature of dark matter is one of the great mysteries of modern physics today and could be from new particles beyond the standard model. The Axion, originally conceived as a solution to the strong-CP problem in nuclear physics, is one well-motivated candidate. The Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX), a DOE Gen 2 project, uses a large microwave cavity immersed in a strong static magnetic field to resonantly convert dark matter axions to detectable photons. Recently ADMX has completed its first data run with unprecedented sensitivity in the classical QCD-axion mass range of several µeV. In addition, several new detection techniques have been proposed to cover a large span of potential axion masses beyond that of the classical window. In this talk I will describe the history of axion dark matter searches, describe the recent ADMX results and give a survey of the R&D efforts currently underway to explore the entire axion dark matter mass window.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 05 Mar 2018 18:16:17 -0500 2018-03-05T16:00:00-05:00 2018-03-05T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Mesoscopic Optics (March 6, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42204 42204-9584892@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 6, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Random scattering of light, e.g., in paint, cloud and biological tissue, is a common process of both fundamental interest and practical relevance. The interference of multiply scattered waves leads to remarkable phenomena in mesoscopic physics such as Anderson localization and universal conductance fluctuations. In applications, optical scattering is the main obstacle to imaging or sending information through turbid media. Recent developments of adaptive wavefront shaping in optics enabled imaging and focusing of light through opaque samples. By selective coupling to high or low transmission eigenchannels, we varied the transmission of a laser beam through a highly scattering system by two orders of magnitude, and drastically changed the energy density distribution inside the system. Furthermore, we utilized the multiple scattering of light in a random structure to realize a chip-scale spectrometer. The speckle pattern is used as a fingerprint to recover an arbitrary spectrum. Such a spectrometer has good spectral resolution and wide frequency range of operation.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 06 Mar 2018 18:16:19 -0500 2018-03-06T16:00:00-05:00 2018-03-06T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Interfacing Spins with Photons for Quantum Simulation and Quantum Control (March 7, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50236 50236-11690313@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 7, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The hallmark of quantum information is its capacity to be non-local, woven into correlations among two, three, or many entangled particles. By contrast, the interactions between particles are necessarily local, restricting the types of quantum states that appear in nature. Nevertheless, non-local interactions feature in a wide range of conceptual models, from spin models encoding hard optimization problems to toy models of quantum gravity and information scrambling in black holes. Motivated by prospects for exploring these concepts in the laboratory, I will present recent progress in engineering and probing effectively non-local interactions in experiments with cold atoms, with photons serving as messengers conveying information between them.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 07 Mar 2018 18:16:19 -0500 2018-03-07T16:00:00-05:00 2018-03-07T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Michael Woodroofe Lecture Series: Emmanuel Candes, Professor, Department of Statistics and Mathematics, Stanford University (March 9, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/48867 48867-11317271@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 9, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Michael Woodroofe Lecture Series

Abstract: A common problem in modern statistical applications is to select, from a large set of candidates, a subset of variables which are important for determining an outcome of interest. For instance, the outcome may be disease status and the variables may be hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms on the genome. In this talk, we develop an entirely new read of the knockoffs framework of Barber and Candès (2015), which proposes a general solution to perform variable selection under rigorous type-I error control, without relying on strong modeling assumptions. We show how to apply this solution to a rich family of problems where the distribution of the covariates can be described by a hidden Markov model (HMM). In particular, we develop an exact and efficient algorithm to sample knockoff copies of an HMM, and then argue that combined with the knockoffs selective framework, they provide a natural and powerful tool for performing principled inference in genome-wide association studies with guaranteed FDR control. Finally, our methodology is applied to several datasets aimed at studying the Crohn's disease and several continuous phenotypes, e.g. levels of cholesterol. Time permitting, we will discuss the robustness of our methods.

This is joint work with many people who will be all highlighted during the lecture.

Bio: Emmanuel Candès is the Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics, a professor of electrical engineering (by courtesy) and a member of the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. Earlier, Candès was the Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. His research interests are in computational harmonic analysis, statistics, information theory, signal processing and mathematical optimization with applications to the imaging sciences, scientific computing and inverse problems. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University in 1998. Candès has received several awards including the Alan T.
Waterman Award from NSF, which is the highest honor bestowed by the National Science Foundation, and which recognizes the achievements of early-career scientists. He has given over 60 plenary lectures at major international conferences, not only in mathematics and statistics but in many other areas as well including biomedical imaging and solid-state physics. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.

*Welcome reception at 11:00 am in the Statistics Lounge, 450 West Hall
** Buffet reception immediately following in 337 West Hall (Don Meyer Commons)

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 21 Feb 2018 14:47:41 -0500 2018-03-09T11:30:00-05:00 2018-03-09T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Michael Woodroofe Lecture Series Workshop / Seminar Candes,Emmanuel
Life After Graduate School Seminar | Medical Physics: Using Physics to Save and Extend Lives (March 9, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50458 50458-11771163@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 9, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics


Looking for a practical and rewarding career where you can put your Physics PhD to good use? Medical Physics might be for you. Medical Physicists use both their theoretical knowledge and experimental hands-on skills to work with teams of Radiation Oncology professionals to treat cancer patients and to improve treatment technologies. We’ll discuss the role that Medical Physicists play in the clinic, research and industrial settings of Radiation Oncology, as well as the path to becoming a Medical Physicist.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 09 Mar 2018 18:16:16 -0500 2018-03-09T12:00:00-05:00 2018-03-09T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Flavor-Specific Scalar Mediators (March 9, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50657 50657-11847603@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 9, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

New singlet scalar bosons have broad phenomenological utility and feature prominently in many extensions of the Standard Model. Such scalars are often taken to have Higgs-like couplings to SM fermions in order to evade stringent flavor bounds, e.g. by assuming Minimal Flavor Violation (MFV), which leads to a rather characteristic phenomenology. Here we describe an alternative approach, based on an effective field theory framework for a new scalar that dominantly couples to one specific SM fermion mass eigenstate. A simple flavor hypothesis, similar in spirit to MFV, ensures adequate suppression of new flavor changing neutral currents. We consider radiatively generated flavor changing neutral currents and scalar potential terms in such theories, demonstrating that they are often suppressed by small Yukawa couplings, and also describe the role of CP symmetry. We further demonstrate that such scalars can have masses that are significantly below the electroweak scale while still being technically natural, provided they are sufficiently weakly coupled to ordinary matter. In comparison to MFV, our framework is rather versatile since a single (or a few) desired scalar couplings may be investigated in isolation. We illustrate this by discussing in detail the examples of an up-specific scalar mediator to dark matter and a muon-specific scalar that may address the muon anomalous magnetic moment discrepancy.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 05 Mar 2018 08:15:42 -0500 2018-03-09T15:00:00-05:00 2018-03-09T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Palestine & Native America: Settler colonialism and Indigeneity (March 9, 2018 5:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50563 50563-11816527@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 9, 2018 5:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Tricontinental Solidarity Network

We are happy to invite you to this conversation between Mallory Whiteduck (American Culture) and Raya Naamneh (Comparative Literature) to comparatively and critically discuss indigeneity and the experiences of living under settler colonialism in both North America and Palestine. Thinking through these two fragmented geopolitical spaces, we hope to discuss the relevance of this transnational connection for the understanding of indigenous experiences and forms of anti-colonial resistance, past and present.
The event will include food and light refreshments.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Sat, 03 Mar 2018 14:29:11 -0500 2018-03-09T17:00:00-05:00 2018-03-09T18:30:00-05:00 West Hall Tricontinental Solidarity Network Lecture / Discussion West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Galaxy Cluster Cosmology with the Dark Energy Survey (March 12, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50607 50607-11816521@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 12, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Constraining LambdaCDM cosmology with galaxy cluster abundance is one of the fundamental goals of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Many thousands of clusters out to redshift 0.65 have been identified in DES data. Weak lensing and multi-wavelength studies with X-ray and cosmic microwave background observations are performed to provide inputs to the cosmology analysis. A cosmology pipeline that considers various systematic effects such as cluster projections and mis-centering is used to derive constraints on LambdaCDM cosmology parameters. In this talk, I will present current progress on DES galaxy cluster cosmology analyses as well as discuss future improvements.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 12 Mar 2018 18:16:12 -0400 2018-03-12T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-12T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Bose Fireworks: Coherent Emission of Matter-wave Jets (March 13, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42205 42205-9584893@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 13, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Experiments frequently come with surprises. In a driven Bose-Einstein condensate, we observe unexpectedly generation of many matter-wave jets leaving the condensate with quantized momenta as a result of bosonic stimulation. Based on a pattern recognition scheme, we identify a universal pattern of correlations which offers essential clues to unveiling the underlying microscopic processes.

Finally, connection of the matterwave jets to the dijet structure in heave ion collider will be discussed.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 13 Mar 2018 18:16:41 -0400 2018-03-13T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-13T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
2018 Helmut W. Baer Lecture in Physics | Detecting the Tiny Thump of the Neutrino (March 14, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/40987 40987-8875735@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 14, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department Colloquia

Neutrinos are “ghostly” particles, interacting only rarely with matter. Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) was first predicted in 1973; it’s a process in which a neutrino scatters off an entire nucleus. By neutrino standards, CEvNS occurs frequently, but it is tremendously challenging to see. The only way to observe it is to detect the minuscule thump of the nuclear recoil. CEvNS was measured for the first time by the COHERENT collaboration using the unique, high-quality source of neutrinos from the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This talk will describe COHERENT's recent measurement of CEvNS, the status and plans of COHERENT's suite of detectors at the SNS, and the physics we will learn from the measurements.

The Helmut W. Baer Lecture is a special colloquium supported by family and friends in honor of Dr. Helmut Baer. Dr. Baer's career in physics began with his work at the University of Michigan where he was awarded a doctorate in nuclear physics in 1967. He published over 100 articles that cover a range of physics topics including nuclear physics and pion interactions. Dr. Baer was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in March of 1989, and to his delight enjoyed countless opportunities over the years to talk about physics at universities and conferences internationally. Dr. Baer set the highest personal standards for himself and his research. This lecture is held approximately every two years.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Tue, 13 Mar 2018 14:12:31 -0400 2018-03-14T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-14T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department Colloquia Lecture / Discussion West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Ambuj Tewari, Professor of Statistics, University of Michigan (March 16, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/48891 48891-11320065@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 16, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Abstract: The origins of the field of machine learning can be traced back to a remarkable section titled “Learning Machines” in Turing’s famous “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” paper. The paper, one of Turing’s two great papers, was published in 1950 in the philosophy journal Mind. In the past 70 years, the field has grown enormously. Technological progress has given us object recognition, speech recognition, and machine translation systems that we now take for granted. There has also been tremendous progress in understanding learning machines from the statistical, computational and mathematical viewpoints. Yet, what Turing wrote at the end of his 1950 paper remains true as ever: “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

In this talk, I will provide brief non-technical descriptions of a few projects, both applied and theoretical, that my research group is working on. I also hope to convey the message that machine learning, like any technology, is amoral. Whether it is put to good or bad uses in society is up to us. If learning algorithms control access to credit, healthcare, education, and employment, it becomes an ethical obligation to examine issues related to fairness, accountability and transparency in machine learning.

Speaker Bio:

Ambuj Tewari is an associate professor in the Department of Statistics and the Department of EECS (by courtesy) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His is also affiliated with the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS). He obtained his PhD under the supervision of Peter Bartlett at the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests lie in machine learning including statistical learning theory, online learning, reinforcement learning and control theory, network analysis, and optimization for machine learning. He collaborates with scientists to seek novel applications of machine learning in mobile health, learning analytics, and computational chemistry. His research has been recognized with paper awards at COLT 2005, COLT 2011, and AISTATS 2015. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2015 and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2017.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 02 Apr 2018 16:17:27 -0400 2018-03-16T11:30:00-04:00 2018-03-16T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Constraints on Interacting Massive High Spins (March 16, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49951 49951-11608290@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 16, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

There seem to be no good examples of UV complete theories that have low-lying massive higher spin states isolated by a large gap, despite the relative ease of constructing effective field theories describing such states. We discuss constraints from analytic dispersion relations and subluminality of eikonal scattering that may help to explain this and provide insight into the possible interactions of massive higher spins.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 12 Feb 2018 09:38:08 -0500 2018-03-16T15:00:00-04:00 2018-03-16T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | First Measurement of Monoenergetic Muon Neutrino Charged Current Interactions (March 19, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51013 51013-11941995@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 19, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

This talk will present the first measurement of monoenergetic muon neutrino charged current interactions. The MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab has been used to isolate and study 236 MeV muon neutrino events originating from charged kaon decay at rest. The muon kinematics and total cross section have been extracted from this data. Notably, this result is the first known-energy, weak-interaction-only probe of the nucleus to yield a measurement of omega (energy transferred to the nucleus) using neutrinos, a quantity thus far only accessible through electron scattering. I will discuss the significance of this measurement, and these monoenergetic neutrinos in general, for elucidating both the neutrino-nucleus interaction and oscillations.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 19 Mar 2018 18:16:01 -0400 2018-03-19T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-19T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | New Phase Transitions in Atomically Thin Quantum Materials (March 20, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42206 42206-9584894@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 20, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

We have recently demonstrated an experimental platform to isolate 2D quantum materials that are unstable in the ambient environment. I will discuss our studies of the Weyl semimetal candidate, 1T’-MoTe2, and layered magnetic insulator, CrI3, in the atomically thin limit, made possible using this technique. In MoTe2, lowering dimensionality suppresses the inversion symmetric monoclinic phase, driving the Weyl ground state up to and beyond room temperature. The different electronic structure of thin samples is studied by magnetotransport measurements at low temperature. In CrI3, we observe a very large negative magnetoresistance effect comparable to colossal magnetoresistance in the manganites. I will explain the origin of this effect and discuss some new opportunities in spintronics incorporating 2D magnets.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 20 Mar 2018 18:16:03 -0400 2018-03-20T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-20T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | An M.S.-to-Ph.D. Physics Bridge Program and Other Diversity and Student Support Enhancing Activities in the OSU Physics Graduate Program (March 21, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50367 50367-11724549@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 21, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Lack of diversity in physics and other STEM PhD programs is a chronic issue. In recent years, less than 7% of domestic physics PhDs awarded nationwide have gone to students from underrepresented minority (URM) groups, even though they make up 35% of the college age population. Increasing diversity in a physics PhD program can be difficult, especially if the program receives a low number of “traditionally qualified” URM applicants. Inspired by successful STEM Bridge programs at San Francisco State, Fisk-Vanderbilt, and Michigan, the Ohio State University MS-to-PhD Physics Bridge Program (OSU-BP) was established in late 2012 with unanimous faculty support to increase the pool of qualified applicants from underrepresented groups, and accepted its first cohort of four Bridge students in August 2013. I will discuss activities and events that preceded and followed the creation of the OSU-BP, which have coincided with an increase in the representation of URM students in the OSU Physics PhD program from less than 5% of domestic students in 2012 to almost 20% in autumn 2017. These include building a core group of committed faculty colleagues, partnering with the American Physical Society Bridge Program for nationwide recruiting and other support, working with colleagues in Physics Education Research (PER) to develop new graduate physics academic support programs, and expanding holistic PhD admissions practices. I will also discuss on-going and future efforts, opportunities, and obstacles for increasing diversity in graduate programs at OSU and elsewhere. I would like to acknowledge the essential contributions of OSU Bridge Program Co-Director Jay Gupta, PER colleagues Andrew Heckler and Chris Porter, and many other colleagues who worked so hard to help these efforts succeed.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 21 Mar 2018 18:16:06 -0400 2018-03-21T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-21T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Jonathan Taylor, Professor of Statistics, Stanford University (March 23, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/48893 48893-11320068@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 23, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Abstract:
We begin with a description of recent work in the conditional approach to selective inference. These methods typically require describing potentially complex conditional distributions. In this work, we describe a model-agnostic simplification to such conditional distributions when the selection stage can be expressed as a sequence of (randomized) convex programs with convex loss and structure inducing constraints or penalties. Our main result is a change of measure formula that expresses the selective likelihood in terms of an integral over variables appearing in the optimization problem. The region of integration can often be interpreted geometrically in terms of the normal cycle of the balls in the corresponding penalty. Using this change of measure, we give a brief description of "inferactive data analysis", so-named to denote an interactive approach to data analysis with an emphasis on inference after data analysis.

This is joint work with Xiaoying Tian, Nan Bi, Snigdha Panigrahi and Jelena Markovic.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 02 Apr 2018 16:11:14 -0400 2018-03-23T11:30:00-04:00 2018-03-23T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Workshop / Seminar Taylor
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: "Policing 'Free' Speech: The Language of DUI Arrests in the U.S. South" (March 23, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47219 47219-10821996@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 23, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

Over the last two years, escalated outcomes in the use of violence during routine police-suspect encounters have prompted police forces in the South to recruit more ethnically and linguistically diverse officers and require the use of surveillance technologies to monitor interactions. Some legislators have also instituted tougher laws criminalizing non-compliance and, in some cases, making it a hate crime to resist arrest. Drawing on the preliminary analysis of an archive of 900+ dashcam and bodycam recordings and case files of Driving Under the Influence (DUI) stops provided by the Public Defender’s office in Richland County, South Carolina, this talk explores what the escalation and de-escalation of police force looks and sounds like as an interactional achievement. Why do some verbal or gestural practices count as evidence of “intent” to incite harm and not others? How do affective stances and emotional states such as fear, anxiety, and rage intensify and scale up as signs of violence or hate? To what extent do recordings of police arrests impact what legally counts as unprotected speech, given the onus on police officers to recognize suspects’ constitutional right to disagree with or insult public servants? Language, often overlooked in contexts of police work, thus emerges as a central component of law enforcement’s diversity, the substance of its interactions, and the basis for legal evidence. I argue that acts of labeling intersubjective stances during DUI stops as violent and defiant, or alternatively, as composed and compliant are built upon and constitutive of entrenched ethno-racial inequalities that preclude all Americans from enjoying the same liberties of free speech.

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Tue, 02 Jan 2018 14:00:37 -0500 2018-03-23T15:00:00-04:00 2018-03-23T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Lecture / Discussion West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Characterizing Hot and Dense Nuclear Matter Using Temperature Fluctuation (March 26, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51119 51119-11976184@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 26, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Power law formulae have routinely been used to describe the transverse momentum spectra of the hadrons at high energies. The Tsallis distribution is one among them which has been very successful in explaining the experimental transverse momentum distribution, longitudinal momentum fraction distribution as well as the rapidity distribution of the hadrons in electron-positron and proton-proton collisions. The Tsallis distribution is a two parameter power-law distribution, described by the Tsallis parameter q (which can be related to the relative variance in temperature) and the Tsallis temperature T, which reduces to the Boltzmann (exponential) distribution when q goes to 1. The Tsallis distribution has been used in many fields of the physical as well as the social sciences (like Statistical Mechanics, Geology, Anatomy, Economics, Finance and many more). In the realm of the physical sciences it arises when there are systems with non-ideal effects like long range correlation, memory effect etc. Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), the hot and dense medium created during the high energy collision phenomena, is one such example. This medium has been under intensive study for the past few decades and we will discuss how the Tsallis distribution can be used for characterization of QGP.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 26 Mar 2018 18:15:55 -0400 2018-03-26T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-26T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Controlled Transfer of Electronic Wavepacket Motion Between Distant Atoms (March 27, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42207 42207-9584895@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 27, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The establishment, observation, and potential control of correlated multi-electron dynamics is a complex problem of interest across disciplines with numerous applications in a variety of contexts, from femtosecond interatomic Coulomb decay and attosecond charge migration within small molecules, to energy transfer in photosynthetic systems, to quantum control of few- and many-body systems, and quantum information processing. The extreme sensitivity of Rydberg atoms to electric fields, including those produced by neighboring atoms, makes them superb candidates for studying such phenomena. In a quantum analogy to classical far-field radio transmission from a source to receiver antenna, we have transferred electronic wavepacket motion established within Rydberg atoms in a dilute nearly-frozen gas to neighboring Rydberg atoms. The transfer is enabled by electron correlations resulting from electric field-controlled, atom-atom couplings and relies on the use of both cold atom and ultrafast techniques.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 27 Mar 2018 18:15:53 -0400 2018-03-27T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-27T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Life After Graduate School Seminar | From Research to Research Publishing (March 30, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51101 51101-11964840@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 30, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

I shall briefly describe my education and the first part of my career, as a research scientist in computational high energy physics. Mid career, I switched to research publishing, working as an editor for Physical Review D. For the reminder of the talk I will give you an impression of the duties of an editor for one of the Physical Review journals. Our main activity is guiding the peer review process of submitted papers.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 30 Mar 2018 18:15:58 -0400 2018-03-30T12:00:00-04:00 2018-03-30T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Gravitational Probes of Dark Matter Physics (March 30, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51356 51356-12086778@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 30, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

Dark matter orchestrates the expansion of the universe and the development of the cosmic web of structure, yet its identity is unknown. We know that dark matter molds luminous matter into galaxies, yet the microphysical processes that govern its own creation and evolution remain a mystery. Despite its cosmic importance, the nature of dark matter remains one of the biggest unsolved problems in fundamental physics. However, it is one that may be solved with the tools of astronomy. In this talk, I will show how astronomical observations have shaped our understanding of the microphysical properties of dark matter. I will discuss the exciting prospects for a new generation of astronomical facilities to enable measurements of dark matter physics.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 26 Mar 2018 08:24:17 -0400 2018-03-30T15:00:00-04:00 2018-03-30T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: "Why Does the Modern Human Skull Look the Way It Does?" (April 2, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/41393 41393-9207102@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 2, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

"My talk will address two questions about the modern human skull: What explains the differences between modern humans and other closely related species? What explains the variation among modern human groups and individuals? These questions can be answered at different levels—I will focus on using novel quantitative approaches to gain insights into the evolutionary processes that underlie variation in skull shape and size. I will address these questions with examples from my research comparing modern humans to non-human primates, modern humans to Neandertals, and modern human foragers to farmers."

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Fri, 01 Dec 2017 11:02:36 -0500 2018-04-02T15:00:00-04:00 2018-04-02T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Lecture / Discussion West Hall
KOTO: The Search for the Elusive KL → πνν (April 2, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51418 51418-12101062@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 2, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HEP - Astro Seminars

The KOTO experiment was designed to observe and study the KL → πνν decay. The Standard Model (SM) prediction for the mode is 2.4 x 10-11 with a small theoretical uncertainty. An experimental upper limit of 2.6 x 10-8 was set by the KEK E391a collaboration. The rare “golden” decay is ideal for probing for physics beyond the standard model. A comparison of experimentally obtained results with SM calculations permits a test of the quark flavor region and provides a means to search for new physics.

The signature of the decay is a pair of photons from the π0 decay and no other detected particles. For the measurement of the energies and positions of the photons, KOTO uses a Cesium Iodide (CSI) electromagnetic calorimeter as the main detector, and hermetic veto counters to guarantee that there are no other detected particles. KOTO’s initial data was collected in 2013 and achieved a similar sensitivity as E391a result. Since then, we completed significant hardware upgrades and had additional physics runs in 2015 at beam powers of roughly 24--40 kW. This presentation will recap the efforts of KOTO and its sustained pursuit of detecting KL → πνν.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 28 Mar 2018 14:30:04 -0400 2018-04-02T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-02T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall HEP - Astro Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | 2D Materials: Superconductivity and Magnetism (April 3, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42208 42208-9584896@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, April 3, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The discovery of graphene has stimulated not only the field of carbon nanoelectronics, but also studies of novel electronic phenomena in a wide range of 2D van der Waals’ materials. In this talk, I will discuss our recent studies on two seemingly unrelated 2D materials: non-centrosymmetric superconducting NbSe_2 and magnetic CrI_3. As a result of the crystal symmetry and spin-orbit interactions, the electron spins in both of these materials become Ising-like (i.e. spins locked to the out-of-plane direction), giving rise to unique magnetic properties. First I will discuss how the Ising spins in 2D NbSe_2 protect superconductivity under very high magnetic fields and experimental signatures of spin-triplet pairing correlations through tunneling measurements. I will then discuss our recent efforts in studying 2D magnetism in CrI_3 by electric fields. If time allows, I will briefly discuss interesting future directions by combining these two materials to form heterostructures.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 03 Apr 2018 18:15:49 -0400 2018-04-03T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-03T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Meeting Dirac’s Challenge: Progress Towards a Theory of Correlated Electrons in Materials and Molecules (April 4, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51267 51267-12032763@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, April 4, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

This talk will present an overview of recent progress towards the solution of one of the grand-challenges of modern science: computing the properties of interacting electrons in molecules and solids. I will argue that the theoretical methodology has reached the point where we can say with confidence that the two dimensional Hubbard model captures key aspects of the high transition temperature superconductivity observed in layered copper-oxide compounds and can delineate which phenomena are not accounted for by this model. I will further summarize the current status of our extension of the methods to fully physically realistic systems, emphasizing the areas of theoretical uncertainty and the prospects for resolution.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 04 Apr 2018 18:15:52 -0400 2018-04-04T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-04T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Black Holes & Number Theory: How to Bootstrap a Black Hole via Modular Forms (April 5, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/51561 51561-12167537@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, April 5, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

In the language of statistical physics, an extremal black hole is a zero temperature system with a huge amount of residual entropy. Understanding which class of counting formulas can account for a large degeneracy will undoubtedly unveil interesting properties of quantum gravity. In this talk I will discuss the application of Siegel modular forms to black hole entropy counting. The role of the Igusa cusp form in the D1D5P system is well-known in string theory, and its transformation properties are what allow precision microstate counting in this case. We implement this counting for other Siegel modular and paramodular forms, and we show that they could serve as candidates for other gravitational systems.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 02 Apr 2018 08:24:42 -0400 2018-04-05T11:30:00-04:00 2018-04-05T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Zhiliang Ying, Professor of Statistics, Columbia University (April 6, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/48895 48895-11320070@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 6, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Abstract:
Measurement theory has played a foundational role in educational and psychological assessment. Traditional methods are primarily based on latent variable models, which could be confounded with dimension reduction and goodness of fit. Furthermore, these methods are not applicable to modern complex data such as process data obtained from PSTRE (Problem solving in technology-rich environments) items. This talk will first introduce a new method for addressing the first issue, i.e. sufficient dimension reduction with adequate goodness of fit. It is followed by a second new method for handling process data from PSTRE items. These new developments will be applied to data in educational assessment and psychological evaluation.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 02 Apr 2018 16:06:08 -0400 2018-04-06T11:30:00-04:00 2018-04-06T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Workshop / Seminar Ying,Zhiliang
Life After Graduate School Seminar | A Career in Science Philanthropy (April 6, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51528 51528-12135383@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 6, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

I will discuss qualifications for and the role of program directors at private nonprofit foundations that fund science research and STEM education initiatives. I’ll focus on how to design effective funding programs to support advances in the physical sciences, how to evaluate grant proposals and ipso facto how to write an effective proposal.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 06 Apr 2018 18:16:06 -0400 2018-04-06T12:00:00-04:00 2018-04-06T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Revisiting Goldstone's Theorem (April 6, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51563 51563-12167539@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 6, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

In recent times we have learned that if in QFT, the constraint of locality and/or Lorentz invariance are lifted, the patterns of symmetry breaking are far richer than in local relativistic field theories. Recently we have studied some (conformal) field theories with global symmetries in the sector where the value of the global charge Q is large. We find that the low energy excitations in this sector are described by a particular form of the non-relativistic Goldstone theorem. We also provide heuristic arguments that the effective theory describing such sector contains an effective coupling constant suppressed by powers of the large charge. The comparison of our heuristic arguments with "exact" results (lattice MonteCarlo) are remarkably good.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 02 Apr 2018 08:26:37 -0400 2018-04-06T15:00:00-04:00 2018-04-06T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Quantitative Biology Seminar | Multiple Gamma Mechanisms Co-exist in an Excitatory/Inhibitory Network (April 9, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49772 49772-11532461@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 9, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Gamma oscillations have been implicated in many cognitive functions. Fast spiking interneurons are thought to play an important role in gamma synchrony. Recently, fast spiking interneurons in the entorhinal cortex have been shown to exhibit type 2 excitability and postinhibitory rebound (PIR). Theoretical work has shown that these properties make interneuronal network gamma (ING) more robust than in networks of type 1 interneurons. Here we show that this robust ING persists in a sparsely connected excitatory network. We also show that phase response curve (PRC) theory can predict under what circumstances the interneurons will sparsely synchronize in two clusters, and how increasing the delay and/or the conductance destabilizes two clusters in favor of a single cluster.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 09 Apr 2018 18:15:38 -0400 2018-04-09T12:00:00-04:00 2018-04-09T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Addressing Challenges for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) (April 9, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51645 51645-12182149@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 9, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is under construction to measure the expansion history of the universe using the baryon acoustic oscillations technique. The spectra of 35 million galaxies and quasars over 14,000 square degrees will be measured during a 5-year survey. A new prime focus corrector for the Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory will deliver light to 5,000 individually targeted fiber-fed robotic positioners. The fibers in turn feed ten broadband multi-object spectrographs. This talk will give an overview of the DESI project and then describe several unique instrument and survey challenges. I will highlight the ProtoDESI experiment, an on-sky technology demonstration with the goal to reduce technical risks associated with aligning optical fibers with targets using robotic fiber positioners and maintaining the stability required to operate DESI. The ProtoDESI prime focus instrument, which was installed and commissioned on the 4-m Mayall telescope from Aug. 14 to Sep. 30, 2016, consisted of three fiber positioners, illuminated fiducials, and a guide camera. ProtoDESI was successful in acquiring targets with the robotically positioned fibers and demonstrated that the DESI guiding requirements can be met. Additionally, I will report progress on a predictive sky background model for DESI, built on the spectra from the 4-year Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). This dataset consists of ~1 million unique sky spectra covering 360 - 1040 nm collected in a variety of observational conditions. This detailed model will be integrated into a dynamic exposure time calculator for DESI, which will ensure data quality uniformity and increase survey efficiency.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 09 Apr 2018 18:15:38 -0400 2018-04-09T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-09T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Recent Developments with Few-body Efimov and Rydberg Physics (April 10, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45674 45674-10254211@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, April 10, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Experiment and theory have been making rapid strides in these areas recently. In this seminar I will present some of our recent theoretical progress, both for heavy-heavy-light Efimov physics and for ultra-long-range Rydberg molecules. Some suggestions for promising experimental directions will be described.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 10 Apr 2018 18:15:39 -0400 2018-04-10T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-10T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Moiré Pattern Physics (April 11, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51529 51529-12135384@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, April 11, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

According to Wikipedia a moiré pattern (/mwɑːrˈeɪ/; French: [mwaˈʁe]) is a large scale interference pattern that is produced when an opaque regular pattern with transparent gaps is overlaid on another similar pattern. Moiré pattern appears when two dimensional crystals are overlaid with a small difference in lattice constant or a small difference in orientation, are ubiquitous in van der Waals heterojunctions, and can be controlled by varying relative orientation. I will discuss some examples of new physics that can be realized using moiré patterns formed by graphene on hexagonal boron-nitride, graphene on graphene, and by transition metal dichalcogenides bilayers.


]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 11 Apr 2018 18:15:38 -0400 2018-04-11T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-11T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Aaron Friedman Marine Hydrodynamics Lab Dedication (April 12, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51877 51877-12274526@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, April 12, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Naval Architecture & Marine Engineering

One year ago we started work to update the Aaron Friedman Marine Hydrodynamics Lab. Today we reopen the doors to a stunning redesign! Come see this historic space reimagined for a new era of marine technology.

Thanks to a generous donation from the family of 1943 Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering alumni, Aaron Friedman, the facility will now feature an updated entryway, a series of exhibits and displays that tell the story of the unique heritage of the department, new staff offices and an upgraded student computer lab.

]]>
Other Mon, 04 Jun 2018 13:59:37 -0400 2018-04-12T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-12T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Naval Architecture & Marine Engineering Other NAME
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Fred Feinberg, Joseph Handleman Professor of Management, Professor of Statistics and Chair of Marketing, University of Michigan (April 13, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/48896 48896-11320071@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 13, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Mathematical psychologists and statisticians have, over the last 50 years, refined methodologies for zeroing in on individuals' preferences using heterogeneous discrete choice tasks. Yet visual design elements, due to their high‐dimensional, holistic, and interactive nature, do not lend themselves well to measurement using extant methods for preference elicitation.

We incorporate real‐time, interactive, 3D‐rendered configurations into such measurement frameworks, using scalable machine learning algorithms to adaptively update visual designs. At the heart of the method is a parametric decomposition of an object's geometry, along with a novel, adaptive “bi‐level” query task that can estimate individuals’ preferences among visual designs.

We illustrate the method’s performance through simulation and a field test for the design of a mid‐priced sedan, using real‐time 3D rendering and an online panel. Bayesian part-worth estimation and online training via ranking SVM allow the proposed method to elicit trade-offs between design and more traditional elements generally, and also pinpoint which design details differentially drive (heterogeneous) preferences.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 09 Apr 2018 16:27:22 -0400 2018-04-13T11:30:00-04:00 2018-04-13T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Workshop / Seminar Feinberg
Life After Graduate School Seminar | From Physicist to Data Scientist in Silicon Valley (April 13, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51740 51740-12217120@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 13, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

In this informal talk/Q&A I will talk about my experience going from astrophysicist to a data scientist working at an enormous german company (Bosch) in Silicon Valley. The narrative will be audience driven but should cover a bit about Bosch, my job and how I made the transition.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 13 Apr 2018 18:15:39 -0400 2018-04-13T12:00:00-04:00 2018-04-13T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Dissertation Defense: Geometric Inference in Bayesian Hierarchical Models with Applications to Topic Modeling (April 16, 2018 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/51791 51791-12248769@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 16, 2018 10:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Unstructured data is available in abundance with the rapidly growing size of digital information. Labeling such data is expensive and impractical, making unsupervised learning an increasingly important field. Big data collections often have rich latent structure that statistical modeler is challenged to uncover. Bayesian hierarchical modeling is a particularly suitable approach for complex latent patterns. Graphical model formalism has been prominent in developing various procedures for inference in Bayesian models, however the corresponding computational limits often fall behind the demands of the modern data sizes. In this thesis we develop new approaches for scalable approximate Bayesian inference. In particular, our approaches are driven by the analysis of latent geometric structures induced by the models.
Our specific contributions include the following. We develop full geometric recipe of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model. Next, we study several approaches for exploiting the latent geometry to first arrive at a fast weighted clustering procedure augmented with geometric corrections for topic inference, and then a nonparametric approach based on the analysis of the concentration of mass and angular geometry of the topic simplex, a convex polytope constructed by taking the convex hull of vertices representing the latent topics. Estimates produced by our methods are shown to be statistically consistent under some conditions. Finally, we develop a series of models for temporal dynamics of the latent geometric structures where inference can be performed in online and distributed fashion. All our algorithms are evaluated with extensive experiments on simulated and real datasets, culminating at a method several orders of magnitude faster than existing state-ofthe-art topic modeling approaches, as demonstrated by experiments working with several million documents in a dozen minutes.

]]>
Other Mon, 09 Apr 2018 11:58:49 -0400 2018-04-16T10:00:00-04:00 2018-04-16T12:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Other Defense Flyer
HEP-Astro Seminar | Dark Photon Search in Positron Annihilation at Cornell (April 16, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51832 51832-12262915@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 16, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Dark matter remains a tantalizing puzzle for particle physics and cosmology, with profound implications for understanding the essential nature and evolution of our universe. Its average mass density in the universe is known with considerable and ever-improving precision, yet extensive searches based on conventional explanations such as weakly interacting massive particles continue to yield null results. Newer alternative theories raise the possibility of low mass dark matter, and in so doing open the possibility for discovery in unexplored parameter space, using low-energy, high-intensity experiments. The so-called “dark photon” is a plausible candidate, capable of being produced in electromagnetic interactions such as electron-positron annihilation.

We have proposed the design and construction of a 6 GeV positron beam for fixed target experiments. It will become the highest intensity source of high energy positrons anywhere in the world, providing a unique tool for research in particle- and nuclear-physics. Beam characteristics are optimized for dark matter search experiments that require positrons with high total beam delivery and limited instantaneous beam current. The facility will build on the capabilities of the existing synchrotron injector at Cornell University, augmenting it with beam instrumentation to enable a slow spill of positrons by a resonant extraction mechanism.

I will describe the dynamics of slow extraction of a high energy positron beam from the Cornell synchrotron, and the experiment to search for a dark photon in electron-positron annihilation.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 16 Apr 2018 18:15:26 -0400 2018-04-16T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-16T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
2018 UNDERGRADUATE PHYSICS COMMENCEMENT AND AWARDS CEREMONY (April 27, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/52096 52096-12418704@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 27, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Since space is limited; RSVP only.

Watch for details on the physics department's website homepage regarding viewing the "live" ceremony.

]]>
Ceremony / Service Tue, 24 Apr 2018 15:57:23 -0400 2018-04-27T11:30:00-04:00 2018-04-27T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Ceremony / Service West Hall
Dissertation Defense: Statistical Tools for Network Data: Prediction and Resampling (April 30, 2018 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52032 52032-12371052@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 30, 2018 1:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Advances in data collection and social media have led to more and more network data appearing in diverse areas, such as social sciences, internet, transportation and biology. This thesis develops new principled statistical tools for network analysis, with emphasis on both appealing statistical properties and computational efficiency.

Our first project focuses on building prediction models for network-linked data. Prediction algorithms typically assume the training data are independent samples, but in many modern applications samples come from individuals connected by a network. For example, in adolescent health studies of risk-taking behaviors, information on the subjects' social network is often available and plays an important role through network cohesion, the empirically observed phenomenon of friends behaving similarly. Taking cohesion into account in prediction models should allow us to improve their performance. We propose a network-based penalty on individual node effects to encourage similarity between predictions for linked nodes, and show that incorporating it into prediction leads to improvement over traditional models both theoretically and empirically when network cohesion is present. The penalty can be used with many loss-based prediction methods, such as regression, generalized linear models, and Cox's proportional hazard model. Applications to predicting levels of recreational activity and marijuana usage among teenagers from the AddHealth study based on both demographic covariates and friendship networks are discussed in detail. We show that our approach to taking friendships into account can significantly improve predictions of behavior while providing interpretable estimates of covariate effects.

Resampling, data splitting, and cross-validation are powerful general strategies in statistical inference, but resampling from a network remains a challenging problem. Many statistical models and methods for networks need model selection and tuning parameters, which could be done by cross-validation if we had a good method for splitting network data; however, splitting network nodes into groups requires deleting edges and destroys some of the structure. Here we propose a new network cross-validation strategy based on splitting edges rather than nodes, which avoids losing information and is applicable to a wide range of network models. We provide a theoretical justification for our method in a general setting and demonstrate how our method can be used in a number of specific model election and parameter tuning tasks, with extensive numerical results on simulated networks demonstrating its competitiveness with task-specific methods. We also apply the method to analysis of a citation network of statisticians and obtain meaningful research communities.

Finally, we consider the problem of community detection on partially observed networks. Communities are one important type of structure in networks and they have been widely studied. However, in practice, network data are often collected through sampling mechanisms, such as survey questionnaires, instead of direct observation. The noise and bias introduced by such sampling mechanisms can obscure the community structure and invalidate the assumptions of standard community detection methods. We propose a model to incorporate neighborhood sampling, through a model reflective of survey designs, into community detection for directed networks, since friendship networks obtained from surveys are naturally directed.. We model the edge sampling probabilities as a function of both individual preferences and community parameters, and fit the model by a combination of spectral clustering and the method of moments. The algorithm is computationally efficient and comes with a theoretical guarantee of consistency.. We evaluate the proposed model in extensive simulation studies and applied it to a faculty hiring dataset, discovering a meaningful hierarchy of communities among US business schools.

]]>
Other Tue, 16 Jul 2019 14:29:35 -0400 2018-04-30T13:00:00-04:00 2018-04-30T15:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Other flyer
Dissertation Defense: Joint Mean and Covariance Modeling of Matrix-Variate Data (May 4, 2018 2:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52147 52147-12483088@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, May 4, 2018 2:30pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

We address theory, methodology, and applications for joint mean and covariance estimation with matrix-variate data. Our first project considers joint mean and covariance estimation in the Kronecker product model, which has natural methodological connections to large-scale screening and differential mean analysis in various application areas including genomics. It has been proposed that complex populations, such as those that arise in genomics studies, may exhibit dependencies among observations as well as among variables. This gives rise to the challenging problem of analyzing unreplicated high-dimensional data with unknown mean and dependence structures. Matrix-variate approaches that impose various forms of (inverse) covariance sparsity allow flexible dependence structures to be estimated, but cannot directly be applied when the mean and covariance matrices are estimated jointly. We present a practical method utilizing generalized least squares and penalized (inverse) covariance estimation to address this challenge. We establish consistency and obtain rates of convergence for estimating the mean parameters and covariance matrices. The advantages of our approaches are: (i) dependence graphs and covariance structures can be estimated in the presence of unknown mean structure, (ii) the mean structure becomes more efficiently estimated when accounting for the dependence structure among observations; and (iii) inferences about the mean parameters become correctly calibrated. We use simulation studies and analysis of genomic data from a twin study of ulcerative colitis to illustrate the statistical convergence and the performance of our methods in practical settings. Several lines of evidence show that the test statistics for differential gene expression produced by our methods are correctly calibrated and improve power over conventional methods.

Our second project uses matrix-variate techniques to gain insight into pitch curve data that plays an important role in linguistics research. These curves can be viewed as large multi-indexed data arrays with distinct covariance behaviors along each index. We estimate covariance and inverse covariance matrices and graphs, and we connect edge structures to word properties. By contrast with the first project, the pitch curve data contains a limited number of replicates, which allows us to use trial residualization to remove mean structure. We investigate whether edges are associated with characteristics of the words, including initial consonant, vowel type, and voicing using inverse covariance graphs estimated using graphical lasso and nodewise regression. In particular, we hierarchically decompose the words by consonants and/or by vowels while analyzing edges between individual words as well as word groups categorized by initial consonant or vowel properties.

]]>
Other Tue, 16 Jul 2019 14:29:10 -0400 2018-05-04T14:30:00-04:00 2018-05-04T16:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Other flyer
Dissertation Defense: Computational Inference Algorithms for Spatiotemporal Processes and Other Complex Models (May 8, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52154 52154-12485863@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, May 8, 2018 2:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Statistical data analysis can be carried out based on a stochastic model that reflects the analyst’s understanding about how the system in question behaves. The stochastic model specifies where in the system randomness is present and how the randomness plays a role in generating data. The likelihood of the data defined by the model summarizes the evidence provided by observations of the system. Drawing inference from the likelihood of the data, however, can be far from being simple or straightforward, especially in modern statistical data analyses. Complex probability models and big data call for new computational methods to translate the likelihood of data into inference results. In this thesis, I present two innovations in computational inference for complex stochastic models.

The first innovation lies in the development of a method that enables inference on coupled dynamic systems that are partially observed. The high dimensionality of the model that defines the joint distribution of the coupled dynamic processes makes computational inference a challenge. I focus on the case where the probability model is not analytically tractable, which makes the computational inference even more challenging. Mechanistic model of a dynamic process that is defined via a simulation algorithm can lead to analytically intractable models. I show that algorithms that utilizes the Markov structure and the mixing property of stochastic dynamic systems can enable fully likelihood based inference for these high dimensional analytically intractable models. I demonstrate theoretically that these algorithms can substantially reduce the computational cost for inference, which may be orders of magnitude in practice. Spatiotemporal dynamics of measles transmission are inferred from data collected at linked geographic locations, as an illustration that this algorithm can
offer an advance in scientific inference.

The second innovation involves a generalization of the framework in which samples from a probability distribution with unnormalized density are drawn using Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. The new framework generalizes the widely used Metropolis-Hastings acceptance or rejection strategy. The resulting method is straightforward to implement in a broad range of MCMC algorithms, including the most frequently used ones such as random walk Metropolis, Metropolis adjusted Langevin, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, or the bouncy particle sampler. Numerical studies show that this new framework enables flexible tuning of parameters and facilitates faster mixing of the Markov chain, especially when the target probability density has complex structure.

]]>
Other Tue, 16 Jul 2019 14:28:51 -0400 2018-05-08T14:00:00-04:00 2018-05-08T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Other flyer
Dissertation Defense: Topics in Network Analysis with Applications to Brain Connectomics (May 9, 2018 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/52199 52199-12528873@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, May 9, 2018 10:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Large complex network data have become common in many scientific domains, and require new statistical tools for discovering the underlying structures and features of interest. This thesis presents new methodology for network data analysis, with a focus on problems arising in the field of brain connectomics. Our overall goal is to learn parsimonious and interpretable network features, with computationally efficient and theoretically justified methods.

The first project in the thesis focuses on the problem of prediction with network covariates. This setting is motivated by neuroimaging applications, in which each subject has an associated brain network constructed from fMRI data, and the goal is to derive interpretable prediction rules for a phenotype of interest or a clinical outcome. Existing approaches to this problem typically either reduce the data to a small set of global network summaries, losing a lot of local information, or treat network edges as a ``bag of features'' and use standard statistical tools without accounting for the network nature of the data. We develop a method that uses all edge weights, while still effectively incorporating network structure by using a penalty that encourages sparsity in both the number of edges and the number of nodes used. We develop efficient optimization algorithms for implementing this method and show it achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on a dataset of schizophrenic patients and healthy controls while using a smaller and more readily interpretable set of features than methods which ignore network structure. We also establish theoretical performance guarantees.

Communities in networks are observed in many different domains, and in brain networks they typically correspond to different regions of the brain responsible for different functions. In connectomic analyses, there are standard parcellations of the brain into such regions, typically obtained by applying clustering methods to brain connectomes of healthy subjects. However, there is now increasing evidence that these communities are dynamic, and when the goal is predicting a phenotype or distinguishing between different conditions, these static communities from an unrelated set of healthy subjects may not be the most useful for prediction. We present a method for supervised community detection, that is, a method that finds a partition of the network into communities that is most useful for predicting a particular response. We use a block-structured regularization and compute the solution with a combination of a spectral method and an ADMM optimization algorithm. The method performs well on both simulated and real brain networks, providing support for the idea of task-dependent brain regions.

The last part of the thesis focuses on the problem of community detection in the general network setting. Unlike in neuroimaging, statistical network analysis is typically applied to a single network, motivated by datasets from the social sciences. While community detection has been well studied, in practice nodes in a network often belong to more than one community, leading to the much harder problem of overlapping community detection. We propose a new approach for overlapping community detection based on sparse principal component analysis, and develop efficient algorithms that are able to accurately recover community memberships, provided each node does not belong to too many communities at once. The method has a very low computational cost relative to other methods available for this problem. We show asymptotic consistency of recovering community memberships by the new method, and good empirical performance on both simulated and real-world networks.

]]>
Other Tue, 16 Jul 2019 14:28:32 -0400 2018-05-09T10:00:00-04:00 2018-05-09T12:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Other flyer
Dissertation Defense: Some Contributions to High Dimensional Mixed-Effects Logistic Regression Models (May 14, 2018 9:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/52238 52238-12566851@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, May 14, 2018 9:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Generalized mixed-effects linear models (GLMMs) extend the generalized linear models (GLMs) and the mixed effects models by adding random effects to the linear predictors of the GLMs. The mixed-effects logistic regression model is a typical example of the GLMMs, which is widely used when the response variable is discrete or categorical and has a group structure.

High dimensional mixed-effects logistic regression model refers to the scenario when the number of fixed effects coefficients p is (much) larger than the sample size N, while the rank q of the random effects variance-covariance matrix is much smaller than the sample size N. Our goal in this dissertation is to infer about the unknown high dimensional fixed effects coefficients of the high dimensional mixed-effects logistic regression models. The challenges of point estimation in such a model are several folds. Firstly, its negative log-likelihood function is non-convex in general, which causes generic difficulties in computing its minimum. Secondly, the log-likelihood function and its gradient are intractable integration that are challenging to approximate. Numerical integration techniques like Laplace method may work when the dimension of integration is low (Schelldorfer et al. 2013), but the performance deteriorates when the dimension grows.

In this dissertation, we contribute to solving high dimensional mixed-effects logistic regression models with several algorithms, their convergence analysis, and a non-asymptotic high dimensional estimation error bound of a solution. Among our algorithms, the stochastic proximal gradient and iterated filtering are two stochastic algorithms, while a second order approximate and the fixed-effects approximate algorithms are deterministic ones. We introduce and extend the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz property of a function to a stochastic setting to analyze the convergence behavior of the stochastic proximal gradient algorithm and prove the convergence of the second order approximate algorithm in the non-convex and non-smooth setting. In establishing the estimation error bound of the fixed-effects approximate solution, we extend the restricted eigenvalue condition to a stochastic setting and show that this condition holds with high probability in our problem. In the development of the iterated filtering algorithm, we use the iterated filtering to approximate the forward step in a proximal gradient algorithm, which leverages the idea of using the mean of a function (the pseudo proximal map) to approximate the mode of the function whose value is not accessible.

We have conducted extensive numerical studies of our algorithms to illustrate their convergence behavior and statistical properties, and also compared their performance in different data settings. We have applied our algorithms to a breast cancer data which identify genes as signatures of the patients' 5-years metastasis status - a major clinical indicator of breast cancer survivor.

]]>
Other Tue, 16 Jul 2019 14:28:12 -0400 2018-05-14T09:30:00-04:00 2018-05-14T11:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Other flyer
Physics Graduate Student Symposium | Multidimensional Spectroscopy of Color Centers in Diamond (May 16, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52310 52310-12631408@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, May 16, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Color centers in diamond are a broad class of optically accessible physical systems which, by virtue of being embedded crystal defects in the diamond lattice, are relatively isolated from the macroscopic environment. This makes them promising candidates for a variety of applications from precision metrology to quantum information processing. One key to realizing these applications is a detailed understanding of the electron dynamics that govern the opto-electronic properties of color centers. I will present our recent work studying silicon–vacancy centers with multidimensional coherent spectroscopy, discuss the implications of these results for proposed silicon–vacancy center applications, and mention a few exciting new directions of study in the world of color center spectroscopy.

Talks will be given each Wednesday and will be 30 minutes in length, with time after for questions. Lunch will be served at 11:45 and talks will begin at 12:00. Unless otherwise noted, they will be held in 340 West Hall.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 15 May 2018 10:02:49 -0400 2018-05-16T12:00:00-04:00 2018-05-16T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Physics Graduate Student Symposium | Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis in Spinor Condensates (May 23, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52327 52327-12639130@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, May 23, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Thermalization of isolated quantum systems is a long-standing fundamental problem where different mechanisms are proposed over time. Eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) is one of the most well-known of these mechanisms. I will start my talk by introducing the problem of quantum thermalization and ETH as a possible route to thermalization. Then I will switch gears and turn to the topic of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates. Eventually the aim of the talk is to answer the question of "Could spinor condensates be another test-bench for testing eigenstate thermalization hypothesis besides widely used quantum many-body systems?". I will show the experimental advantages of spinor condensates to observe ETH and the possible limits of this model. Finally, it seems possible to draw a relation between the thermalization and localization properties of the eigenstates via studying spinor condensates.

Talks will be given each Wednesday and will be 30 minutes in length, with time after for questions. Lunch will be served at 11:45 and talks will begin at 12:00. Unless otherwise noted, they will be held in 340 West Hall.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 18 May 2018 13:59:34 -0400 2018-05-23T12:00:00-04:00 2018-05-23T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Physics Graduate Student Symposium | Illuminating Photosynthesis with Two Dimensional Spectroscopy (May 30, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52467 52467-12793960@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, May 30, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Photosynthesis is a process vital to life on Earth by which energy from light is converted to chemical energy. Although much is understood about this process, unanswered questions remain that, if answered, could inspire more efficient artificial light harvesting technologies. The technique of two-dimensional (2D) spectroscopy has shown promise in addressing some of these questions. In this talk, I will discuss 2D studies of the Bacterial Reaction Center (BRC), a pigment-protein complex that serves as a model system for investigating the initial steps of photosynthesis. By exciting the BRC in the near-IR and detecting the response over a broad portion of the visible spectrum, we are able to uncover previously obscured coupling between BRC pigments and begin to further elucidate the kinetic pathways of energy transfer and charge separation.

Talks will be given each Wednesday and will be 30 minutes in length, with time after for questions. Lunch will be served at 11:45 and talks will begin at 12:00. Unless otherwise noted, they will be held in 340 West Hall.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 09:53:46 -0400 2018-05-30T12:00:00-04:00 2018-05-30T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Quantitative Biology Seminar | Single Cell Response to Multiple Carbon Sources: A Case Study of Combinatorial Signal Integration (May 30, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52470 52470-12793962@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, May 30, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Quantitative Biology Seminars

A major determinant of the fitness of biological systems is their ability to integrate multiple cues from the environment and coordinate their response accordingly. Yet, our understanding of combinatorial integration of multiple inputs and its age dependence is still limited. One of the well-studied examples of such regulation is catabolite repression - a phenomenon where preferred carbon source (e.g., glucose) represses the pathway required for the consumption of alternative carbon sources (e.g., galactose). As a model system, we study how yeast response to hundreds of environments with different carbon sources as a function of time and age. We found that, in contrast to the textbook view, instead of merely inhibiting galactose utilization when glucose is above a threshold concentration, individual cells respond to the ratio of glucose and galactose, and based on this ratio determine whether to induce genes involved in galactose metabolism. We investigate the genetic architectures that can result in a ratio sensing and derive the conditions in which the optimal switching strategy involves preparation and when it is changed from threshold-sensing to ratio-sensing. We characterize the ability of cells to respond to changes in carbon source as a function of age and show that there is a non-trivial relation between mortality rate and failure rate.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 10:15:46 -0400 2018-05-30T12:00:00-04:00 2018-05-30T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Quantitative Biology Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Dissertation Defense: Outlier Identification in Spatio-Temporal Processes (June 1, 2018 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/52460 52460-12786066@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, June 1, 2018 10:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

This dissertation answers some of the engineering and statistical challenges arising in spatio-temporal data from Internet traffic, electricity grids and climate models. It begins with methodological contributions to the problem of anomaly detection in communication networks. Using electricity consumption patterns and grid topology for University of Michigan campus, the well known spatial prediction method: kriging has been adapted for identification of false data injections into the system.
Events like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), Botnet/Malware attacks, Credit card frauds etc. call for methods which can identify unusual behavior in Internet file transfer system. Since storing information on the entire network is infeasible, hashing techniques which produce summary statistics for the network have been used. Owing to the rather heavy tailed nature of traffic payloads, extreme value theory (EVT) based techniques have been developed for identification of volumetric attacks from the summary statistics. These methods based on EVT require the estimation of the tail index of a heavy tailed distribution. The traditional estimators (Hill (1975) for the tail index tend to be biased in the presence of outliers. To circumvent this issue, a trimmed version of the classic Hill estimator has been proposed and studied xiii from a theoretical perspective. For the Pareto domain of attraction, the optimality and asymptotic normality of the estimator has been established. Additionally, a data driven strategy to detect the number of extreme outliers in heavy tailed data has also been presented. The dissertation concludes with the statistical formulation of m-year return levels of extreme climatic events (heat/cold waves). The Generalized Pareto distribution (GPD) serves as good fit for modeling peaks over threshold of a distribution. Allowing the parameters of the GPD to vary as a function of covariates such as time of the year, El-Ni˜no and location in the US, extremes of the areal impact of heat waves have been well modeled and inferred.

]]>
Other Tue, 16 Jul 2019 14:27:55 -0400 2018-06-01T10:00:00-04:00 2018-06-01T12:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Other flyer
Physics Graduate Student Symposium | Exploring the Origins of Nitrogen in Terrestrial Worlds (June 6, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52328 52328-12639131@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, June 6, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

In the study of star and planet formation, one outstanding question is how the materials necessary for life (such as water, carbon, and nitrogen) arrived on rocky worlds like our Earth. In my dissertation, I am studying this topic through observations of young, still-forming solar systems to better understand their chemical compositions. By focusing on nitrogen-bearing organic molecules, and using models of protostellar envelopes, I hope to better understand the origins of the Earth's nitrogen.

Talks will be given each Wednesday and will be 30 minutes in length, with time after for questions. Lunch will be served at 11:45 and talks will begin at 12:00. Unless otherwise noted, they will be held in 340 West Hall.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 06 Jun 2018 08:15:35 -0400 2018-06-06T12:00:00-04:00 2018-06-06T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Physics Graduate Student Symposium | Supermassive Black Holes as the Regulators of Star Formation in Central Galaxies (June 13, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52623 52623-12908314@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, June 13, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Cavities and bubbles in the extended X-ray emission from massive galaxies demonstrate that feedback from supermassive black holes can have a profound effect on the hot gaseous atmospheres that surround these systems. The consequences of these effects result in dramatic changes with respect to how the baryon cycle works and whether new stars are able form within these galaxies. With this concern in mind, we present a relationship between the black hole mass, stellar mass, and star formation rate of a diverse group of 91 local galaxies with dynamically-measured black hole masses. For our sample of galaxies with a variety of morphologies and other galactic properties, we find that the specific star formation rate is a smoothly decreasing function of the ratio between black hole mass and stellar mass. With respect to galaxy formation models, our results present a powerful diagnostic with which to test various prescriptions of black hole feedback and its effects on star formation activity. Using the new IllustrisTNG simulation, we illuminate the physics behind quiescence in this model and compare with our observational results. We also use dozens of other TNG runs with varying physics implementations to show how observable galaxy trends and correlations are affected by changes in the black hole feedback physics, thereby providing a pathway to physically interpret observations.

Talks will be given each Wednesday and will be 30 minutes in length, with time after for questions. Lunch will be served at 11:45 and talks will begin at 12:00. Unless otherwise noted, they will be held in 340 West Hall.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 12 Jun 2018 11:01:19 -0400 2018-06-13T12:00:00-04:00 2018-06-13T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Physics Graduate Student Symposium | Electromagnetically Induced Transparency (June 20, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52331 52331-12639134@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, June 20, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Talks will be given each Wednesday and will be 30 minutes in length, with time after for questions. Lunch will be served at 11:45 and talks will begin at 12:00. Unless otherwise noted, they will be held in 340 West Hall.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 18 May 2018 14:08:55 -0400 2018-06-20T12:00:00-04:00 2018-06-20T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Dissertation Defense: On High-Dimensional Misspecified Quantile Regression (June 21, 2018 9:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/52696 52696-12959222@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, June 21, 2018 9:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Potential misspecification of the fitted model is a fundamental problem in statistics. In this dissertation we develop theory for inference and uncertainty quantification of potentially misspecified quantile regression processes when the number of predictor variables increases with or exceeds the sample size. We derive a strong Bahadur representation for misspecified quantile regression processes and establish tight error bounds on its remainder term which hold uniformly over growing collections of quantile regression functions. We use this result to obtain a de-biased representation of the high-dimensional penalized quantile regression process and to analyze the post-Lasso quantile regression estimator when the assumed linear model is wrong. To quantify the uncertainty associated with a misspecified quantile regression function we analyze its predictive risk and expected optimism. We propose uniformly consistent estimators for both quantities when the number of regression functions is growing moderately with the sample size.

]]>
Other Tue, 16 Jul 2019 14:27:30 -0400 2018-06-21T09:00:00-04:00 2018-06-21T11:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Other flyer
Physics Graduate Student Symposium | Amplitudes (July 11, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52332 52332-12639135@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, July 11, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Talks will be given each Wednesday and will be 30 minutes in length, with time after for questions. Lunch will be served at 11:45 and talks will begin at 12:00. Unless otherwise noted, they will be held in 340 West Hall.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 18 May 2018 14:10:01 -0400 2018-07-11T12:00:00-04:00 2018-07-11T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Physics Graduate Student Symposium | The MUSE Experiment and Proton Radius Puzzle (July 18, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53033 53033-13209179@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, July 18, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

In 2010, a novel method of spectroscopic measurements on muonic hydrogen resulted in a 4% smaller proton radius than previously observed, and at an order of magnitude improvement in precision. This measurement, and a second in 2013, established the so-called "Proton Radius Puzzle". Now, the MUSE collaboration will simultaneously measure, for the first time, electron and muon scattering of both polarities from a liquid hydrogen target. In this talk, I will survey the physics of the Proton Radius Puzzle, introduce how the proton radius is measured in scattering and spectroscopic experiments, and discuss how the MUSE experiment will fill an important gap in the proton radius data.

Talks will be given each Wednesday and will be 30 minutes in length, with time after for questions. Lunch will be served at 11:45 and talks will begin at 12:00. Unless otherwise noted, they will be held in 340 West Hall.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 17 Jul 2018 08:14:06 -0400 2018-07-18T12:00:00-04:00 2018-07-18T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Physics Graduate Student Symposium | Rare Decay of the Kaon with the KOTO Experiment (July 25, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52333 52333-12639136@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, July 25, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Talks will be given each Wednesday and will be 30 minutes in length, with time after for questions. Lunch will be served at 11:45 and talks will begin at 12:00. Unless otherwise noted, they will be held in 340 West Hall.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 26 Jun 2018 16:23:25 -0400 2018-07-25T12:00:00-04:00 2018-07-25T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Physics Graduate Student Symposium | Spin Dynamics in Semiconductors (August 1, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52334 52334-12639137@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, August 1, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Talks will be given each Wednesday and will be 30 minutes in length, with time after for questions. Lunch will be served at 11:45 and talks will begin at 12:00. Unless otherwise noted, they will be held in 340 West Hall.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 26 Jun 2018 16:25:53 -0400 2018-08-01T12:00:00-04:00 2018-08-01T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Physics Graduate Student Symposium | PHENIX Direct Photon Spin Asymmetry (August 8, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52335 52335-12639138@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, August 8, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Talks will be given each Wednesday and will be 30 minutes in length, with time after for questions. Lunch will be served at 11:45 and talks will begin at 12:00. Unless otherwise noted, they will be held in 340 West Hall.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 26 Jun 2018 16:25:08 -0400 2018-08-08T12:00:00-04:00 2018-08-08T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Physics Graduate Student Symposium | Mind the Gap: Using the Stellar Mass – Halo Mass Relation to understand Galaxy Growth and Cluster Assembly (August 22, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52336 52336-12639139@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, August 22, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

A large variance exists in the amplitude of the galaxy cluster Stellar Mass – Halo Mass (SMHM) relation. We find that the magnitude gap between the brightest central galaxy (BCG) and its fourth brightest neighbor accounts for this variance. At fixed halo mass, clusters with higher magnitude gaps have larger BCG stellar masses. This stratification is also observed in semi-analytic simulations of low-redshift clusters; this suggests that this stratification results from the hierarchical growth of BCGs and may link assembly of the halo with BCG growth. We quantify the impact of the magnitude gap in the SMHM relation using a multiplicative stretch factor, which we measure to be significantly non-zero. Including the magnitude gap also significantly reduces the intrinsic scatter in the BCG stellar mass at fixed halo mass. Additionally, hierarchical growth predicts that at higher redshifts fewer mergers have occurred, indicating that the BCG’s stellar mass and magnitude gap should decrease with increasing lookback time. This suggests that the slope and magnitude gap stretch factor may evolve with redshift. We test this prediction using SDSS-redMaPPer clusters to measure the SMHM relation’s parameters as a function of redshift to z < 0.3. Contrary to expectations from semi-analytic galaxy evolution models, we find no evolution. We will discuss our results in the context of hierarchical growth and prior measurements of BCG growth over the redshift range of our sample.

Talks will be given each Wednesday and will be 30 minutes in length, with time after for questions. Lunch will be served at 11:45 and talks will begin at 12:00. Unless otherwise noted, they will be held in 340 West Hall.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 20 Aug 2018 15:03:36 -0400 2018-08-22T12:00:00-04:00 2018-08-22T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Multi-Boson Interactions (MBI) 2018 (August 28, 2018 9:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/65656 65656-16627866@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, August 28, 2018 9:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics

Organizers:
Aaron Pierce (LCTP), Jianming Qian (ATLAS), James Wells (LCTP),
Bing Zhou (ATLAS),
Junjie Zhu (ATLAS)

]]>
Conference / Symposium Fri, 23 Aug 2019 11:35:47 -0400 2018-08-28T09:00:00-04:00 2018-08-28T12:00:00-04:00 West Hall Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics Conference / Symposium West Hall
Multi-Boson Interactions (MBI) Workshop (August 28, 2018 9:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/54046 54046-13519655@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, August 28, 2018 9:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Physics Workshops & Conferences

The Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics in conjunction with the Michigan ATLAS group will host this annual workshop at the U-M Department of Physics.

This three day workshop is an annual event intended to bring together theorists and experimentalists to discuss the physics of multiple vector bosons at the LHC. Topics include diboson and triboson production; vector boson scattering and vector boson fusion; precision calculation and measurement of multiboson production; new physics in multiboson production; anomalous TGC and QGC couplings; effective field theory; Monte Carlo generators; and the latest LHC Run 2 results. Past workshops have been at TU Dresden (2013), BNL (2014), DESY (2015), Wisconsin (2016), and KIT (2017).

If you are interested in these topics, you are all welcome to attend.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 22 Aug 2018 10:57:17 -0400 2018-08-28T09:00:00-04:00 2018-08-28T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Physics Workshops & Conferences Workshop / Seminar LCTP Conference Program
Multi-Boson Interactions (MBI) 2018 (August 29, 2018 9:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/65656 65656-16627867@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, August 29, 2018 9:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics

Organizers:
Aaron Pierce (LCTP), Jianming Qian (ATLAS), James Wells (LCTP),
Bing Zhou (ATLAS),
Junjie Zhu (ATLAS)

]]>
Conference / Symposium Fri, 23 Aug 2019 11:35:47 -0400 2018-08-29T09:00:00-04:00 2018-08-29T12:00:00-04:00 West Hall Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics Conference / Symposium West Hall
Multi-Boson Interactions (MBI) Workshop (August 29, 2018 9:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/54046 54046-13519657@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, August 29, 2018 9:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Physics Workshops & Conferences

The Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics in conjunction with the Michigan ATLAS group will host this annual workshop at the U-M Department of Physics.

This three day workshop is an annual event intended to bring together theorists and experimentalists to discuss the physics of multiple vector bosons at the LHC. Topics include diboson and triboson production; vector boson scattering and vector boson fusion; precision calculation and measurement of multiboson production; new physics in multiboson production; anomalous TGC and QGC couplings; effective field theory; Monte Carlo generators; and the latest LHC Run 2 results. Past workshops have been at TU Dresden (2013), BNL (2014), DESY (2015), Wisconsin (2016), and KIT (2017).

If you are interested in these topics, you are all welcome to attend.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 22 Aug 2018 10:57:17 -0400 2018-08-29T09:00:00-04:00 2018-08-29T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Physics Workshops & Conferences Workshop / Seminar LCTP Conference Program
Multi-Boson Interactions (MBI) 2018 (August 30, 2018 9:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/65656 65656-16627868@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, August 30, 2018 9:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics

Organizers:
Aaron Pierce (LCTP), Jianming Qian (ATLAS), James Wells (LCTP),
Bing Zhou (ATLAS),
Junjie Zhu (ATLAS)

]]>
Conference / Symposium Fri, 23 Aug 2019 11:35:47 -0400 2018-08-30T09:00:00-04:00 2018-08-30T12:00:00-04:00 West Hall Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics Conference / Symposium West Hall
Multi-Boson Interactions (MBI) Workshop (August 30, 2018 9:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/54046 54046-13519658@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, August 30, 2018 9:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Physics Workshops & Conferences

The Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics in conjunction with the Michigan ATLAS group will host this annual workshop at the U-M Department of Physics.

This three day workshop is an annual event intended to bring together theorists and experimentalists to discuss the physics of multiple vector bosons at the LHC. Topics include diboson and triboson production; vector boson scattering and vector boson fusion; precision calculation and measurement of multiboson production; new physics in multiboson production; anomalous TGC and QGC couplings; effective field theory; Monte Carlo generators; and the latest LHC Run 2 results. Past workshops have been at TU Dresden (2013), BNL (2014), DESY (2015), Wisconsin (2016), and KIT (2017).

If you are interested in these topics, you are all welcome to attend.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 22 Aug 2018 10:57:17 -0400 2018-08-30T09:00:00-04:00 2018-08-30T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Physics Workshops & Conferences Workshop / Seminar LCTP Conference Program
AskMe! Info Stations (September 4, 2018 8:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/54166 54166-13537239@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, September 4, 2018 8:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Campus Information

"What does this acronym mean?" "What bus route do I take to get to north?" "Where is this building?" We get it. Navigating the first couple days of class can be a bit overwhelming. But fear not! Friendly staff members and students will be stationed at Ask Me! Info Tents throughout central and north campus to answer any questions you have and get you to where you need to go. Can't make it to a tent? Call 734.764.INFO or tweet #askumich and we will get your question answered.

]]>
Other Fri, 24 Aug 2018 09:10:51 -0400 2018-09-04T08:00:00-04:00 2018-09-04T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Campus Information Other Campus Information Logo
AskMe! Info Stations (September 5, 2018 8:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/54166 54166-13537243@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, September 5, 2018 8:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Campus Information

"What does this acronym mean?" "What bus route do I take to get to north?" "Where is this building?" We get it. Navigating the first couple days of class can be a bit overwhelming. But fear not! Friendly staff members and students will be stationed at Ask Me! Info Tents throughout central and north campus to answer any questions you have and get you to where you need to go. Can't make it to a tent? Call 734.764.INFO or tweet #askumich and we will get your question answered.

]]>
Other Fri, 24 Aug 2018 09:10:51 -0400 2018-09-05T08:00:00-04:00 2018-09-05T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Campus Information Other Campus Information Logo
Department Colloquium | State of the Department Address (September 5, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53478 53478-13386088@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, September 5, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Brad Orr will open the school year by informing everyone of the new research and happenings in the Physics Department.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 05 Sep 2018 18:16:35 -0400 2018-09-05T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-05T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Ryan Tibshirani, Associate Professor, Departments of Statistics and Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University (September 7, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/52994 52994-13176867@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 7, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics Seminar Series

We describe some recent advances in distribution-free prediction intervals in regression, using the conformal inference framework. This framework allows for the construction of a prediction band for the response variable using any estimator of the regression function. The resulting prediction band preserves the consistency properties of the original estimator under standard assumptions, while guaranteeing finite-sample marginal coverage even when these assumptions do not hold. We discuss two major variants of our conformal framework: full conformal inference and split conformal inference, along with a related jackknife method. These methods offer different tradeoffs between statistical accuracy (length of resulting prediction intervals) and computational efficiency. We also develop a new method for constructing valid in-sample prediction intervals called rank-one-out conformal inference, which has essentially the same computational efficiency as split conformal inference. Lastly, if time permits, we will discuss a number of open challenges related to conformal inference.
Much of this represents joint work with my CMU colleagues Jing Lei, Max G’Sell, Alessandro Rinaldo, and Larry Wasserman.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 30 Aug 2018 09:45:15 -0400 2018-09-07T11:30:00-04:00 2018-09-07T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Seminar Series Workshop / Seminar Ryan Tibshirani
Quantitative Biology Seminar | Verticalization of Bacterial Biofilms (September 10, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54684 54684-13636270@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, September 10, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Biofilms are communities of bacteria adhered to surfaces. Recently, biofilms of rod-shaped bacteria were observed at single-cell resolution and shown to develop from a disordered, two-dimensional layer of founder cells into a three-dimensional structure with a vertically-aligned core. Here, we elucidate the physical mechanism underpinning this transition using a combination of agent-based and continuum modeling. We find that verticalization proceeds through a series of localized mechanical instabilities on the cellular scale. For short cells, these instabilities are primarily triggered by cell division, whereas long cells are more likely to be peeled off the surface by nearby vertical cells, creating an "inverse domino effect". The interplay between cell growth and cell verticalization gives rise to an exotic mechanical state in which the effective surface pressure becomes constant throughout the growing core of the biofilm surface layer. This dynamical isobaricity determines the expansion speed of a biofilm cluster and thereby governs how cells access the third dimension. In particular, theory predicts that a longer average cell length yields more rapidly expanding, flatter biofilms. We experimentally show that such changes in biofilm development occur by exploiting chemicals that modulate cell length.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 10 Sep 2018 18:16:58 -0400 2018-09-10T12:00:00-04:00 2018-09-10T01:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Searches for di-Higgs Production and Using Hardware Track Triggers to Search for New Physics (September 10, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53569 53569-13410061@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, September 10, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The particle physics community has been working to study the properties of the Higgs boson since its discovery in 2012. As part of the Higgs physics program, the ATLAS experiment has conducted searches for di-Higgs (hh) production, which will allow us to measure the Higgs self-coupling and compare to Standard Model (SM) predictions. We can also search for enhanced hh production in beyond-the-SM scenarios, such as resonant production via a new heavy scalar, or non-SM couplings to the Higgs boson, either of which would increase the hh cross section. Looking forward, the LHC Run 3 will bring a new set of challenges, including more pp collisions per bunch crossing. Extracting rare physics signatures from this busier environment will be difficult for the ATLAS trigger system. The FastTracKer (FTK), a hardware upgrade to the ATLAS trigger system, will use new technologies to perform full-scan tracking for each event selected at the first level of the trigger. The tracks will then be provided to the software-based High Level Trigger, which makes the final trigger decisions. This will make it possible to efficiently find difficult objects, such as taus and b-tagged jets, at the trigger level. In this talk, I will present ATLAS searches for hh production using a variety of final states, as well as their combination, and discuss the use of FTK in the ATLAS trigger system during LHC Run 3.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 10 Sep 2018 18:16:58 -0400 2018-09-10T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-10T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Synchrotron Radiation from an Accelerating Light Pulse (September 11, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54950 54950-13656389@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, September 11, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Synchrotron radiation, namely, electromagnetic radiation produced by charges moving in a curved path, is regularly generated at large-scale facilities where GeV electrons move along kilometer-long circular paths. We use a metasurface to bend light and demonstrate synchrotron radiation produced by a sub-picosecond pulse, which moves along a circular arc of radius 100 µm inside a nonlinear crystal. The emitted radiation, in the THz frequency range, results from the nonlinear polarization induced by the pulse. The generation of synchrotron radiation from a pulse revolving about a circular trajectory holds promise for the development of on-chip THz sources.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 11 Sep 2018 18:16:52 -0400 2018-09-11T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-11T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Topological Protection in Messy Matter: Edge Modes in Disordered Fiber Networks and Quasicrystals (September 12, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53479 53479-13386089@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, September 12, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Topological states of matter have been intensively studied in crystals, leading to fascinating phenomena such as scattering-free edge current in topological insulators. However, the power of topological protection goes well beyond ordered crystal lattices. In this talk we explore how topology protects mechanical edge modes in messy, noncrystalline, systems. We will use disordered fiber networks and quasicrystals as our examples, to demonstrate how topological edge floppy modes can be induced in these structures by controlling their geometry. Fiber networks are ubiquitous in nature and especially important in bio-related materials. Quasicrystals show unusual orientational order with quasiperiodic translational order. Realizing topological edge floppy modes in these noncrystalline structures may open the door to rich new physics in biological networks as well as novel designs of topological mechanical metamaterials.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 12 Sep 2018 18:16:54 -0400 2018-09-12T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-12T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Qiyang Han, Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics, Rutgers University (September 14, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/52995 52995-13176888@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 14, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics Seminar Series

We study the convergence rate of the least squares estimator (LSE) in a regression model
with possibly heavy-tailed errors. Despite its importance in practical applications,
theoretical understanding of this problem has been limited. We first show that from a
worst-case perspective, the convergence rate of the LSE in a general non-parametric regression model is given by the maximum of the Gaussian regression rate and the noise rate induced by the errors. In the more difficult statistical model where the errors only have a second moment, we further show that the sizes of the 'localized envelopes' of the model give a sharp interpolation for the convergence rate of the LSE between the worst-case rate and the (optimal) parametric rate.
These results indicate both certain positive and negative aspects of the LSE as an estimation procedure in a heavy-tailed regression setting. The key technical innovation is a new multiplier inequality that sharply controls the size of the multiplier empirical process associated with the LSE, which also finds applications in shape-restricted and sparse linear regression problems.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 06 Sep 2018 16:42:04 -0400 2018-09-14T11:30:00-04:00 2018-09-14T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Seminar Series Workshop / Seminar Qiyang Han
HET Seminars | Might the Dark Matter Also Be the Inflaton? (September 14, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54937 54937-13654181@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 14, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

Dark matter and inflation represent two of the biggest open question in cosmology. Although they are generally thought of as distinct and unrelated phenomena, here I will ask whether they might be closely connected. In particular, I will describe a class of models in which a stable inflaton is produced as a thermal relic in the early universe and constitutes the dark matter. I will show that the annihilations of these inflatons can efficiently reheat the universe, and I will identify several examples of inflationary potentials within this scenario which can accommodate all cosmic microwave background observables. As a simple example, I will discuss a model in which inflaton annihilations that take place through a Higgs portal interaction, leading to encouraging prospects for future direct detection experiments.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 10 Sep 2018 10:31:46 -0400 2018-09-14T15:00:00-04:00 2018-09-14T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Recent Developments and Applications of Improved Fast Neutron Detectors (September 17, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55127 55127-13689413@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, September 17, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Neutrons are hard to detect and until recently the technique used by Chadwick to identify the neutron in the 1930s has often been used to detect them. This method, based on recoil proton detection, does not provide detailed information on the neutron energy spectra unless one can do a neutron time-of-flight measurement (n-ToF). This is not always possible especially with the new generation of low b.g. underground accelerators designed for nuclear-astrophysics measurements.. Even when n-ToF is feasible, it often is not very efficient as a long flight path must typically be used together with a bunched and pulse-selected beam . Recent developments in deuterated scintillators, both liquids and recently crystalline, can provide efficient detection of neutrons and their energy spectra w/o n-ToF. As will be illustrated, these new detectors are proving to be especially useful for study of many types of rare nuclear reactions, for home-land security applications, for ion-beam dosimetry, and for measurements of important reactions creating problematic neutrons in the large scintillators used for neutrino oscillation measurements and for dark-matter searches.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 17 Sep 2018 18:17:07 -0400 2018-09-17T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-17T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | An Atomic Receiver for AM and FM Radio Communication (September 18, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55388 55388-13725241@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, September 18, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Radio-frequency field modulation underlies nearly all modern communication, from car radios to wifi. Despite being a mature technology first developed in the late nineteenth century, radio communication has several ongoing challenges including information security, increasing bandwidth by tapping the microwave- and mm-wave regimes, and improving resilience against electromagnetic interference (EMI). An exciting prospect to solving many of these challenges lies in replacing antenna technology with quantum technologies. In this talk, I will describe the recent development at Rydberg Technologies of a fundamentally new atomic receiver technology for AM and FM radio communication [1, 2]. The atomic receiver exploits the properties of Rydberg atoms, highly excited atomic states that are very sensitive to electromagnetic fields, to collect and demodulate AM and FM radio based on atomic spectroscopy in compact room-temperature vapor cells. Features of the atomic receiver include its small size, ability detect carrier-waves spanning several octaves, and a circuit-free detector element. Even in this first demonstration, the bandwidth and dynamic range are sufficient to receive human vocals.

References:

[1] D.A. Anderson, R.E. Saprio, G. Raithel, ‘An Atomic receiver for AM and FM radio communication,” (2018) https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.08589

[2] Rydberg Technologies www.RydbergTechnologies.com

In the news:

'Get ready for atomic radio,' MIT Technology Review 2018 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611977/get-ready-for-atomic-radio/

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 18 Sep 2018 18:17:17 -0400 2018-09-18T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-18T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Marine Hydrodynamics Lab Open House (September 19, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55199 55199-13698268@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, September 19, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Naval Architecture & Marine Engineering

Undecided on your major? Interested in engineering in the marine domain? Chart your course to Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering!

You're invited to visit our Marine Hydrodynamics Lab to learn more about the NAME program and the opportunities that are available to our graduates. 95% job and internship placement.

Food and refreshments will be provided...

Go Blue!

]]>
Other Tue, 18 Sep 2018 13:38:10 -0400 2018-09-19T12:00:00-04:00 2018-09-19T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall Naval Architecture & Marine Engineering Other West Hall
Department Colloquium | Studying the Higgs Sector and Searching for New Physics with the Higgs Boson (September 19, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53481 53481-13386091@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, September 19, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

I will present recent work at Michigan in measuring properties of the Higgs Boson with the ATLAS experiment, including the production of Higgs in association with top quarks and Higgs pair production. I will also discuss planned upgrades of the ATLAS experiment which will dramatically improve the sensitivity of these measurements and many more.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 19 Sep 2018 18:17:06 -0400 2018-09-19T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-19T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Peter Orbanz, Associate Professor, Department of Statistics, Columbia University (September 21, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/52996 52996-13176889@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 21, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics Seminar Series

A recent body of work, by myself and many others, aims to develop a statistical theory of network data for problems a single network is observed. Of the models studied in this area, graphon models are probably most widely known in statistics. I will explain the relationship between three aspects of this work: (1) Specific models, such as graphon models, graphex models, and edge-exchangeable graphs. (2) Sampling theory for networks, specifically in the case statisticians might refer to as an infinite-population limit. (3) Invariance properties, especially various forms of exchangeability. I will also present recent results that show how statistically relevant results (such as central limit theorems) can be derived from such invariance properties.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 17 Sep 2018 16:14:05 -0400 2018-09-21T11:30:00-04:00 2018-09-21T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Seminar Series Workshop / Seminar Peter Orbanz
Life After Graduate School | Wish I'd Known That Sooner (September 21, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53525 53525-13394610@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 21, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

As physicists we place tremendous value on the pursuit of knowledge and scientific discovery, however after graduate school you will eventually recognize that in corporate research many professional interactions aren't aligned with such pursuits. The presenter, an Applied Physics alum, will share insights gained through years of failed (and sometimes successful) professional experiments to help the next-generation of applied physicists recognize the key indicators of stagnant career growth, as well as define strategies to avoid slow starts after earning your first job after graduation.


]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 21 Sep 2018 12:17:13 -0400 2018-09-21T12:00:00-04:00 2018-09-21T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Supersymmetric Localization: Review and Recent Progress (September 21, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55372 55372-13722857@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 21, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Supersymmetric localization is a powerful tool that can provide us with some exact non-perturbative results of quantum field theories. In the first half of this talk we will review its basic idea and some important applications. The results of localization can be used to test some conjectured dualities, for instance the Seiberg-like dualities in various dimensions, and also to help set up new dualities. We will demonstrate these aspects with some examples. In the second half of this talk, we will discuss some recent progress on the localization of 4d N=1 gauge theories. We consider 4d N=1 gauge theories on S2*R2 and compute their partition functions. The results are related to the partition functions of 4d N=1 gauge theories on the Omega background with two epsilon parameters, which can be viewed as building blocks of the Nekrasov partition functions of the 4d N=2 theories on the Omega background. As an application, we use the N=1 partition functions to test various dualities such as the 4d Seiberg duality. Further applications to the 4d Argyres-Douglas theories and the generalized AGT relation will also be discussed. This talk is based on a few papers 1309.3266, 1411.4694, 1505.06207, 1705.01896 and some work in progress.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 17 Sep 2018 11:08:58 -0400 2018-09-21T15:00:00-04:00 2018-09-21T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
The Enigmatic KIME: Time Complexity in Data Science (September 21, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54407 54407-13581110@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 21, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Data Science

Abstract: We will provide a constructive definition of “Big Biomedical/Health Data” and provide examples of the challenges, algorithms, processes, and tools necessary to manage, aggregate, harmonize, process, and interpret such data. In data science, time complexity frequently manifests as sampling incongruency, heterogeneous scales, and intricate dependencies. We will present the concept of 2D complex-time (kime) and illustrate how the kime-order (time) and kime-direction (phase) affect advanced predictive analytics and scientific inference based on Big Biomedical Data. Kime-representation solves the unidirectional arrows of time problems, e.g., psychological arrow of time reflects the irrevocable past to future flow and thermodynamic arrow of time reflecting the relentless growth of entropy. Albeit kime-phase angles may not always be directly observable, we will illustrate how they can be estimated and used to improve the resulting space-kime modeling, trend forecasting, and predictive data analytics. Simulated data, clinical observations (e.g., neurodegenerative disorders), and multisource census-like datasets (e.g., UK Biobank) will be used to demonstrate time-complexity and inferential-uncertainty.

Bio: Ivo D. Dinov is a professor of Health Behavior and Biological Sciences and Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan. He directs the Statistics Online Computational Resource, the Integrative Biostatistics and Informatics Core of the Michigan Nutrition and Obesity Research Center, and the Udall Parkinson’s Disease Biostatistics and Data Management Core. He co-directs the Center for Complexity and Self-management of Chronic Disease (CSCD Center) and the multi-institutional Probability Distributome Project. Dr. Dinov is an Associate Director for Education and Training of the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS). He is a member of the American Statistical Association (ASA), the International Association for Statistical Education (IASE), the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), as well as an Elected Member of the Institutional Statistical Institute (ISI).

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 06 Sep 2018 09:51:17 -0400 2018-09-21T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-21T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Michigan Institute for Data Science Workshop / Seminar Ivo D. Dinov, Phd
HEP-Astro Seminar | Anomaly of Dancing Reactor Antineutrinos (September 24, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53547 53547-13401553@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, September 24, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The Reactor Experiment for Neutrino Oscillation(RENO) started data-taking from August, 2011 and has observed the disappearance of reactor electron antineutrinos to measure the smallest neutrino mixing angle theta13. The experiment has analyzed roughly 2200 days of data to make an accurate measurement of the oscillation amplitude and frequency based on energy and baseline dependent disappearance of reactor antineutrinos. RENO’s precisely measured flux and spectral shape of reactor antineutrinos has shown a deficit in the flux and an excess in the region of 5 MeV relative to the most commonly used model. Furthermore, it has observed fuel-composition dependent variation of reactor antineutrino yield and spectrum. We find that reevaluation of 235U’s antineutrino yield per fission may solve the reactor antineutrino anomaly. We also report a hint of correlation between the 5-MeV excess and the 235U fuel isotope fraction.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 24 Sep 2018 18:17:22 -0400 2018-09-24T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-24T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Harvard Law School Information Session (September 25, 2018 1:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55433 55433-13725306@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, September 25, 2018 1:30pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Newnan LSA Academic Advising Center

A visiting admissions representative from Harvard Law School will host an admissions information session for all University of Michigan students interested in applying to Harvard Law. The session will include a short presentation and Q&A/discussion about Harvard’s new programs, such as their acceptance of the GRE in admissions and the expansion of the Junior Deferral Program (JDP).

Register here: https://jdadmissions.law.harvard.edu/register/hls-at-umich-2018

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 14 Sep 2018 14:28:20 -0400 2018-09-25T13:30:00-04:00 2018-09-25T14:30:00-04:00 West Hall Newnan LSA Academic Advising Center Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Quantum Oscillations in Kondo Insulator YbB12 (September 25, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55550 55550-13759135@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, September 25, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

In metals, orbital motions of conduction electrons on the Fermi surface are quantized in magnetic fields, which is manifested by quantum oscillations in electrical resistivity. This Landau quantization is generally absent in insulators. Here, we report a notable exception in an insulator — ytterbium dodecaboride (YbB12). The resistivity of YbB12, which is of a much larger magnitude than the resistivity in metals, exhibits distinct quantum oscillations. These unconventional oscillations arise from the insulating bulk, even though the temperature dependence of the oscillation amplitude follows the conventional Fermi liquid theory of metals with a large effective mass. Quantum oscillations in the magnetic torque are also observed, albeit with a lighter effective mass. Our result reveals a mysterious dual nature of the ground state in YbB12: it is both a charge insulator and a strongly correlated metal.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 25 Sep 2018 18:17:18 -0400 2018-09-25T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-25T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Correlated Topological Materials (September 26, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53482 53482-13386092@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

In Kondo insulators, strong correlation and band hybridization lead to a diverging resistance at low temperature. The resistance divergence ends at about 3 Kelvin, a behavior due to the surface conductance. Quantum oscillations were observed in magnetization, but not in electrical resistivity. This difference raised many speculations if a charge-neutral Fermi Surface exists in insulators and these fermions interact only with the magnetic field, not with electric fields. We solved the problem by resolving the Landau Level quantization and Fermi Surface topology in the electrical resistivity a Kondo insulator Ytterbium Dodecaboride (YbB12). The temperature dependence of the oscillation amplitude follows the conventional Fermi liquid theory of metals with a large effective mass. The result suggests that the observed Fermi surface originates from the charged particles. Our finding reveals a mysterious dual nature of the ground state in Kondo insulator YbB12: it is both a charge insulator and a strongly correlated topological metal.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 26 Sep 2018 18:17:21 -0400 2018-09-26T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-26T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM Theory Seminar | Quantum Donuts and Wedding Cakes: Topology- and Interaction-driven Effects in Graphene Quantum Dots (September 27, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53483 53483-13386093@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, September 27, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Graphene is a quasi two-dimensional material with low-energy excitations that can be described by the relativistic Dirac equation for massless chiral fermions. This has allowed graphene to act as a host solid state system for measuring analogous relativistic effects on a laboratory table-top. Recently, the ability to generate nanoscale substrate gate potentials in hexagonal boron nitride has opened the door for creating confined quantum dot (QD) states in a contiguous sheet of graphene. Unlike other QD systems, graphene’s exposed electronic surface is uniquely amenable to scanning probe measurements that reveal the detailed spatial structure of the resonant QD states. In this talk I will present scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/S) measurements that explore the interplay between spatial and magnetic confinement of Dirac fermions in graphene QDs. I will first describe how quasi-bound resonances occur due to relativistic Klein scattering at QD edges. I will then show how the application of a weak magnetic field (B ~ 0.1 T) can act as a topological Berry phase on/off “switch” resulting in the sudden onset of large energy splittings in the graphene QD spectrum. Finally, at higher fields (B > 1T), I describe measurements that directly visualize the intricate evolution of the QD resonant states into highly degenerate Landau levels where electron interactions lead to the subsequent formation of a 'wedding cake'-like structure of compressible incompressible strips and strong Fermi velocity renormalization.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 27 Sep 2018 18:17:28 -0400 2018-09-27T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-27T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Li Ma, Associate Professor, Department of Statistical Science, Duke University (September 28, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/52997 52997-13176890@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 28, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics Seminar Series

We introduce a method---called Fisher exact scanning (FES)---for testing and identifying variable dependency that generalizes Fisher's exact test on $2\times 2$ contingency tables to $R\times C$ contingency tables and continuous sample spaces. FES proceeds through scanning over the sample space using windows in the form of $2\times 2$ tables of various sizes, and on each window completing a Fisher's exact test. Based on a factorization of Fisher's multivariate hypergeometric (MHG) likelihood into the product of the univariate hypergeometric likelihoods, we show that there exists a coarse-to-fine, sequential generative representation for the MHG model in the form of a Bayesian network, which in turn implies the mutual independence (up to deviation due to discreteness) among the Fisher's exact tests completed under FES. This allows an exact characterization of the joint null distribution of the $p$-values and gives rise to an effective inference recipe through simple multiple testing procedures such as \v{S}id\'{a}k and Bonferroni corrections, eliminating the need for resampling. In addition, FES can characterize dependency through reporting significant windows after multiple testing control. The computational complexity of FES is approximately linear in the sample size, which along with the avoidance of resampling makes it ideal for analyzing massive data sets. We use extensive numerical studies to illustrate the work of FES and compare it to several state-of-the-art methods for testing dependency in both statistical and computational performance. Finally, we apply FES to analyzing a microbiome data set and further investigate its relationship with other popular dependency metrics in that context.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 17 Sep 2018 16:16:39 -0400 2018-09-28T11:30:00-04:00 2018-09-28T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Seminar Series Workshop / Seminar Li Ma
Life After Graduate School | How Three Recent Opportunities are Changing our Company's Business Outlook (September 28, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53526 53526-13394611@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 28, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Dr. Peter Cabauy is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of City Labs, Inc. In 2002, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Applied Physics. His thesis work was in Quantum Information Physics at Argonne National Laboratories (ANL), and he co-authored a publication with his thesis advisor, Dr. Paul Benioff, a seminal pioneer in the field of Quantum Computing.

In 2003, he founded and directed the Office of Entrepreneurial Science at Florida International University advising in intellectual property matters and laying the groundwork for its technology incubator program. In 2005, Dr. Cabauy co-founded City Labs where his diverse experience in technology entrepreneurship, experimental and theoretical physics has been instrumental in both structuring the company and developing its product line. Under his leadership, the company completed a Series A investment round in 2010, commercialized its signature betavoltaic product line in 2012 and has successfully navigated the complex regulatory landscape achieving the world's first general license for a betavoltaic product. As of 2018 City Labs has achieved a strong patent portfolio under Cabauy's leadership and is introducing a new class of betavoltaics that will expand its commercial reach into medical implants, wireless sensors and space satellite applications.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 28 Sep 2018 18:17:18 -0400 2018-09-28T12:00:00-04:00 2018-09-28T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminar | Black Holes, Nuggets, & Blobs. Oh my! (September 28, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55888 55888-13802783@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 28, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

The past few years have seen a growing interest to explore dark matter candidates that are outside of the standard WIMP / axion paradigms. A resurgence of macroscopic dark matter candidates have brought with it a mix of whimsical names — primordial black holes, asymmetric dark matter nuggets, and dark blobs — to name a few. In general the difficulty with macro dark matter is not the observational constraints, which are typically quite sparse and weak, but rather the challenge is finding a well-motivated mechanism for producing gram-sized dark matter objects. In this talk, I will argue that “dark quark nuggets” are a generic prediction of confining, hidden-sector gauge theories. I will discuss the phenomenology of these theories, the cosmological production of dark quark nuggets, and their observational probes.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 24 Sep 2018 08:49:56 -0400 2018-09-28T15:00:00-04:00 2018-09-28T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: “Culinary Spectacles: Gastro-Politics, Race and Species in Peru” (September 28, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51711 51711-12205471@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 28, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

Peru is in the midst of what many have called a gastronomic revolution. Dominant narratives in the country and beyond celebrate the fusion of Peru’s diversity (cultural, racial, culinary) as a pathway to social inclusion and Peruvian economic success. While culinary fusion has been a key part of this moment, the rise of chef Virgilio Martínez—famously known as the chef who “cooks ecosystems”—has expanded discussions (gastronomic and political) to highlight Peruvian biodiversity, indigeneity and cultural “authenticity.” In this talk I explore this moment as one that illuminates the contemporary aesthetics of what Peruvian theorist Anibal Quijano has termed “the coloniality of power.” While there may indeed be some material benefits for emerging young chefs and some indigenous producers, I argue that this gastronomic boom in fact perpetuates gendered and racial hierarchies in the country, and obscures violence against marginalized human and non-human bodies.

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Thu, 09 Aug 2018 10:40:42 -0400 2018-09-28T15:00:00-04:00 2018-09-28T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Lecture / Discussion West Hall
Statistical Models for Analyzing Dynamic Social Network Data (September 28, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54423 54423-13583297@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 28, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Data Science

Abstract: Due in part to the ubiquity of online social networks these days, interest in analyzing social network data has spread beyond its traditional home in the social sciences to many other disciplines including physics, computer science, statistics, and engineering. A topic of significant importance in social network analysis is the creation of statistical models for social network data. Many social network data involve relations between people observed at multiple points in time and are thus dynamic network data. In this talk, I introduce several statistical models for analyzing two types of dynamic network data. Discrete-time network data, also known as network panel data, represent the structure of the social network at regular time intervals, e.g. over each week or each month.Continuous-time network data, also known as timestamped network or relational event data, are collected with finer granularity on the time and at irregular time intervals. I demonstrate how these models can be used to infer network structures and how they evolve over time on several dynamic social network data sets, including a network of physical proximities between people at a university and a network of wall posts between users on Facebook.

Bio: Kevin S. Xu received the B.A.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2007 and the M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering: Systems from the University of Michigan in 2009 and 2012, respectively. He was a recipient of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Postgraduate Master’s and Doctorate Scholarships. He is currently an assistant professor in the EECS Department at the University of Toledo and has previously held industry research positions at Technicolor and 3M. His main research interests are in machine learning and statistical signal processing with applications to network science and human dynamics.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 06 Sep 2018 09:52:23 -0400 2018-09-28T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-28T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Michigan Institute for Data Science Workshop / Seminar Kevin Xu
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: "The sensory ecology of fruit selection by wild capuchin monkeys (Cebus capucinus imitator) in Sector Santa Rosa, Costa Rica" (October 1, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51705 51705-12202560@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 1, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

"Sensory systems are our interface with the external world. Longstanding hypotheses concerning primate origins hinge on the relationships among sensory systems, diet and activity pattern and revealing these dynamics is important to understanding primate adaptive radiation. I ask how primates use their senses to find and select foods, and how diet and habitat have shaped vision, olfaction, taste, touch and hearing over the course of primate evolution. Here, I will discuss my collaborative research on the sensory ecology of wild capuchin monkeys (Cebus capucinus imitator) in the tropical dry forests of northwestern Costa Rica over the past 14 years. Data from behavioral, genetic, life history, and visual modelling approaches provide compelling evidence that color vision polymorphism is maintained by balancing selection, and that monkeys with different sensory phenotypes have distinct ecological advantages and disadvantages. Trichromatic (color-normal relative to human) capuchins have higher foraging efficiency on many ripe fruits, while dichromats (red-green colorblind) are more efficient at capturing surface-dwelling insects. Capuchins also integrate their senses of vision, olfaction, touch and taste in complex ways during foraging, and their sensory gene repertoire is diverse. Additionally, I will discuss how plant properties shape primate behavior - variation in the frequency of fruit sniffing can be linked to the chemical profile and odors of fruits as they ripen, as well as presence/absence of haptic and color variation. Investigation of primate sensory ecology is still in its infancy; I end by highlighting promising avenues of future research in this dynamic and enthralling area."

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Thu, 16 Aug 2018 15:46:44 -0400 2018-10-01T15:00:00-04:00 2018-10-01T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Lecture / Discussion West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Translation Symmetry in Topologically Ordered Phases (October 2, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56047 56047-13823404@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 2, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Lattice translation is a fundamental crystalline symmetry in many condensed matter systems.In this talk we examine the interplay of translation symmetry with topological order. In the first part of the talk, we will discuss recent advances in Lieb-Schultz-Mattis (LSM) type theorems, which put stringent microscopic constraints on the low-energy dynamics of translation-invariant lattice systems. We will introduce a new interpretation of the classic LSM theorem and its higher-dimensional version by Oshikawa and Hastings, as consequences of the bulk-boundary correspondence for translation symmetry-protected topological phases in higher dimensions. We then discuss various generalizations and refinements following this new perspective. In the second part, we discuss the relation between translation symmetry transformations on quasiparticle excitations and their mobility. It turns out that certain patterns of translation symmetry fractionalization (in the presence of a global U(1) symmetry) imply that quasiparticles are immobile, i.e. they become fractons. We show that such fractonic particles naturally appear in three dimensional U(1) spin liquids, and develop a systematic understanding for symmetry enforced restrictions on mobility. We will also discuss possible physical realizations.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 02 Oct 2018 18:17:17 -0400 2018-10-02T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-02T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Life In Graduate School Seminar | Going Off-Site for Research - How To Balance with Grad School and Life (October 5, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56209 56209-13867058@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 5, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Life After Grad School Seminars

Going Off-Site for Research - How To Balance with Grad School and Life (Student Panel)

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 01 Oct 2018 08:57:05 -0400 2018-10-05T12:00:00-04:00 2018-10-05T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Life After Grad School Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
New Methods for Detecting Natural Selection in Large Samples of Genetic Data (October 5, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56321 56321-13878530@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 5, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Data Science

Abstract: Understanding how humans evolved and adapted to their environment is one of the most important and interesting questions in science. The recent emergence of large, publicly available genetic data sets places the answers to these questions closer within reach than ever before. New statistical methods are needed to take full advantage of these resources.

In this talk Dr. Terhorst will discuss some recent progress towards detecting signals of recent natural selection in genetic data from tens of thousands of individuals. On the computational side, he will describe new memory- and compute-efficient inference algorithms that allow us to analyze thousands of genomes in parallel using GPUs. On the theoretical side, he will describe a new test for neutrality based on combinatorial properties of Kingman’s coalescent. The test turns out to have interesting connections to a classic problem in theoretical statistics which has been studied by LeCam, Moran, Hall, and other luminaries. Some of this work is joint with Dan Erdmann-Pham, Kamm, Pier Palamara, Alkes Price and Yun Song.

Bio: Jonathan Terhorst joined the University of Michigan in the fall of 2017 as an assistant professor in the statistics department. Before that, he was a PhD student in statistics at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Prof. Yun Song. He is broadly interested in applications of statistics and machine learning to problems in biology, with a particular emphasis on statistical and population genetics.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 02 Oct 2018 15:06:12 -0400 2018-10-05T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-05T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Michigan Institute for Data Science Workshop / Seminar Jonathan Terhorst, PhD
HEP-Astro Seminar | Why the Higgs is Light, Why It Has Standard Model Couplings to Gauge Bosons and Fermions, and Where There are More Higgses to be Found (October 8, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54417 54417-13583291@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 8, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Current data from the LHC indicate that the 125 GeV Higgs boson, H, is either the single Higgs of the Standard Model or, to a good approximation, an "aligned Higgs". We propose that His the pseudo-Goldstone dilaton of Gildener and Weinberg. We point out for the first time that this naturally and, as far as we know, uniquely accounts for its low mass and its alignment. It further implies the existence of additional Higgs bosons in the vicinity of 200 - 500 GeV. We illustrate our proposal in a version of the two-Higgs-doublet model of Lee and Pilaftsis and we discuss the model's observational consequences at the LHC.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 08 Oct 2018 18:17:12 -0400 2018-10-08T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-08T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | From Chirped Pulse Amplification to High Field Physics (October 9, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56444 56444-13905899@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 9, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Gerard Mourou, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan was awarded the Nobel prize in Physics in 2018 for his 1985 invention of chirped pulse amplification using lasers. This has resulted in an explosion of research using high intensity laser systems as well as numerous applications. I will discuss the development of the technology of short pulse, high power lasers from that time to the present - as well as the exciting research in high field science that this has enabled.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 09 Oct 2018 18:17:07 -0400 2018-10-09T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-09T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Drops, spiral waves, and gels: Experiments in non-equilibrium soft matter systems (October 10, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56299 56299-13878491@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 10, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Soft matter abounds in the natural world. Moreover, soft materials are most often not in thermal equilibrium. I will present a series of vignettes from experiments in my lab that show the remarkable behaviors that emerge in driven soft materials. I will show how drying drops can be used in forensic analysis, how drops can be moved with light, how spiral waves appear in chemical reactions and how they interact with each other, and how the same chemical reaction can be used to induce mechanical motion of a gel.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 10 Oct 2018 18:17:06 -0400 2018-10-10T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-10T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM Theory Seminar | Mechanics of Allosteric Materials - How Proteins Mediate Long-Range Interaction (October 11, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53484 53484-13386094@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, October 11, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

A crucial regulation for life is enabled at the molecular level through allosteric proteins, whose catalytic activity at the active sites can be significantly enhanced or inhibited by the appearance of specific chemicals binding at their allosteric sites. Predicting the allosteric pathways from protein structures would help us determine regulation networks and design smart drugs. However, it remains a challenge as the nature of allostery — this elasticity-mediated long-range interaction is understood superficially. To approach the problem with systematic samples, we introduce a numerical scheme with the model proteins evolving in-silico to accomplish specific allosteric functions. We then obtain statistical features among thousands of solutions to the tasks and deduce rules for the allosteric mechanics. For the geometric task when a specific strain is propagated through the media, we find commonly applied is an edge-mode mechanism which quickly amplifies the strain signal close to the active site. While for the cooperative task with elastic energy conveyed, we reveal that the appearance of a mechanism, an extended and nearly zero energy mode, dominates the pathway. This mechanism can appear as shear, hinge, and twist — designs found in some allosteric proteins, or be more complicated and hard to visualize. But independent of specific designs, we predict such a scaling relation for the frequency of the allosteric mechanism that the cooperative energy is optimized to be independent of the protein size.

Bio: After obtained Bachelor degree at Peking University in 2010, Le moved to the United States for his PhD at New York University, where he worked with Matthieu Wyart studying the glassy dynamics and rigidity transition. After that, he has been a postdoc fellow at Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, where he is applying his physics knowledge to understand mysteries in various scales of biology: from the protein structure to epithelial tissue network to evolution of flu.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 11 Oct 2018 18:17:15 -0400 2018-10-11T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-11T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Jessi Cisewski, Assistant Professor of Statistics & Data Science, Yale University (October 12, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/52999 52999-13176891@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 12, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Data exhibiting complicated spatial structures are common in many areas of science (e.g. cosmology, biology), but can be difficult to analyze. Persistent homology is a popular approach within the area of Topological Data Analysis that offers a way to represent, visualize, and interpret complex data by extracting topological features, which can be used to infer properties of the underlying structures. For example, TDA may be useful for analyzing the large-scale structure (LSS) of the Universe, which is an intricate and spatially complex web of matter. The output from persistent homology, called persistence diagrams, summarize the different ordered holes in the data (e.g. connected components, loops, voids). I will introduce persistent homology, present functional transformations of persistence diagrams useful for inference, and discuss several applications.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 03 Oct 2018 16:36:28 -0400 2018-10-12T11:30:00-04:00 2018-10-12T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Workshop / Seminar Jessi Cisewski
Life After Graduate School | Life at an FFRDC (October 12, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54725 54725-13638583@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 12, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Charles Munson completed his PhD on Cosmic Microwave Background cosmology in late 2016 in Jeff McMahon's lab. Since graduating, he has been working as an electrical engineer for the MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit organization that manages seven federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs). These FFRDCs support U.S. government agencies including the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service. He will discuss the transition from physics to engineering, some information about the MITRE corporation, and his experience so far as a physicist at an FFRDC.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 12 Oct 2018 18:17:11 -0400 2018-10-12T12:00:00-04:00 2018-10-12T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Determine the Number of States in Hidden Markov Models VIA Marginal Likelihood (October 12, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56322 56322-13878531@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 12, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Data Science

Abstract: Hidden Markov models (HMM) have been widely adopted by scientists from various fields to model stochastic systems: the underlying process is a discrete Markov chain and the observations are noisy realizations of the underlying process. Determining the number of hidden states for an HMM is a model selection problem, which has yet to be satisfactorily solved, especially for the popular Gaussian HMM with heterogeneous covariance. In this paper, we propose a consistent method for determining the number of hidden states of HMM based on the marginal likelihood. We give a rigorous proof of the consistency of the proposed marginal likelihood method and provide simulation studies to compare the proposed method with the currently mostly adopted method, the Bayesian information criterion (BIC), demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed marginal likelihood method. The proposed method is applied to single-molecule data and yields interesting scientific insights.

Bio: Yang Chen received her Ph.D. (2017) in Statistics from Harvard University and joined the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor of Statistics and Research Assistant Professor at the Michigan Institute of Data Science (MIDAS). She received her B.A. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics from the University of Science and Technology of China. Research interests include computational algorithms in statistical inference and applied statistics in the field of biology and astronomy.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 02 Oct 2018 15:11:57 -0400 2018-10-12T15:00:00-04:00 2018-10-12T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall Michigan Institute for Data Science Workshop / Seminar Yang Chen, PhD
Department Colloquium | Organ Size, Inflationary Embryology, and the Statistical Physics of Tissue Growth (October 17, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56711 56711-13969926@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 17, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

One of the enduring mysteries of biology is how organs know to stop growing at the correct size and how those sizes are coordinated so that the animal retains the correct proportions. Here, we discuss several studies that in different ways address the precision with which organ size can be controlled. We first show that there are severe limits to the coordination of the sizes of left and right organs (like the left and right wings of a fruit fly) by chemical signals, suggesting that organ size is set primarily autonomously. We then consider the noisy dynamics of the growth of individuals tissues in presence of various feedback laws. We find that only certain forms of mechanical feedback can specify a unique organ size. We also show that, even in the simplest, homogeneous case, stochastic growth of an elastic tissue has unexpectedly rich behavior: For example, it exhibits power law correlation functions, reminiscent of those seen in cosmological models, and soft modes that allow for diffusive growth of labelled clones of cells.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 17 Oct 2018 18:17:05 -0400 2018-10-17T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-17T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Yang Feng, Associate Professor, Department of Statistics, Columbia University (October 19, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/53000 53000-13176893@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 19, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics Seminar Series

A fundamental problem in network data analysis is to test whether a network contains statistically significant communities. We study this problem in the stochastic block model context by testing H0: Erdos-Renyi model vs. H1: stochastic block model. This problem serves as the foundation for many other problems including the testing-based methods for determining the number of communities and community detection. Results will be presented for both ordinary graphs as well as hypergraphs where each edge contains more than two vertices. A comprehensive study is conducted for a wide spectrum of edge (or hyperedge) density scenarios. In particular, the joint impact of signal-to-noise ratio and the number of communities on the asymptotic results is unveiled. The proposed testing procedures are examined by both simulated and real-world network datasets. The talk is based on joint work with Mingao Yuan, Ruiqi Liu, and Zuofeng Shang.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 10 Oct 2018 14:15:29 -0400 2018-10-19T11:30:00-04:00 2018-10-19T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Seminar Series Workshop / Seminar Yang Feng
HET Seminars | Complexity of Vacua and Near-Vacua (October 19, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56748 56748-13994902@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 19, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

In this talk I will study the computational complexity of vacua and near-vacua in field theory and string theory. From analogy to protein folding, it is natural to expect that finding stable vacua is computationally hard, in the sense of complexity theory. However, I will demonstrate that this is the case even for metastable vacua. The problem is exacerbated in string theory, since setting up the hard problem of finding string vacua requires actually computing the scalar potential in a controlled regime. Such computations involve solving instances of computationally hard problems. Cosmological implications will be discussed in light of a recently proposed measure that utilizes computational complexity.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 15 Oct 2018 08:39:38 -0400 2018-10-19T15:00:00-04:00 2018-10-19T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: "The Biopolitics of Baby Talk" (October 19, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51637 51637-12179235@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 19, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

ais un abus de tout autre importance. . . est qu'on se presse trop de les faire parler, comme si l'on avait peur qu'ils n'apprissent pas à parler d'eux-mêmes (Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou de l’Éducation, 1762)

Figuring Émile as his pupil, Rousseau’s primer on education argues against Locke’s Enlightenment missive to begin engaging children in verbal reasoning at an early age. Useless, he argues: leave them to their own devices and they will flourish linguistically, morally, and intellectually. More than three centuries later, this essay revives this argument in light of a 21st century ideology that privileges intensive reflective dialogue between caregivers and young children as the bedrock of normal neurocognitive development and children’s talk as evidence of knowledge. This ideology has taken hold in US middle-class households and developmental psychology scholarship, motivating global biopolitical governance of the speaking bodies of economically disadvantaged caregivers and infants in the first months of life. The analysis weighs the complicated entailments of elevating not just a young child’s detached reflectivity but verbal displays of such reflectivity as a biological capacity waiting to be nurtured versus Western civilization’s handmaiden to rationality, scientific progress, capitalism, and the formation of the free ethical subject.

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Wed, 19 Sep 2018 15:47:20 -0400 2018-10-19T15:00:00-04:00 2018-10-19T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Lecture / Discussion West Hall
Quantitative Biology Seminar | Geometric Principles of Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Second Messengers in Dendritic Spines (October 22, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54685 54685-13636271@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 22, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The ability of the brain to encode and store information depends on the plastic nature of the individual synapses. The increase and decrease in synaptic strength, mediated through the structural plasticity of the spine, are important for learning, memory, and cognitive function. Dendritic spines are small structures that contain the synapse. They come in a variety of shapes (stubby, thin, or mushroom-shaped) and a wide range of sizes that protrude from the dendrite. These spines are the regions where the postsynaptic biochemical machinery responds to the neurotransmitters. Spines are dynamic structures, changing in size, shape, and number during development and aging. While spines and synapses have inspired neuromorphic engineering, the biophysical events underlying synaptic and structural plasticity remain poorly understood.

Our current focus is on understanding the biophysical events underlying structural plasticity. I will discuss two recent efforts from my group - first, a systems biology approach to construct a mathematical model of biochemical signaling and actin-mediated transient spine expansion in response to calcium influx caused by NMDA receptor activation and second, a series of spatial models to study the role of spine geometry and organelle location within the spine for calcium and cyclic AMP signaling. I will conclude with some new efforts in using reconstructions from electron microscopy to inform computational domains. I will conclude with how geometry and mechanics plays an important role in our understanding of fundamental biological phenomena and some general ideas on bio-inspired engineering.

Bio: Padmini Rangamani is an associate professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. She joined the department in July 2014. Earlier, she was a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, where she worked on lipid bilayer mechanics. She obtained her Ph.D. in biological sciences from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She received her B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Osmania University (Hyderabad, India) and Georgia Institute of Technology respectively. She is the recipient of the ARO, AFOSR, and ONR Young Investigator Awards, and a Sloan Research Fellowship for Computational and Molecular Evolutionary Biology. She is also the lead PI for a MURI award on Bioinspired low energy information processing from the AFOSR.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 22 Oct 2018 18:16:56 -0400 2018-10-22T12:00:00-04:00 2018-10-22T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Dissertation Defense: Cell Type Deconvolution and Transformation of Microenvironment Microarray Data (October 22, 2018 1:15pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56795 56795-14005996@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 22, 2018 1:15pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics Dissertation Defenses

Transformations are an important aspect of data analysis. In this work we explore the impact of data transformation on the analysis of high-throughput -omics data. Specifically, we explore two applications were data transformation plays an important role. The first application is estimating cell types using gene expression data. Here we develop dtangle, a method that carefully considers scale transformations when estimating cell type proportion estimates. This method broadly out-performs existing deconvolution methods in a comprehensive meta-analysis. Secondly, we explore the role of simple data transformations for the analysis of microenvironment microarray data. In this section we look at simple data transformations and how they interact with visualization, discovery of latent effects, and data integration. We find that simple transformations applied alone or in sequence can make salient important aspects of the data.

]]>
Other Tue, 16 Jul 2019 14:27:07 -0400 2018-10-22T13:15:00-04:00 2018-10-22T15:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Dissertation Defenses Other flyer
Department Colloquium | Spins in Semiconductors (October 24, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56884 56884-14017125@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Spin is a quantum property that plays an important role in magnetism, and there are proposals to use spin for quantum computing and “spintronics,” devices that combine electronic logic and magnetic storage. In general, spins in non-magnetic materials are not polarized, but I will describe optical techniques that my group uses to excite electron spin polarization and then monitor its dynamics and show how this data can be used to probe carrier drift and diffusion, spin-orbit effects and dynamic nuclear polarization.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 24 Oct 2018 18:17:01 -0400 2018-10-24T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-24T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Fall Preview Weekend (October 26, 2018 9:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/53178 53178-13272082@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 26, 2018 9:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Astronomy

Explore a Michigan PhD
October 26-27, 2018

The Astronomy & Astrophysics Ph.D. program will host a select group of invited students to visit us for a preview event of our PhD program. This department-funded opportunity will allow prospective students to explore graduate education, participate in admissions workshops, meet world-renowned faculty and current graduate students, and learn about life in Ann Arbor.

Applications for the 2018 Preview Weekend are closed. Please check back in Summer 2019 for details about the 2019 Fall Preview Weekend.

Questions? Contact astrophdprogram@umich.edu

]]>
Conference / Symposium Wed, 24 Oct 2018 16:57:20 -0400 2018-10-26T09:00:00-04:00 2018-10-26T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Astronomy Conference / Symposium West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Pierre Bellec, Assistant Professor of statistics, Rugers University (October 26, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/53001 53001-13176894@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 26, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

In sparse linear regression, it is now well understood that the Lasso achieves fast prediction rates, provided that the correlations of the design satisfy some Restricted Eigenvalue or Compatibility condition, and provided that the tuning parameter is at least larger than some threshold. Using the two quantities introduced in the paper, we show that the compatibility condition on the design matrix is actually unavoidable to achieve fast prediction rates with the Lasso. In other words, the $\ell_1$-regularized Lasso must incur a loss due to the correlations of the design matrix, measured in terms of the compatibility constant. This results holds for any design matrix, any active subset of covariates, and any positive tuning parameter.
We also characterize sharp phase transitions for the tuning parameter of the Lasso around a critical threshold dependent on the sparsity $k$. If $\lambda$ is equal to or larger than this critical threshold, the Lasso is minimax over $k$-sparse target vectors. If $\lambda$ is equal or smaller than this critical threshold, the Lasso incurs a loss of order $\sigma\sqrt k$, even if the target vector has far fewer than $k$ nonzero coefficients. This sharp phase transition highlights a minimal penalty phenomenon similar to that observed in model selection with $\ell_0$ regularization by Birge and Massart.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 19 Oct 2018 17:27:51 -0400 2018-10-26T11:30:00-04:00 2018-10-26T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Workshop / Seminar Pierre Bellec
HET Seminars | Hunting for Heavy Winos (October 26, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56969 56969-14057147@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 26, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

I will discuss recent progress in calculating a precision photon spectrum for heavy wino annihilation to photons, along with implications for indirect detection experiments. I will review arguments that the 3 TeV mass wino is one of the simplest WIMP dark matter candidates. Then I will discuss how the large separation of scales from 3 TeV to the weak scale leads to a breakdown of perturbation theory. I will demonstrate how one can rely on modern effective field theory techniques to restore the convergence of the perturbative expansion, and will discuss our precision prediction for the wino annihilation spectrum. I will review the status of searching for these photons using a ground based air Cherenkov telescope array (the H.E.S.S. experiment), along with the impact of our calculation on the interpretation of these limits.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 22 Oct 2018 08:41:14 -0400 2018-10-26T15:00:00-04:00 2018-10-26T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Technosemiotics (October 26, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56548 56548-13942261@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 26, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

A roundtable conversation about new ways to study and think about the entanglements of medial technologies in sociocultural life.
_________________
How should we understand the vast and often unexpected entanglements of media technologies in social and cultural life? This roundtable draws into dialogue linguistic and semiotic anthropology, media ethnography and archaeology, and science and technology studies. From syllabic typewriters to sound recorders, from postwar Japan and America to contemporary Punjab and Nigeria, we examine how human, media, and machine do not simply “interact” but variably combine and sometimes co-constitute each other with far-reaching effects. How do we take seriously the materiality of media and their infrastructures without neglecting cultural significance or resorting to species of determinism? In what ways are we helped or hindered by concepts such as “interface,” “indexicality,” and “technique,” and amalgams like “sociotechnical” and, indeed, “technosemiotic”?
_________________
Participants
Padma Chirumamilla | Doctoral Candidate, School of Information, University of Michigan
Matthew Hull | Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan
Miyako Inoue | Associate Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University
Brian Larkin | Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University
Michael Lempert | Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan
Nishita Trisal | Doctoral Candidate, Anthropology, University of Michigan
_________________
Questions?
Email the Department of Anthropology at michigan-anthro@umich.edu or visit lsa.umich.edu/anthro.

]]>
Conference / Symposium Tue, 09 Oct 2018 13:53:56 -0400 2018-10-26T15:00:00-04:00 2018-10-26T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Conference / Symposium Technosemiotics Poster
Fall Preview Weekend (October 27, 2018 9:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/53178 53178-13272083@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, October 27, 2018 9:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Astronomy

Explore a Michigan PhD
October 26-27, 2018

The Astronomy & Astrophysics Ph.D. program will host a select group of invited students to visit us for a preview event of our PhD program. This department-funded opportunity will allow prospective students to explore graduate education, participate in admissions workshops, meet world-renowned faculty and current graduate students, and learn about life in Ann Arbor.

Applications for the 2018 Preview Weekend are closed. Please check back in Summer 2019 for details about the 2019 Fall Preview Weekend.

Questions? Contact astrophdprogram@umich.edu

]]>
Conference / Symposium Wed, 24 Oct 2018 16:57:20 -0400 2018-10-27T09:00:00-04:00 2018-10-27T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Astronomy Conference / Symposium West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | A New QCD Facility at the M2 Beam Line of the CERN SPS (October 29, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55523 55523-13752388@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 29, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Possibility to use high intensity secondary beams at the SPS M2 beam line in combination with the world’s largest polarized target, liquid hydrogen, liquid deuterium and various nuclear targets create a unique opportunity for universal experimental facility to study previously unexplored aspects of meson and nucleon structure, QCD dynamics and hadron spectroscopy.

High intensity hadron (pion dominated) beams already made COMPASS the world leading facility for hadron spectroscopy and hadron structure study through Drell-Yan production of di-muon pairs. High intensity muon beams, previously used for unique semi-inclusive and exclusive hard scattering programs, make possible proton radius measurement in muon-proton elastic scattering and and further development of polarized exclusive hard scattering program.

Upgrades of the M2 beam line resulting in high intensity RF-separated anti-proton- and kaon-beams would greatly expand the horizon of experimental possibilities at CERN: hadron spectroscopy with kaon beam, studies of transverse momentum dependent quark structure for protons, pions and kaons, precise studies of nuclear effects and for the first time measurements of kaon quark-substructure.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 29 Oct 2018 18:17:14 -0400 2018-10-29T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-29T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Measurement of the Permanent Electric Dipole Moment of ^{129}Xe Using ^3He Comagnetometery and SQUID Detection (October 30, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56537 56537-13942250@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 30, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Permanent electric dipole moment (EDM) measurements of ^{129}Xe, along with other diamagnetic systems and the neutron, constrain beyond-the-standard-model hadronic CP-violating parameters. In the HeXeEDM experiment, a new technique is used to measure the EDM of ^{129}Xe with a ^3He comagnetometer and has potential to improve the current limit by two orders of magnitude. ^3He and ^{129}Xe are polarized using spin-exchange optical pumping, transferred to a measurement cell and then transported into a magnetically shielded room. The free precession of both species is detected in the presence of an applied 3 kV/cm electric field and a 2.6 muT magnetic field using SQUID magnetometers.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 30 Oct 2018 18:16:43 -0400 2018-10-30T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-30T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Nonlinear Optics at the Frequency Scale of Thermal Fluctuations (October 31, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53843 53843-13470099@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 31, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

In this lecture, I will discuss how coherent electromagnetic radiation at infrared and TeraHertz frequencies can be used to drive coherently and to large amplitudes collective excitations in solids. The nonlinear cooperative response is largely unexplored and can yield new types functional control. I will for example discuss experiments in which superconducting fluctuations can be amplified by light at temperatures higher than the thermodynamic transition temperature. I will also discuss how X-ray Free Electron Lasers are integral to this work, and how they can be used to sample the dynamical evolution of crystal lattices and of other microscopic parameters in time.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 31 Oct 2018 18:16:45 -0400 2018-10-31T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-31T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
The Post-Structuralist Turn? (November 2, 2018 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/56435 56435-13899097@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 2, 2018 10:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Central Concepts in Contemporary Theory Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop

Jonathan Culler will meet with graduate students and faculty to discuss this recent paper on post-structuralism. RSVP. Light refreshments will be provided.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Mon, 08 Oct 2018 15:49:51 -0400 2018-11-02T10:00:00-04:00 2018-11-02T12:00:00-04:00 West Hall Central Concepts in Contemporary Theory Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop Lecture / Discussion Seminar poster featuring a painting and event description.
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Jun Zhang, Professor, Departments of Psychology and Mathematics, University of Michigan (November 2, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/53002 53002-13176895@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 2, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics Seminar Series

Information Geometry is the differential geometric study of the manifold of probability models, where each probability distribution is just a point on the manifold. Instead of using metric for measuring distances on such manifolds, these applications often use “divergence functions” for measuring proximity of two points (that do not impose symmetry and triangular inequality), for instance Kullback-Leibler divergence, Bregman divergence, f-divergence, etc. Divergence functions are tied to generalized entropy (for instance, Tsallis entropy, Renyi entropy, phi-entropy) and cross-entropy functions widely used in machine learning and information sciences. After a brief introduction to IG, I illustrate the geometry of maximum entropy inference and exponential family. I then introduce a general form of entropy/cross-entropy/divergence function, and show how the geometry of the underlying probability manifold (deformed exponential family) reveals an “escort statistics” that is hidden from the standard exponential family.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 30 Oct 2018 11:50:59 -0400 2018-11-02T11:30:00-04:00 2018-11-02T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Seminar Series Workshop / Seminar Jun Zhang
Life In Graduate School | Rackham Funding Opportunities (November 2, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57133 57133-14119707@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 2, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Life in Graduate School Seminars

Chrissy Zigulis is planning on speaking about the funding opportunities open to programs and students for graduate funding, how to apply to these, and advice on how to do so.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 29 Oct 2018 10:10:49 -0400 2018-11-02T12:00:00-04:00 2018-11-02T12:50:00-04:00 West Hall Life in Graduate School Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | The Status of the String Landscape (November 2, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57129 57129-14119705@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 2, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

Whether string theory admits a multiverse of de Sitter solutions that look approximately like our universe is a hotly debated current topic. I will overview the basics of landscape constructions and explain my view on this question.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 29 Oct 2018 08:41:40 -0400 2018-11-02T15:00:00-04:00 2018-11-02T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Two-Step Estimation and Inference with Possibly Many Included Covariates (November 2, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56594 56594-13951424@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 2, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Data Science

Abstract: We study the implications of including many covariates in a first-step estimate entering a two-step estimation procedure. We find that a first order bias emerges when the number of included covariates is “large” relative to the square-root of sample size, rendering standard inference procedures invalid. We show that the jackknife is able to estimate this “many covariates” bias consistently, thereby delivering a new automatic bias-corrected two-step point estimator. The jackknife also consistently estimates the standard error of the original two-step point estimator. For inference, we develop a valid post-bias-correction bootstrap approximation that accounts for the additional variability introduced by the jackknife biascorrection. We find that the jackknife bias-corrected point estimator and the bootstrap postbias-correction inference perform excellent in simulations, offering important improvements over conventional two-step point estimators and inference procedures, which are not robust to including many covariates. We apply our results to an array of distinct treatment effect, policy evaluation, and other applied microeconomics settings. In particular, we discuss production function and marginal treatment effect estimation in detail.

Bio: Matias D. Cattaneo is a Professor of Economics and a Professor of Statistics at the University of Michigan. He joined Michigan’s faculty in 2008, after receiving a Ph.D. in Economics and an M.A. in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to coming to the U.S., he completed an M.A. in Economics at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and a B.A. in Economics at Universidad of Buenos Aires. His research interests include mathematical statistics, econometric theory, and applied econometrics, with emphasis on applied microeconomics and program evaluation. Most of his recent work is related to the development of new, improved semiparametric and nonparametric inference procedures exhibiting demonstrable robustness properties with respect to tuning parameter and other implementation choices. Most of this work is motivated by concrete empirical problems in social sciences and several other disciplines, and covers a wide array of topics related to treatment effects and policy evaluation, average derivatives and structural response functions, applied finance and applied microeconomics, among others. He current serves as Associate Editor at the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Operations Research, Econometric Theory, the Econometrics Journal, and the Journal of Causal Inference.

For more information on MIDAS or the Seminar Series, please contact midas-contact@umich.edu. MIDAS gratefully acknowledges Wacker Chemie AG for its generous support of the MIDAS Seminar Series.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 10 Oct 2018 14:20:21 -0400 2018-11-02T16:00:00-04:00 2018-11-02T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Michigan Institute for Data Science Workshop / Seminar Matias Cattaneo
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: “Winds, Currents, and Histories of Seafaring: How Oceanographic Effects Influenced Ancient Voyaging and the European ‘Age of Discovery’” (November 5, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51638 51638-12179236@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 5, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

"For millennia, humans have developed different kinds of watercraft to travel across the world’s seas and oceans to settle new lands. The contacts they made with both pristine island ecologies and indigenous peoples dramatically changed the scope of human history in myriad ways that we are only beginning to understand. What environmental and social reasons influenced how humans traveled over open-ocean and how is archaeology and other scientific fields helping to decipher these clues? Here I examine how computer modeling, archaeological research, and other lines of evidence are providing answers to these questions, with a special focus on events that occurred in the Pacific and Caribbean."

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Thu, 09 Aug 2018 11:12:15 -0400 2018-11-05T15:00:00-05:00 2018-11-05T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Lecture / Discussion West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Dark Matter and New Physics at Neutrino Experiments (November 5, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56931 56931-14032727@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 5, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

In the past decade, neutrino experiments have emerged as powerful tools in the search for new physics beyond just oscillations. In these fixed-target experiments, new particles (e.g. dark photons, millicharged particles, light scalars, etc.) can be produced in the neutrino beamline and propagate into the downstream detector where they induce signals via scattering or decay. These experiments are capable of probing models of light (MeV-scale) dark matter and can be considered complementary to more traditional direct and indirect searches. In the first half of this talk, I will describe the sensitivity of existing LSND measurements and future data from the JSNS2 experiment to two dark matter models. In particular, I will show that JSNS2 can rule out new parameter space for dark photon models and that LSND severely constrains a recent explanation of the 3.5 keV Galactic Center excess. For the second half of the talk, I will discuss the recently updated MiniBooNE neutrino oscillation analysis and possible new physics explanations for the long-standing low energy excess. Through model-independent, kinematic arguments, I will show that many new physics explanations for the excess are incompatible with the available data.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 05 Nov 2018 18:16:41 -0500 2018-11-05T16:00:00-05:00 2018-11-05T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Applied Physics Seminar: "Advanced Marine Structures in Multiphase Flows" (November 7, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55131 55131-13689418@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, November 7, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Applied Physics

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the use of advanced materials for maritime applications, including propellers, turbines, hydrofoils, control surfaces, energy saving and energy harvesting devices. Compared to traditional metallic alloys, advanced polymer composites offer the advantage of higher strength-to-weight ratio, better fatigue characteristics, higher durability, and better resistance to sea water corrosion and other chemical agents. Moreover, active materials, sensors, and actuators can be embedded inside composites to develop multi-functional marine structures that can not only bare load, but also provide improved functionality, including the ability to enable in situ flow and structural health monitoring, vibration and noise control, as well as renewable energy harvesting. In particular, advanced marine structures can be designed to enable passive or active tailoring of the cavitation/ventilation inception speed, cavity size, and cavity shedding frequencies. Although there exists many advantages, there are many challenges to the design, analysis, testing, and operation of multi-functional marine structures. Any structure that is designed to interact with the surrounding multiphase flow are intrinsically more sensitive to changes in flow conditions and rapid body manoeuvers. Moreover, the system natural frequencies and damping characteristics may vary with proximity to free surface, forward speed, waves, cavitation and ventilation. Lock-in of the flow excitation frequency with one of the body natural frequencies or their harmonics can lead to dynamic load amplifications, flow-induced vibrations and noise, flutter and even parametric resonance. Nonlinear feedback between the surrounding multiphase flow and body deformations, as well as hysteresis fluid-structure interaction behaviour further complicate flow control methodologies. Hence, the focus of this talk is to advance the fundamental understanding of the fluid-structure interaction response and stability of advanced marine structures in complex, multiphase flows, and to explore innovative methods to develop multi-functional marine structures to sense and control cavitation and/or ventilation.

Prof. Young a Professor at the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering and the Director of the Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Prof. Young is internationally well known for her work on modelling of adaptive composite marine propulsors and turbines. Prof. Young is a member of the Seakeeping Committee for the International Towing Tank Committee (ITTC), and a member of the joint ITTC-ISSC Working Group. She was also the Society of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering representative on the United States National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics between 2009-2014. Prof. Young is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Ship Research, an Editorial Board Member on Acta Mechanica Sinica, and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Offshore, Mechanics, Artic, and Ocean Engineering. Prof. Young has written over two hundred journal and conference papers in the area of fluid-structure interactions of maritime structures.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Mon, 10 Sep 2018 12:39:12 -0400 2018-11-07T12:00:00-05:00 2018-11-07T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Applied Physics Lecture / Discussion West Hall
Department Colloquium | Cosmology in the Era of Multi-messenger Astronomy with Gravitational Waves (November 7, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57302 57302-14148797@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, November 7, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Motivated by the exciting prospect of a new wealth of information arising from the first observations of gravitational and electromagnetic radiation from the same astrophysical phenomena, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) has established a search and discovery program for the optical transients associated with LIGO/Virgo events using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam). This talk presents the discovery of the optical transient associated with the neutron star merger GW170817 using DECam and discusses its implications for the emerging field of multi-messenger cosmology with gravitational waves and optical data.


]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 07 Nov 2018 18:16:39 -0500 2018-11-07T16:00:00-05:00 2018-11-07T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM Theory Seminar | Hunting for Correlated Topological Matter: from SmB_6 to a Putative Hourglass Fermion (November 8, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54293 54293-13565703@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 8, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The combination of strong electronic correlations and non-trivial topology presents a novel paradigm with promising experimental realizations. In this talk I will first discuss the case of SmB_6, a mixed-valent 4f material predicted to be a topological Kondo insulator. Recent thermal transport, scanning tunneling microscopy, and electrical transport measurements indicate that the bulk of SmB_6 is truly insulating whereas its surface states are sensitive to perturbations that break time reversal symmetry. In the second part of my talk, I will introduce a putative Eu-based topological insulator with nonsymmorphic symmetry, which has the potential of hosting surface states with hourglass dispersion.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 08 Nov 2018 18:16:44 -0500 2018-11-08T16:00:00-05:00 2018-11-08T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department of Statistics Preview Weekend (November 9, 2018 9:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/53082 53082-13220164@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 9, 2018 9:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

The Department of Statistics is hosting a preview weekend for juniors, senior, recently graduated students, and Master’s students to visit us for a preview event. We are eager to recruit students for this event who will contribute to our department's mission of promoting diversity and inclusion in the fields of Statistics and Data Science. This event is a department-funded opportunity to explore graduate education, participate in admissions workshops, meet world-renowned faculty and current graduate students, and learn about life in Ann Arbor. Please apply by September 27, 2018 if you come from a background that is traditionally underrepresented in Statistics and/or if you actively work towards promoting issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM fields.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 18 Jul 2018 16:24:14 -0400 2018-11-09T09:00:00-05:00 2018-11-09T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Tingting Zhang, Associate Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Virginia (November 9, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/53003 53003-13176896@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 9, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics Seminar Series

The human brain is a dynamic system consisting of many consistently interacting regions. The brain regions and the influences exerted by each region over another, called directional connectivity, form a directional network. We study normal and abnormal directional brain networks of epileptic patients using their intracranial EEG (iEEG) data, which are multivariate time series recordings of many small brain regions. We propose a high-dimensional state-space multivariate autoregression model (SSMAR) for iEEG data. To characterize brain networks with a commonly reported cluster structure, we use a stochastic-block-model-motivated prior for possible network patterns in the SSMAR. We develop a Bayesian framework to estimate the proposed high-dimensional model, examine the probabilities of nonzero directional connectivity among every pair of regions, identify clusters of densely-connected brain regions, and map epileptic patients' brain networks in different seizure stages. We show through both simulation and real data analysis that the new method outperforms existing network methods by being flexible to characterize various high-dimensional network patterns and robust to violation of model assumptions, low iEEG sampling frequency, and data noise. Applying the developed SSMAR and Bayesian approach to an epileptic patient's iEEG data, we reveal the patient's network changes at the seizure onset and the unique connectivity of the seizure onset zone (SOZ), where seizures start and spread to other normal regions. Using this network result, our method has a potential to assist clinicians to localize the SOZ, a long standing research focus in epilepsy diagnosis and treatment.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 09 Nov 2018 08:47:53 -0500 2018-11-09T11:30:00-05:00 2018-11-09T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Seminar Series Workshop / Seminar Tingting Zhang
HET Seminars | Deep Sets for Particle Jets (November 9, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57372 57372-14182267@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 9, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

One of most basic facts about quantum mechanics is that identical particles are indistinguishable. One of most basic facts about quantum field theory is that only infrared-and-collinear-safe observables can be calculated in a fixed-order expansion. In this talk, I show how to incorporate both of these facts into a novel machine learning architecture called Energy Flow Networks (EFNs). EFNs are a special case of a more general architecture called Deep Sets, with the nice feature that one can "open the box" of an EFN to gain insight into what the network has learned. Using the example of quark/gluon jet tagging at the LHC, I highlight the excellent performance of EFNs and their intuitive visualization.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 05 Nov 2018 08:37:55 -0500 2018-11-09T15:00:00-05:00 2018-11-09T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Automated Scalable Bayesian Inference via Data Summarization (November 9, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57307 57307-14148804@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 9, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Data Science

Abstract: Bayesian methods are attractive for analyzing large-scale data due to in part to their coherent uncertainty quantification, ability to model complex phenomena, and ease of incorporating expert information. Many standard Bayesian inference algorithms are often computationally expensive, however, so their direct application to large datasets can be difficult or infeasible. Other standard algorithms sacrifice accuracy in the pursuit of scalability. We take a new approach. Namely, we leverage the insight that data often exhibit approximate redundancies to instead obtain a weighted subset of the data (called a “coreset”) that is much smaller than the original dataset. We can then use this small coreset as input to existing Bayesian inference algorithms without modification. We provide theoretical guarantees on the size and approximation quality of the coreset. In particular, we show that our method provides geometric decay in posterior approximation error as a function of coreset size. We validate on both synthetic and real datasets, demonstrating that our method reduces posterior approximation error by orders of magnitude relative to uniform random subsampling.



Bio: Tamara Broderick is the ITT Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She is a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the MIT Statistics and Data Science Center, and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). She completed her Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley in 2014. Previously, she received an AB in Mathematics from Princeton University (2007), a Master of Advanced Study for completion of Part III of the Mathematical Tripos from the University of Cambridge (2008), an MPhil by research in Physics from the University of Cambridge (2009), and an MS in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley (2013). Her recent research has focused on developing and analyzing models for scalable Bayesian machine learning. She has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award (2018), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2018), an Army Research Office Young Investigator Program award (2017), Google Faculty Research Awards, the ISBA Lifetime Members Junior Researcher Award, the Savage Award (for an outstanding doctoral dissertation in Bayesian theory and methods), the Evelyn Fix Memorial Medal and Citation (for the Ph.D. student on the Berkeley campus showing the greatest promise in statistical research), the Berkeley Fellowship, an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, a Marshall Scholarship, and the Phi Beta Kappa Prize (for the graduating Princeton senior with the highest academic average).

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 01 Nov 2018 12:48:47 -0400 2018-11-09T16:00:00-05:00 2018-11-09T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Michigan Institute for Data Science Workshop / Seminar Tamara Broderick, PhD
Department of Statistics Preview Weekend (November 10, 2018 9:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/53082 53082-13220165@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, November 10, 2018 9:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

The Department of Statistics is hosting a preview weekend for juniors, senior, recently graduated students, and Master’s students to visit us for a preview event. We are eager to recruit students for this event who will contribute to our department's mission of promoting diversity and inclusion in the fields of Statistics and Data Science. This event is a department-funded opportunity to explore graduate education, participate in admissions workshops, meet world-renowned faculty and current graduate students, and learn about life in Ann Arbor. Please apply by September 27, 2018 if you come from a background that is traditionally underrepresented in Statistics and/or if you actively work towards promoting issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM fields.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 18 Jul 2018 16:24:14 -0400 2018-11-10T09:00:00-05:00 2018-11-10T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Quantitative Biology Seminar | Durotaxis, Random Walkers, and the Electric Telegraph (November 12, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55304 55304-13716037@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 12, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Motile biological cells in tissue often display the phenomenon of durotaxis, i.e. they tend to move towards stiffer parts of substrate tissue. The mechanism for this behavior is not understood. We consider simplified models for durotaxis based on the classic persistent random walker scheme. Even a one- dimensional model of this type sheds interesting light on the classes of behavior cells might exhibit. Our results strongly indicate that cells must be able to sense the gradient of stiffness in order to show the effects observed in experiment. This is in contrast to the claims in recent publications that it is sufficient for cells to be more persistent in their motion on stiff substrates to show durotaxis: i.e., if would be enough to sense the value of the stiffness.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 12 Nov 2018 18:16:39 -0500 2018-11-12T12:00:00-05:00 2018-11-12T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Next Questions for Neutrinos: Recent Results from the NOvA Experiment (November 14, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57542 57542-14211237@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, November 14, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The 2015 Nobel prize in physics was awarded for the discovery of neutrino oscillations and mass in 1998. That discovery spawned a world-wide effort to better understand neutrino properties using oscillations of neutrinos produced in the Sun, in the atmosphere, at reactors, and by accelerators. While much has been learned since then, several important questions remain: Which neutrino is heaviest? Do neutrino properties follow a pattern or respect any symmetries? Is the framework we use to understand neutrinos complete or is there more? Do neutrinos break the symmetry between matter and antimatter? The NOvA experiment was designed to address each of these remaining questions by sending a beam of neutrinos 810 km to a 14,000 ton detector located in northern Minnesota. In my talk, I will introduce neutrinos and the questions surrounding them, discuss the important factors that led to the design of the NOvA experiment and summarize the most recent neutrino and antineutrino measurements from the experiment.

Short bio: Mark Messier is a Rudy Professor of Physics at Indiana University who studies the basic properties of a class of fundamental particles called neutrinos. From 2006 - 2018 he served as co-spokesperson of the NOvA experiment at Fermilab guiding the collaboration through proposal, design, construction, and first results.

Prof. Messier began his studies of neutrinos at Boston University working on the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan. His doctoral thesis, “Evidence for Oscillations of Atmospheric Neutrinos with Super-Kamiokande”, and accompanying paper in Physical Review Letters documented the first conclusive evidence that neutrinos have a non-zero mass. This paper ranks among the 25 most cited experimental and theoretical results in high energy physics.

After completing his doctoral work, Prof. Messier worked on the MINOS and MIPP experiments at Fermilab as a Research Fellow at Harvard University and joined the faculty at Indiana University in 2002. Messier's early work to develop the NOvA experiment concept earned recognition with a Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator award and he is a fellow of the American Physical Society.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 14 Nov 2018 18:16:28 -0500 2018-11-14T16:00:00-05:00 2018-11-14T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM Theory Seminar | Semimetals Unlimited: Unbounded Electrical and Thermal Transport Properties in Three-dimensional Nodal Semimetals (November 15, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57322 57322-14151046@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 15, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Modern electronics is built on semiconductors, whose utility comes from their ability to operate on either side of the conductor-insulator dichotomy. For practical applications, however, semiconductors face certain unavoidable limitations imposed by the physics of Anderson localization and by the disorder introduced through doping. In this talk I discuss whether these same limitations apply to nodal semimetals, which are a novel class of three-dimensional materials that have a vanishing density of states (like insulators) but no gap to electron-hole excitations (like conductors). I show that, surprisingly, in a certain class of nodal semimetals the electronic mobility can far exceed the bounds that constrain doped semiconductors, becoming divergingly large even with a finite concentration of charged impurities. I then discuss the thermoelectric effect in semimetals, and show that their electron-hole symmetry allows for a thermopower that grows without bound under the application of a strong magnetic field. This large thermopower apparently enables the development of devices with record-large thermoelectric figure of merit.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 15 Nov 2018 18:16:22 -0500 2018-11-15T16:00:00-05:00 2018-11-15T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Reliable Evidence from Health Care Data: Lessons from the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) Collaborative (November 16, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57308 57308-14148805@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 16, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Data Science

Abstract: Concerns over reproducibility in science extend to research using existing healthcare data; many observational studies investigating the same topic produce conflicting results, even when using the same data. To address this problem, we propose a paradigm shift. The current paradigm centers on generating one estimate at a time using a unique study design with unknown reliability and publishing (or not) one estimate at a time. The new paradigm advocates for high-throughput observational studies using consistent and standardized methods, allowing evaluation, calibration, and unbiased dissemination to generate a more reliable and complete evidence base. We demonstrate this new paradigm by comparing all depression treatments for a set of outcomes, producing 17,718 hazard ratios, each using methodology on par with state-of-the-art studies. We furthermore include control hypotheses to evaluate and calibrate our evidence generation process. Results show good transitivity and consistency between databases, and agree with four out of the five findings from clinical trials. The distribution of effect size estimates reported in literature reveals an absence of small or null effects, with a sharp cutoff at p = 0.05. No such phenomena were observed in our results, suggesting more complete and more reliable evidence.



Bio: Marc A. Suchard is a Professor in the Departments of Biostatistics, of Biomathematics and of Human Genetics in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He earned his Ph.D. in biomathematics from UCLA in 2002 and continued for a M.D. degree which he received in 2004. Dr. Suchard is a leading Bayesian statistician who focuses on inference of stochastic processes in molecular epidemiology of infectious diseases. His training in both medicine and applied probability help to bridge the gap of understanding between statistical theory and clinical practicality. Dr. Suchard has been awarded several prestigious statistical awards such as the 2003 Savage Award, the 2006 and 2011 Mitchell Prizes, as well as a 2007 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in computational and molecular evolutionary biology, and a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship to further computational statistics. Finally, he received the 2011 Raymond J. Carroll Young Investigator Award and the 2013 Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) Presidents’ Award for outstanding contributions to the statistics profession by a person aged 40 or under.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 01 Nov 2018 12:54:59 -0400 2018-11-16T16:00:00-05:00 2018-11-16T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Michigan Institute for Data Science Workshop / Seminar Marc A. Suchard, PhD
HEP-Astro Seminar | Testing LCDM with Weak Lensing and Galaxy Statistics in the Dark Energy Survey (November 19, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55524 55524-13752389@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 19, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

We can use the statistics of observed galaxy properties in large photometric imaging surveys to probe the Universe's underlying physics. One of the observational programs aiming to do this is the Dark Energy Survey (DES), currently taking its sixth and final year of data. The data undoubtedly contains unprecedented amounts of information on the structure of the Universe at z~<1, but extracting that information robustly is challenging! I'll discuss some of the methodology associated with the recent cosmological constraints inferred from the first year of data, and then give a broad overview of improvements currently being developed for the next cosmological analyses. I'll focus in detail on a couple of examples which take advantage of some neat statistical methods.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 19 Nov 2018 18:16:18 -0500 2018-11-19T16:00:00-05:00 2018-11-19T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Concordance Cosmology and Beyond (November 26, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56932 56932-14032728@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 26, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

I will discuss the relevant statistical tools aimed at testing the concordance of cosmological observations and how they can be used as the most model independent test for the standard cosmological model. These statistical tests are a powerful way of assessing whether a specific model explains the observed measurements or whether there are indications of residual, unaccounted, systematic effects or hints toward new physical phenomena. I will show the results of these tests when applied to state of the art cosmological measurements and discuss the overall level of agreement of the standard cosmological model with observations. I will then move to discuss extensions of the standard model and how these might help in explaining some of the discrepant aspects of observations. In particular I will focus on dark energy and modified gravity models discussing their cosmological phenomenology and highlighting the observational aspects that they improve and that can be used to test them.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 26 Nov 2018 18:16:15 -0500 2018-11-26T16:00:00-05:00 2018-11-26T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
No Test Exists!   Why Tests Applied to Individuals Cannot Determine Optimal Cognitive Teams (A Many Model Approach) (November 27, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/57699 57699-14263409@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, November 27, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: The Center for the Study of Complex Systems

**DONATION LINK AT BOTTOM OF PAGE**

Most cognitive work is now done in teams.  That is true in the academy, the private sector, and the public sector.  Yet, with few exceptions, most hiring is done at the individual level.   Fairness combined with concerns about hiring the "best", lead many organizations to adopt scoring rules for hiring and admissions.  As seen in the recent lawsuit involving Harvard admissions,  Harvard combines test scores, GPA, personality factors, and legacy status in coming up with a score for each applicant. Those applicants with the highest scores gain acceptance.

Over the past decade and a half, a series of theoretical papers by Hong and Page; Marcolino, Jiang and Tambe; Kleinberg and Raghu; and Bendor and Page have shown either directly or implicitly that on complex tasks, no such test can exist. That is, no test applied to individuals, will identify the best team.   

The talk will discuss these models plus several more and then place them on axiomatic foundations, showing that, in fact, for a test to exist, the problem must be relatively simple.
__________________________________

This is a special talk to help kick off the newly established Rick Riolo Memorial Fund. Giving Blueday and the day of the release of Scott Page's new book The Model Thinker happen to fall on the same day.

Donors to the RRMF may also receive a Free Copy of this new book. If you donate $100 or more between the hours of 11:30am and 2:00pm tomorrow, you will receive a free signed copy of book. Dr. Page has generously purchased advanced copies of the book to help raise support for the new fund. Thank you to Basic Books for allowing the advanced purchase.

The Model Thinker: What You Need To Know To Make Data Work For You (2018 Basic Books) is available to purchase on November 27.

The Model Thinker explains why we model, advocates an interdisciplinary approach to modeling and contains accessible descriptions of more than two dozen models.   Prior to its release, The Model Thinker has been an Amazon top 10 new release in data science, stochastic modeling, engineering transportation, financial engineering, game theory and both areas of statistics: baseball statistics and biostatistics. It is currently the #1 new release in Business Planning and Forecasting.  The book officially goes on sale on Amazon on Nov. 27th.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 26 Nov 2018 13:50:45 -0500 2018-11-27T11:30:00-05:00 2018-11-27T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall The Center for the Study of Complex Systems Workshop / Seminar Scott E Page
CM/AMO Seminar | Unconventional Thermal Metallic State of Charge Neutral Fermions in Topological Kondo Insulator YbB_{12} (November 27, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57928 57928-14375299@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, November 27, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Recent observations of quantum oscillations (QOs) in Kondo insulators SmB_6 [1], [2] and YbB_{12} [3] have been a big surprise since they seem to host Fermi surfaces, which is a defining character of a metal. Though there have been several theoretical proposals to explain this mystery so far, it is far from settled because of lack of experimental inspections by other means of measurements. In this talk, I will present low-temperature heat-transport measurements to discuss low energy excitations in the ground state of YbB_{12}. At zero field, despite the resistivity rho_{xx} being far larger than that of conventional metals, sizeable T-linear dependent terms in the specific heat C and thermal conductivity K_{xx} in the zero-temperature limit are clearly resolved, leading to a spectacular violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law: the Lorenz ratio L = K_{xx} rho_{xx}/T is 10^4-10^5 times larger than that expected in conventional metals. These data indicate that YbB_{12} is a charge insulator but a thermal metal, suggesting the presence of itinerant neutral fermions. Remarkably, more insulating crystals with larger activation energies exhibit larger amplitudes of the resistive QOs as well as a larger K_{xx}/T (T rightarrow 0), in stark contrast to conventional metals. Moreover, we find that these fermions couple to magnetic field despite their charge neutrality, whereas no discernible thermal Hall angle is resolved within our resolution up to 12T. Our findings expose novel gapless and highly itinerant, charge-neutral quasi-particles in this unconventional quantum state.

[1] G. Li et al., Science 346, 1208 (2014).
[2] B. S. Tan et al., Science 349, 287 (2015).
[3] Z. Xiang et al., Science 362, 65 (2018).

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 27 Nov 2018 18:16:11 -0500 2018-11-27T16:00:00-05:00 2018-11-27T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Particle Physics Beyond Colliders (November 30, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57852 57852-14363801@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 30, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

Recently there have been several proposals of low-energy precision experiments that can search for new particles, new forces, and the Dark Matter of the Universe in a way that is complementary to collider searches. In this talk, I will present some examples involving atomic clocks, nuclear magnetic resonance, molecules, and astrophysical black holes accessible to LIGO.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 26 Nov 2018 08:42:07 -0500 2018-11-30T15:00:00-05:00 2018-11-30T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: "The Good, The Bad, and the Maladapted: Fetal Sensitivity in Light of Evolutionarily Novel Environments" (November 30, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51710 51710-12205470@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 30, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

"Developmental plasticity is an important mechanism for evolutionary adaptation. This talk explores how developmental plasticity in the human stress response system shapes patterns of health and disease in contemporary environments. It will also consider how an evolutionary perspective can inform our approach to public health intervention to reduce the impacts of adverse environments on health."

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Tue, 28 Aug 2018 10:45:32 -0400 2018-11-30T15:00:00-05:00 2018-11-30T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Lecture / Discussion West Hall
Person Specific Temporal Networks: Accuracy, Dynamics, and Emojis (November 30, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57910 57910-14373143@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 30, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Data Science

Abstract: Networks are everywhere! They provide a powerful way to detect patterns and relationships within big data systems. But, are they meaningful when the “system” is an individual person? Indeed, the reliability and validity of network approaches have been questioned in the social and medical sciences; network results are assumed to generalize across people and time, but these assumptions rarely hold because people are heterogeneous and dynamic. The goal of this presentation is to introduce a person-specific perspective to network modeling, and to illustrate the accuracy of a particular modeling approach called group iterative multiple model estimation (GIMME). Two novel GIMME-related applications will also be presented. In the first, GIMME will be used to detect individualized time-varying neural connectivity during a resting state, revealing connectivity parameters that are associated with cognitive impulsivity. In the second, GIMME will be used to identify personalized links among emoji-based emotion structures and daily depressive symptomatology. This is an ongoing work with possible extensions to big(ger) data (e.g., Twitter) and with implications for precision health care.

Bio: Dr. Adriene Beltz is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. She is affiliated with the developmental area and plays a significant role in the department’s quantitative training, including the teaching of graduate methods courses.

Dr. Beltz received her Ph.D. in Psychology, specializing in Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience from the Pennsylvania State University in 2014. Her training was supervised by Dr. Sheri Berenbaum, an expert in human behavioral endocrinology whose research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health for three decades. Dr. Beltz then transitioned to a post-doctoral position in Human Development and Family Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She worked with the internationally-renowned methodologist, Dr. Peter Molenaar, on connectivity analysis approaches for fMRI data. Prior to Penn State, Dr. Beltz received her B.S. in Psychology and M.S. in Experimental Psychology at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 27 Nov 2018 09:50:11 -0500 2018-11-30T16:00:00-05:00 2018-11-30T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Michigan Institute for Data Science Workshop / Seminar Adriene Beltz, PhD
HEP-Astro Seminar | Anti-nuclei Cosmic-Rays and Dark Matter (December 3, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53480 53480-13386090@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, December 3, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Antimatter cosmic-ray measurements have long been used to advance our understanding of high energy astrophysical phenomena in the Galaxy. Using the antiproton cosmic-ray measurements by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on board the International Space Station, I will present work in search of unexpected sources of antiprotons. In doing that, I will discuss the uncertainties related to the interstellar propagation of cosmic-rays, the antiproton production cross-section uncertainties from inelastic cosmic-ray collisions the interstellar medium, as well as the uncertainties from the effects of the solar wind. At the GeV range there is an excess of cosmic-ray antiprotons that could be accounted for by a dark matter particle in the mass range of 50 to 90 GeV. Furthermore I will discuss the prospects of detecting anti-deuterons and anti-Helium nuclei produced both from inelastic collisions of high energy cosmic-rays with the interstellar medium gas from dark matter annihilations. Interestingly, under certain assumptions relating to the properties of the Milky Way we may be able to detect with AMS, cosmic-ray anti-deuterons and anti-Helium from annihilating dark matter particles.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 03 Dec 2018 18:15:52 -0500 2018-12-03T16:00:00-05:00 2018-12-03T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Frederi Viens, Professor, Department of Statistics and Probability, Michigan State University (December 4, 2018 4:10pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53005 53005-13176898@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, December 4, 2018 4:10pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics Seminar Series

Abstrtact: We consider the class of all stationary Gaussian processes. When the spectral density is parametrically explicit, we define a Generalized Method of Moments estimator that satisfies consistency and asymptotic normality, using the Breuer-Major theorem which applies to long-memory processes. This result is applied to the joint estimation of the three parameters of a stationary fractional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (fOU) process driven for all Hurst parameters. For general processes observed at fixed discrete times, no matter what the memory length, we use state-of-the-art Malliavin calculus tools to prove BerryEsseen-type and other speeds of convergence in total variation, for estimators based on power variations. This is joint work with Luis Barboza (U. Costa Rica), Khalifa es-Sebaiy (U. Kuwait), and Soukaina Douissi (U. Cadi Ayyad, Morocco). Time permitting, we will reveal some ideas from ongoing work with Fatimah Alsharani (MSU) and Philip Ernst (Rice U., Houston, Texas) on hypothesis testing for Gaussian processes extending modeling to second-chaos processes, with applications to sea-level rise.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 28 Nov 2018 09:14:07 -0500 2018-12-04T16:10:00-05:00 2018-12-04T17:10:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Seminar Series Workshop / Seminar Frederi Viens
Department Colloquium | The Trouble with Quantum Physics, and Why It Matters (December 5, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56854 56854-14014877@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, December 5, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Quantum physics is arguably the most successful scientific theory ever devised. It explains an enormous variety of natural phenomena to an extraordinary degree of accuracy — everything from semiconductors to the Sun itself. Yet there is a problem: it's unclear what this immensely fruitful theory says about reality. What is going on in the world of quantum physics? Why does "measurement" play a special role in the theory? Is it really impossible to talk about what's happening to atoms and subatomic particles when we're not looking at them? For many years, the standard answer to questions like this was to "shut up and calculate," to ignore these issues and simply use quantum physics to predict the outcomes of experiments. There was also a historical myth that went along with this answer, a myth that said Einstein had once worried about these questions, but he was shown the error of his ways by the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Yet that myth is simply untrue, and these thorny quantum paradoxes are far more important than most physicists once believed. In this talk, I'll explain the puzzles at the heart of quantum physics, why they matter, and what really went down between Einstein and Bohr 90 years ago.

Bio: Adam Becker is an author, astrophysicist, and public speaker. His book, What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books, 2018) is a "thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science," according to the New York Times. The Washington Post called it "splendid", and Science dubbed Adam "a riveting storyteller". Adam has also written for the BBC, NPR, Scientific American, NOVA, New Scientist, and other science media outlets. He recorded a video series with the BBC, and has appeared on numerous radio shows and podcasts. Adam has a PhD in cosmology from the University of Michigan and an undergraduate degree in philosophy and in physics from Cornell University. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Book Grant for his work on What Is Real. Adam is a visiting scholar in the Office for the History of Science and Technology at UC Berkeley. He lives in Oakland, California.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 05 Dec 2018 18:15:55 -0500 2018-12-05T16:00:00-05:00 2018-12-05T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM Theory Seminar | Nematic Enhancement of Superconductivity (December 6, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/58139 58139-14428991@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, December 6, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The nematic phase, wherein electronic degrees of freedom drive a reduction in crystal rotational symmetry, is a common motif across a number of high temperature superconductors. The impact of nematicity and nematic uctuations on the high Tc superconducting phase is complicated, however, due to coexisence with long range magnetic order. I will discuss the evolution of physical properties, including elastoresistance, in the (Ba,Sr)Ni2As2 substitution series, a new electronic nematic system without magnetism or unconventional pairing. Our observation of a unidirectional charge density wave in the nematic phase of this series evokes comparisons to nematicity in cuprate superconductors, and a strong enhancement of the superconducting transition temperature appears to be driven by nematic fluctuations, establishing a promising route to higher superconducting critical temperatures.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 06 Dec 2018 18:15:53 -0500 2018-12-06T16:00:00-05:00 2018-12-06T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
AAOSA-OSUM Seminar: Using Relativistic Intensity Laser Pulses to Generate Huge Magnetic Fields and a Magnetic Reconnection Geometry (December 6, 2018 4:10pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57969 57969-14383879@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, December 6, 2018 4:10pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: The Optics Society at the University of Michigan (OSUM)

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics technique of chirped pulse amplification (CPA) can be used to
produce light pulses that can be focused to intensities where the electric field oscillates electrons at
relativistic velocities. The currents due to the relativistic electrons can generate huge, dynamic fields within a laboratory plasma. Plasma dynamics in astrophysical plasmas are strongly impacted by magnetic field topology. However, direct measurements of the outer space plasma conditions and fields are challenging, so laboratory studies of magnetic dynamics and reconnection provide an important platform for testing theories and characterizing different regimes. The extremely energetic class of astrophysical phenomena - including high-energy pulsar winds, gamma ray bursts, and jets from galactic nuclei - have plasma conditions where the energy density of the magnetic fields exceeds the rest mass energy density (σ_cold = B^2/(μ_0 n_e m_e c^2) > 1, the cold magnetization parameter). I will show experimental measurements, along with numerical modeling, of short-pulse, high-intensity laser-plasma interactions that produce extremely strong magnetic fields (>100 T) in a plasma such that σcold > 1. The generation and the dynamics of these magnetic fields under different target conditions was studied, and relativistic intensity laser-driven, magnetic reconnection experiments were performed. I’ll describe how X-ray imaging allows the observation of the fast electron dynamics. Evidence of magnetic reconnection was identified by the plasma’s X-ray emission patterns, changes to the electron spectrum, and by measuring the reconnection timescales.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 28 Nov 2018 12:01:58 -0500 2018-12-06T16:10:00-05:00 2018-12-06T17:10:00-05:00 West Hall The Optics Society at the University of Michigan (OSUM) Workshop / Seminar AAOSA-OSUM Seminar by Prof. Willingale
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Po-Ling Loh (December 7, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/53006 53006-13176899@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, December 7, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics Seminar Series

We discuss two recent results concerning disease modeling on networks. The
infection is assumed to spread via contagion (e.g., transmission over the edges of
an underlying network). In the first scenario, we observe the infection status of
individuals at a particular time instance and the goal is to identify a confidence
set of nodes that contain the source of the infection with high probability. We
show that when the underlying graph is a tree with certain regularity properties
and the structure of the graph is known, confidence sets may be constructed with
cardinality independent of the size of the infection set. In the scenario, the goal is
to infer the network structure of the underlying graph based on knowledge of the
infected individuals. We develop a hypothesis test based on permutation testing,
and describe a sufficient condition for the validity of the hypothesis test based on
automorphism groups of the graphs involved in the hypothesis test.
This is joint work with Justin Khim (UPenn).

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 09 Nov 2018 08:41:17 -0500 2018-12-07T11:30:00-05:00 2018-12-07T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Seminar Series Workshop / Seminar Po-Ling Loh
Life After Graduate School | From Fundamental Science to Startups: How to Use Your PhD as Your Career Secret Weapon (December 7, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/58224 58224-14444064@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, December 7, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Summary: Brandon will discuss how and why he intentionally went from applied physics graduate student to physics postdoc to biomedical engineering research faculty to startup founder/Chief Technology Officer to emergency medicine research faculty to venture capitalist to codeveloper/instructor of a first-of-its-kind entrepreneurship course to founder/CEO at venture-capital-backed Akadeum Life Sciences, Inc (akadeum.com).

From his experience, Brandon will share his ideas on how to lead a fulfilling career, ways to transfer your PhD skills, and the wide range of opportunities available after grad school. Plus, there may just be some bonus footage of awesome physics experiments.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 07 Dec 2018 18:15:51 -0500 2018-12-07T12:00:00-05:00 2018-12-07T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Quantitative Biology Seminar | Disruption of Excitation/Inhibition Balance in Cortical Neuronal Networks (December 10, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/58012 58012-14392459@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, December 10, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Cortical neuron spiking activity is broadly classified as temporally irregular and asynchronous. Model networks with a balance between large recurrent excitation and inhibition capture these two features, and are a popular framework relating circuit structure and network dynamics, though are traditionally restricted to a single attractor. We analyze paired whole cell voltage-clamp recordings from spontaneously active neurons in mouse auditory cortex slices (Graupner & Reyes, 2013) showing a network where correlated excitation and inhibition effectively cancel, except for intermittent periods when the network shows a macroscopic synchronous event. These data suggest that while the core mechanics of balanced activity are important, we require new theories capturing these brief but powerful periods when balance fails. Recent work by Mongillo et.al. (2012) showed that balanced networks with short-term synaptic plasticity can depart from strict linear dynamics. We extend this model by incorporating finite network size, introducing strong nonlinearities in the firing rate dynamics and allowing finite size induced noise to elicit large scale, yet infrequent, synchronous events. We identify core requirements for system size and network plasticity to capture the transient synchronous activity observed in our experimental data set. Our model properly mediates between the asynchrony of balanced activity and the tendency for strong recurrence to promote macroscopic population dynamics.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 10 Dec 2018 18:15:48 -0500 2018-12-10T12:00:00-05:00 2018-12-10T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Searching for Dark Matter with Paleo-Detectors (December 10, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/53527 53527-13394612@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, December 10, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

A large experimental program is underway to extend the sensitivity of direct detection experiments, searching for the interaction of Dark Matter with nuclei, down to the neutrino floor. However, such experiments are becoming increasingly difficult and costly due to the large target masses and exquisite background rejection needed for the necessary improvements in sensitivity. We investigate an alternative approach to the detection of Dark Matter-nucleon interactions: Searching for the persistent traces left by Dark Matter scattering in ancient minerals obtained from much deeper than current underground laboratories. We estimate the sensitivity of paleo-detectors, which extends far beyond current upper limits for a wide range of Dark Matter masses.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 10 Dec 2018 18:15:48 -0500 2018-12-10T16:00:00-05:00 2018-12-10T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM/AMO Seminar | Single-particle Theory of Optical Scattering from Atomic Clusters (December 11, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/58225 58225-14444065@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, December 11, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

We have recently demonstrated that a dense ensemble of two-level atoms driven by an electromagnetic field can be modelled by an effective single quantum system that has a time-varying decoherence rate [1]. This model compares very well to large-scale, mean-field simulations of the Maxwell-Lindblad equations for a cluster of approximately 4000 atoms. Our effective single particle theory provides a way to model optical interactions in clusters in which computational time can be reduced, and also a model in which the underlying physical processes involved in the system's evolution are much easier to understand. We use this theory to provide an explanation for the results of scattering experiments [2], in which high-intensity, short-duration, electromagnetic pulses were scattered off dielectric liquids such as water and carbon tetrachloride, and produced depolarized emission patterns.

[1] C. S. DiLoreto and C. Rangan, Phys. Rev. A 97: 013812, 2018.
[2] S. C. Rand, W.M. Fisher, and S. L. Oliveira, J. Opt. Soc. Am B, 25:1106, 2008.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 11 Dec 2018 18:15:46 -0500 2018-12-11T16:00:00-05:00 2018-12-11T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | What is space weather, and why should you care? (January 9, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/58910 58910-14578297@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, January 9, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The continuous outflow of plasma from the Sun fills the heliosphere with tenuous gas of charged particles carrying the Solar magnetic field. Largely shielded by the internal geomagnetic field, only a small fraction of the protons and electrons make it to the near-Earth space - but those that do, have a strong impact on our electromagnetic and radiation environment. As the society increasingly relies on space-based assets, it has increasingly important to develop preditions of high-energy (keV to MeV) particle fluxes in the near-Earth space. This talk discusses the effects of Coronal Mass Ejections from the Sun as they reach the geospace: The bright auroral displays, ground currents harmful to power networks and other infrastructure, and the radiation belt electrons in regions where the navigation and communication satellites reside. Our methodologies include satellite observations of the Sun and the fields and plasmas in near-Earth space, and large-scale numerical models to model the complex interactions between the solar wind and the geospace plasma environments.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 09 Jan 2019 18:16:01 -0500 2019-01-09T16:00:00-05:00 2019-01-09T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM Theory Seminar | Dirac Electrons on the Kagome Lattice (January 10, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/58911 58911-14578298@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, January 10, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The kagome lattice is a two-dimensional network of corner-sharing triangles known as a platform for exotic quantum magnetic states. Theoretical work has predicted that the kagome lattice may also host exotic Dirac electronic states including those with non-trivial topology. We here present our recent work in conducting, layered kagome materials in exploring these Dirac-like states, particularly in systems with magnetic order. We describe observations massive Dirac states and associated Berry curvature induced transport. We also demonstrate the detection of these states from de Haas-van Alphen oscillations and their modification in magnetic field. Finally, we discuss the promise for these materials in terms of realizing robust time-reversal-breaking topological phases.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 10 Jan 2019 18:16:00 -0500 2019-01-10T16:00:00-05:00 2019-01-10T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Life After Graduate School Seminar | Building Skynet: How an ultrafast optics physicist became a robotic AI researcher (January 11, 2019 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/59120 59120-14686286@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 11, 2019 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Tim Saucer will present a brief introduction of his path from physics graduate school to working in private industry, followed by a longer discussion of how to navigate the job search process.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Fri, 11 Jan 2019 18:16:07 -0500 2019-01-11T12:00:00-05:00 2019-01-11T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
How to Make Causal Inferences Using Texts (January 11, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/59075 59075-14677952@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 11, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Data Science

Abstract: New text-as-data techniques offer a great promise: the ability to discover, measure, and then utilize text-based variables for testing social science theories of interest from large collections of text. We introduce a conceptual framework for making causal inferences with text-based measures as either a treatment or outcome.  We argue that nearly all text-based causal inferences depend upon a latent representation of the text and provide a set of sufficient assumptions to identify causal effects when text is used as a treatment or outcome. We provide a framework to learn the latent representation---justifying the use of popular unsupervised methods such as topic modeling or principal component analysis---and then estimate causal effects with the same sample used to learn the latent representation. But estimating the latent representation, we show, creates new risks: we may introduce an identification problem or overfit. To address this problem we introduce a split-sample framework.  We apply our framework to study whether increasing the proportion of women on Congressional committees leads to more representation of women’s ideas during the legislative process and to assess how partisans respond to social media messages from President Trump.

Bio: Justin Grimmer is an associate professor of political science at Stanford University. His research examines how representation occurs in American politics using new statistical methods. His first book Representational Style in Congress: What Legislators Say and Why It Matters (Cambridge University Press, 2013) shows how senators define the type of representation they provide constituents and how this affects constituents' evaluations. His second book The Impression of Influence: How Legislator Communication and Government Spending Cultivate a Personal Vote (Under Review, with Sean J. Westwood and Solomon Messing) demonstrates how legislators ensure they receive credit for government actions. His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Regulation and Governance, and Poetics. During the 2013-2014 academic year he was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institute.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 02 Jan 2019 13:12:20 -0500 2019-01-11T16:00:00-05:00 2019-01-11T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Michigan Institute for Data Science Workshop / Seminar Justin Grimmer, PhD
Quantitative Biology Seminar (January 14, 2019 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/59059 59059-14677934@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, January 14, 2019 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Quantitative Biology Seminar

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 14 Jan 2019 18:16:09 -0500 2019-01-14T12:00:00-05:00 2019-01-14T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | The Global Electroweak Fit in the Light of the New Results from the LHC (January 14, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/58683 58683-14544786@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, January 14, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

With the high integrated luminosities recorded at the LHC and the very good understanding of the LHC detectors, it is possible to measure electroweak observables to the highest precision. In this talk, I review the measurement of the W boson mass as well as the measurement of the electroweak mixing angle with the ATLAS detector, both achieving highest precision after several years of intense effort. Special focus is drawn on a discussion of the modeling uncertainties as well as the physics potential of the latest low-mu runs, recorded at in 2017 and 2018. The results will be interpreted in terms of the overall consistency of the Standard Modell by the global electroweak fit, performed by the Gfitter Collaboration.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 14 Jan 2019 18:16:09 -0500 2019-01-14T16:00:00-05:00 2019-01-14T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Towards an Inclusive Physics (January 16, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/59060 59060-14677935@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, January 16, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Three kinds of data are relevant to diversity, equity, and inclusion in physics and other fields. Quantitative data about demographics (e.g., race and binary gender, and less often sexual orientation, other social identities, and their intersections) are widely available; student degree completion data from Michigan, MIT and other departments will be compared. Quantitative and qualitative data about the learning and work environment are sometime available, as in the 2016 Michigan Campus Climate Survey and in experiences shared by individuals. An institution’s policies and practices represent a third kind of data useful in guiding a department. This presentation will share three case studies on data-driven change from different departments at MIT and will reference recent recommendations from professional societies (APS, AAS, AAAS, NASEM) for improving equity and inclusion.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 16 Jan 2019 18:16:14 -0500 2019-01-16T16:00:00-05:00 2019-01-16T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Astronomy Colloquium Series Presents (January 17, 2019 3:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/58457 58457-14502339@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, January 17, 2019 3:30pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Astronomy

Physics and phenomenology of galactic winds

Abstract: Galactic winds are a crucial ingredient in galaxy evolution, but the physics of the ubiquitous outflowing high velocity gas seen from rapidly star-forming galaxies remains unknown. I will describe a series of projects designed to shed light on these open questions, with a focus on how to produce cool atomic and warm photo-ionized gas at high velocities. One idea is to precipitate the cool gas from the super-heated hot phase on scales outside the host galaxy. Another option is to directly accelerate the cool gas from the galaxy with momentum injection, perhaps provided by radiation pressure on dust, cosmic rays, or a putative fast, hot wind. I'll highlight challenges on both the observational and theoretical fronts, and connect to observational constraints on physical scales ranging from the host galaxy's molecular clouds to its circumgalactic medium.

Should you require any reasonable accommodations to ensure equal access and opportunity related to this event, please contact Stacy Tiburzi at 734-764-3440 or stibu@umich.edu.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Wed, 09 Jan 2019 11:54:07 -0500 2019-01-17T15:30:00-05:00 2019-01-17T16:20:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Astronomy Lecture / Discussion Dr. Todd Thompson
A nAttractor Mechanism for nAdS(2)/nCFT(1) (January 18, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/59610 59610-14754562@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 18, 2019 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics

High Energy Theory Talk

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Fri, 18 Jan 2019 13:16:43 -0500 2019-01-18T15:00:00-05:00 2019-01-18T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics Lecture / Discussion West Hall
HET Seminars | An Attractor Mechanism for nAdS(2)/nCFT(1) (January 18, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/59653 59653-14777840@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 18, 2019 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

TBD

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 14 Jan 2019 08:32:18 -0500 2019-01-18T15:00:00-05:00 2019-01-18T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: "Mississippian Migration and Polity Formation in Central Alabama: Conflict or Communitas?" (January 18, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51871 51871-12274331@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 18, 2019 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

"Mississippian cultural practices appear somewhat later in Central Alabama than in other regions of the Southeastern United States. Although evidence of trade and exchange between Late Woodland communities in the region and Mississippian groups is present, it appears as though local Woodland groups were reluctant to fully embrace what archaeologists have defined as “classic" Mississippian culture. This talk centers on archaeological research at several Terminal Woodland sites in Central Alabama, highlighting cases where interactions with Mississippian groups generated archaeological remains that can be interpreted as either evidence of conflict or communitas as initial Mississippian settlement of the region took place."

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:43:58 -0500 2019-01-18T15:00:00-05:00 2019-01-18T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Lecture / Discussion West Hall
Information Extraction from Online Text --- from Opinions to Arguments to Persuasion (January 18, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/59488 59488-14745558@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 18, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Data Science

Abstract: A long line of research in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including our own, has addressed the task of identifying and extracting information about opinions with the goal of determining what people (and other entities) are thinking or feeling. In this talk, I'll present new research on argument mining, a relatively new area of study in NLP that focuses less on extracting from text WHAT people think or feel, but rather analyzing argumentative text to understand WHY they do so. Specifically, I will first present some of our new research on the automatic analysis of informal, user-generated arguments in which we aim to expose the intended underlying structure of the argument. Next, I'll present our research that examines arguments on a public debate forum to understand what makes one argument more convincing than another.

Bio: Claire Cardie is the John C. Ford Professor of Engineering in the Departments of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University. She was the founding Chair of Cornell's Information
Science Department and has worked in the area of topics ranging from information extraction, text summarization and noun phrase coreference resolution to the automatic analysis of opinions, sentiment and deception in text. Cardie was selected as a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2015. She has served on the executive committees of the ACL, NAACL and AAAI, and has been Program Chair for EMNLP, CoNLL, ACL and COLING as well as General Chair this past July for ACL 2018 in Melbourne.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 10 Jan 2019 13:57:49 -0500 2019-01-18T16:00:00-05:00 2019-01-18T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Michigan Institute for Data Science Workshop / Seminar Claire Cardie, PhD
Astronomy Colloquium Series Presents (January 24, 2019 3:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/58458 58458-14502340@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, January 24, 2019 3:30pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Astronomy

“Origin of Molecular Clouds in Early Type Galaxies”

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array has changed our view of molecular clouds in central cluster galaxies. Unlike spiral galaxies where molecular gas lies in a disk moving in ordered motion about the center of the galaxy, molecular clouds in cluster centrals likely form in the updrafts of rising radio bubbles. Less is known about molecular gas in normal giant ellipticals. However, trends between the thermodynamic properties of the hot atmospheres in normal elliptcals and cluster centrals suggests much of the molecular gas in ellipticals condensed from their hot atmospheres.

Should you require any reasonable accommodations to ensure equal access and opportunity related to this event, please contact Stacy Tiburzi at 734-764-3440 or stibu@umich.edu.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Tue, 15 Jan 2019 12:48:55 -0500 2019-01-24T15:30:00-05:00 2019-01-24T16:20:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Astronomy Lecture / Discussion Dr. Brian McNamara
Dark Matter Production: Finite Temperature Effects in the Early Universe (January 25, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/60030 60030-14814795@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 25, 2019 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics

In the early universe, the Standard Model particles formed a hot thermal bath. We highlight the importance of finite temperature corrections in these conditions on various production mechanisms of dark matter, primarily through temperature dependent masses and scalar vevs. We first consider a variation on standard freeze-out, where kinematic thresholds determine the relic abundance. We then consider a freeze-in model where the production rate is dramatically increased when a kinematic threshold opens. Finally, we present a qualitatively new production mechanism for dark matter, where dark matter decay is allowed for a limited amount of time just before the electroweak phase transition.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Mon, 04 Feb 2019 13:15:24 -0500 2019-01-25T15:00:00-05:00 2019-01-25T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics Lecture / Discussion West Hall
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: "Rally Days: Violence and Political Aesthetics in post-war Sierra Leone" (January 25, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52365 52365-12650113@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 25, 2019 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

"In March, 2018, voters in Sierra Leone went to the polls to elect a new president. These were arguably the first post-war elections in this West African state in which the dominant parties did not threaten to remobilize veterans of the country's long recent war. But this did not mean the end of violence in Sierra Leonean political campaigns. Violence and the threat of violence remain an integral part of the political imaginary in national politics. Drawing on film footage from the final rally days of the various political parties, I explore in this talk the fundamental role of violence in Sierra Leone's political aesthetics."

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Tue, 04 Dec 2018 08:37:41 -0500 2019-01-25T15:00:00-05:00 2019-01-25T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Lecture / Discussion West Hall
Quantify Systematics from Mislabeled Truth Tables in Supervised Learning (January 25, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/59978 59978-14806102@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 25, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Data Science

Abstract: Many real world classification problems use ground truth labels created by human annotators. However, observed data is never perfect, and even labels assigned by perfect annotators can be systematically biased due to poor quality of the data they are labeling. This bias is not created by the annotators from measurement error, but is intrinsic to the observational data. We present a method for de-biasing labels which simultaneously learns a classification model, estimates the intrinsic biases in the ground truth, and provides new de-biased labels. We test our algorithm on simulated and real data and show that it is superior to standard denoising algorithms, like instance weighted logistic regression. We apply our technique to galaxy images and find that the morphologies based on supervised machine-learning trained over features such as colors, shape, and concentration show significantly less bias than morphologies based on expert or citizen-science classifiers. This result holds even when there is underlying bias present in the training sets used in the supervised machine learning process.

Bio: Chris Miller is a leader in astroinformatics – mixing computer science, advanced statistics, and data mining to answer key cosmological questions. His specialty is using galaxy clusters to trace the distribution of matter in the universe. After years exploiting the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, he is now heavily involved in the Dark Energy Survey and Dark Energy Spectroscopic Survey, two of the largest current astronomical survey efforts. Professor Miller used his galaxy-cluster research to support the Big Bang theory by aligning findings from opposing cosmological epochs. He was the first to see the signatures of sound waves from the very early universe that were “frozen into” the matter-density distribution that we observe today. His analysis of the current universe synched neatly with the acoustic oscillations of the early universe detected in the cosmic microwave background, and demonstrated the power of combining big-survey with focused observational follow-up data. He has published in a variety of journals outside his own fields of physics and astronomy, including NIPS, ICPR, The Annals of Applied Statistics, and Statistical Science.

Background: BS, Penn State; PhD, University of Maine. Postdoc (2000-2005) Carnegie-Mellon; Faculty (2005-2009) National Optical Astronomy Observatory/Chile. Hired in 2010 at U-M under a presidential initiative for advancing data mining research.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 17 Jan 2019 17:29:47 -0500 2019-01-25T16:00:00-05:00 2019-01-25T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Michigan Institute for Data Science Workshop / Seminar Chris Miller, PhD
HEP-Astro Seminar | Axions, Direction Detection, and ABRACADABRA (January 28, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/60274 60274-14857771@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, January 28, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The axion is a promising dark matter candidate which was originally proposed to solve the strong CP problem in particle physics. To date, the available parameter space for axion and axion-like particle dark matter is relatively unexplored, particularly at axion masses less than 1 mu eV. ABRACADABRA is a new experimental program to search for axion dark matter over a broad range of masses, 10−12 < m_a <10−6 eV, and ABRACADABRA-10 cm is a small-scale prototype for a future detector that could be sensitive to the QCD axion. Recently, a one-month data collection with ABRACADABRA-10 cm lead to the first results in the search for axion dark matter by the ABRACADABRA collaboration. In this talk, I will: review the theoretical and experimental status of axion physics; describe the construction of the ABRACADABRA-10 cm detector, the data collection, and the analysis leading to new laboratory-based constraints on the axion; and discuss future prospects for the ABRACADABRA program.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 28 Jan 2019 18:16:47 -0500 2019-01-28T16:00:00-05:00 2019-01-28T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO / CM Theory Seminar | Accurate Modeling of Charging Energies in Systems with >10,000 Electrons with StochasticGW (January 29, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/60135 60135-14840442@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, January 29, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Stochastic Quantum Chemistry (SQC) is a new paradigm we developed for electronic structure and dynamics, which rewrites traditional quantum chemistry as stochastic averages, avoiding the steep power law scaling of traditional methods. As an example I will discuss Stochastic GW (SGW). The GW technique is known to achieve high accuracy, with only a 0.1-0.3 eV experiment-theory deviation for affinities and ionization energies. SGW reproduces the results of traditional deterministic GW for small systems, but also handles very large systems; as an example, we easily calculated affinities, charging energies, and photoelectron spectroscopy for Si clusters and Si and P platelets with up to 11000 valence electrons, for clusters with 40 thiophene molecules, and for periodic systems with very large supercells. These systems are significantly bigger than any calculable in existing approaches, so that SGW makes a quantum jump in the ability to calculate accurate electronic affinities and potential energies for large molecules. We will specifically discuss recent improvements in the algorithm and implementation which makes SGW superior to traditional techniques already for tetracene, and reduces experiment-theory deviations to ~0.1eV.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 29 Jan 2019 18:16:52 -0500 2019-01-29T16:00:00-05:00 2019-01-29T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Astronomy Colloquium Series Presents (January 31, 2019 3:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/58568 58568-14511741@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, January 31, 2019 3:30pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Astronomy

"Solar System History via Near-Earth Asteroids (...and NASA's OSIRIS-REx Space Mission)"

We report on the current status and scientific results of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return mission that is visiting the B-type near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu. The spacecraft launched in September 2016, arrived at Bennu in December 2018 and will survey and study the asteroid until attempting to collect a sample in the summer of 2020 and return it to Earth in 2023. What will be learned from studying and sampling one near-Earth Asteroid?

Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) are transients that have escaped the Main Asteroid Belt and spend a paltry 10 Myr on planet-crossing orbits before hitting the Sun, a planet or getting ejected from the Solar System. All of the various taxonomic types of asteroids are represented amongst NEAs, but due to their chaotic orbits it is not possible to precisely retrace their history and determine where in the Main Asteroid Belt they came from. Furthermore, km-sized NEAs, are unlikely to have survived Solar System history intact and are expected to be reaccumulated remnants from a larger disrupted asteroid - they are often referred to as "rubble piles". In sum, any given small NEA comes from an unknown place and has an unknown parent asteroid and history. However, with Bennu, ultimately, returned samples from Bennu should clarify its history and evolution, and in the meantime its geology can reveal much of its history and shed light on its history in the Main Asteroid Belt.

Should you require any reasonable accommodations to ensure equal access and opportunity related to this event, please contact Stacy Tiburzi at 734-764-3440 or stibu@umich.edu.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Wed, 16 Jan 2019 12:35:05 -0500 2019-01-31T15:30:00-05:00 2019-01-31T16:20:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Astronomy Lecture / Discussion Dr. Kevin Walsh
HET Seminars | From Seiberg-Witten Theory to Adjoint QCD (February 1, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/60482 60482-14899149@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 1, 2019 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

TBD

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 28 Jan 2019 09:07:52 -0500 2019-02-01T15:00:00-05:00 2019-02-01T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: "Quantitative analyses of the early ape Ekembo with implications for hominoid evolution" (February 4, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51780 51780-12248759@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 4, 2019 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Tue, 29 Jan 2019 10:07:17 -0500 2019-02-04T15:00:00-05:00 2019-02-04T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Lecture / Discussion West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Fermilab: The Accelerators that Drive the Science (February 4, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/60136 60136-14840443@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 4, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

In May 2014 the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5), which advises the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of High Energy Physics released a report called "Building for Discovery" a Strategic Plan for U.S. Particle Physics in the Global Context. The top accelerator-based priorities for Fermilab are: to support the LHC and its planned luminosity upgrades, pursue the g-2 and Mu2e muon programs, focus on the high energy neutrino program to determine the mass hierarchy and measure CP violation, and engage in modest and appropriate levels of ILC accelerator R&D. In this context, I will look at the current accelerator complex, recent upgrades, current projects, accelerator R&D, and ideas/concepts for longer-term future.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 04 Feb 2019 18:16:57 -0500 2019-02-04T16:00:00-05:00 2019-02-04T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM/AMO Seminar | Visualizing a relativistic quantum Hall liquid in a graphene quantum dot (February 5, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/59989 59989-14808246@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, February 5, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Creating and probing the spatial and/or magnetic confinement of particles is ubiquitous in physics, from thermonuclear fusion to ultracold atoms. Spatial confinement leads to the well known "particle-in-a-box"-like states that describe electron behavior in quantum corrals and semiconductor quantum dots (QD). Magnetic confinement leads to charged particles performing tight cyclotron motion and is responsible for the integer quantum Hall effect, a striking example of a macroscopic topological quantum state of matter. But what happens when we finely tune from spatial to magnetic confinement, and what role do electron interactions play?

In this talk I will present scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/S) measurements that explore the interplay between the spatial and magnetic confinement of massless Dirac fermions in a custom 'rewritable' graphene quantum dot. I will first describe how graphene electrons can form quasi-bound QD states due to relativistic Klein scattering. As a magnetic field is applied, I will show measurements that directly visualize the intricate evolution of the atomic shell-like QD states into highly degenerate Landau levels. Here, increased electron interactions lead to the subsequent formation of a 'wedding cake' structure of compressible-incompressible electron strips, showing that custom-made QDs are a new platform for corralling quantum Hall liquids.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 05 Feb 2019 18:16:55 -0500 2019-02-05T16:00:00-05:00 2019-02-05T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Conformal Field Theory: From Boiling Water to Quantum Gravity (February 6, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/60650 60650-14937065@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 6, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Conformal Field Theory (CFT) is a framework used to describe physical systems with no intrinsic length or energy scales. CFTs have wide applicability across theoretical physics, ranging from boiling water or magnets at criticality to the low-energy dynamics of extended objects in string theory. In this talk, I will begin by describing how CFTs can be used to understand critical phenomena, and then I will discuss a couple of recent ideas that led to tremendous progress in obtaining a quantitative understanding of various corners in the space of all possible CFTs.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 06 Feb 2019 18:17:05 -0500 2019-02-06T16:00:00-05:00 2019-02-06T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Astronomy Colloquium Series Presents (February 7, 2019 3:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/58569 58569-14511743@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, February 7, 2019 3:30pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Astronomy

“Mergers of compact objects in the Gravitational Wave Era”

The observation of gravitational waves has opened a new, unexplored window onto the Universe. Among the sources of gravitational wave transients, compact objects such as neutron stars (NSs) and black holes (BHs) play the most important role. In this talk, I will focus on the expected gravitational wave signal when two compact objects (NS-NS and NS-BH) in a binary merge. These events are believed to be accompanied by a strong electromagnetic signature in gamma-rays, followed by longer-wavelength radiation. I will discuss what can be learned from the complementary observations of the electromagnetic and the gravitational wave signals during these events.

Should you require any reasonable accommodations to ensure equal access and opportunity related to this event, please contact Stacy Tiburzi at 734-764-3440 or stibu@umich.edu.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Mon, 04 Feb 2019 13:25:04 -0500 2019-02-07T15:30:00-05:00 2019-02-07T16:20:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Astronomy Lecture / Discussion Dr. Rosalba Perna
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Cosma Shalizi, Associate Professor, Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University (February 8, 2019 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/60665 60665-14937147@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 8, 2019 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Latent homophily generally makes it impossible to identify contagion or influence effects from observations on social networks. Sometimes, however, homophily also makes it possible to accurately infer nodes' latent attributes from their position in the larger network. I will lay out some assumptions on the network-growth process under which such inferences are good enough that they enable consistent and asymptotically unbiased estimates of the strength of social influence. Time permitting, I will also discuss the prospects for tracing out the "identification possibility frontier" for social contagion.

(Joint work with Edward McFowland III; paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.06565 )

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Sat, 02 Feb 2019 10:36:05 -0500 2019-02-08T11:30:00-05:00 2019-02-08T12:30:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Workshop / Seminar Cosma Shalizi
HET Seminars | The Search for Axion Dark Matter (February 8, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/60740 60740-14961641@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 8, 2019 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

Dark matter is the dominant source of matter in our Universe. However, while dark matter dictates the evolution of large-scale astrophysical systems through its gravitational effects, the particle nature of dark matter is unknown. This is despite the significant effort that has gone into the search for particle dark matter over the past decades. In this talk I will review the current status of the search for particle dark matter. I will focus specifically on a dark matter particle candidate called the axion, which is both well-motivated theoretically and also relatively unexplored experimentally. I will outline the near-term program for searching for axion dark matter and show that if this theory is correct, then we will probably know soon.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 04 Feb 2019 09:20:37 -0500 2019-02-08T15:00:00-05:00 2019-02-08T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: "Cooperation without Submission: The Juris-diction of Significance in Hopi-U.S. Relations" (February 8, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56314 56314-13878513@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 8, 2019 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

The founding principles of U.S. law regarding Native Americans, first articulated in the 1830s, define them as “domestic dependent nations” who retain powers of self-government but who are also in a “state of pupilage” to the federal government, in a relationship like that of a “ward to its guardian.” This ambiguous status has offered cover for the shifting winds of U.S. political sentiment, leading sometimes to calls for the assimilation of Native peoples, sometimes for their rights to self-determination. Despite these shifts, tribes like the Hopi Nation in Arizona persist in their claims to being sovereign nations who nonetheless enjoy a unique trust relationship with the U.S. Since the 1990s, and passage of laws like Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, this relationship has been executed pursuant to rules requiring “meaningful tribal consultation” whenever U.S. agencies or their grantees propose actions that may impact Native peoples and their resources, particularly those of substantial natural and/or cultural significance. Disagreement persists about meaningful tribal consultation and its efficacies however. This paper deploys insights from indigenous studies, and legal and linguistic anthropology to analyze the details of the consultations I have observed, since 2012, between Hopi Nation officials and their non-native counterparts in the U.S. Forest Service and the Field Museum of Natural History. Unpacking those interactions in light of Hopi theories of knowledge and authority, through a theory of legal language as juris-diction, I argue that these consultations enact Hopi and Anglo-legal norms of “significance” in complex, contradictory ways. I suggest that understanding “meaningful tribal consultation,” and the settler legal status of Native Nations more generally, requires understanding how indigenous nations enact the conditions of their authority through juris-diction and the relations and refusals to settler colonialism this inevitably entails.

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Fri, 25 Jan 2019 09:26:11 -0500 2019-02-08T15:00:00-05:00 2019-02-08T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Lecture / Discussion West Hall
The Search for Axion Dark Matter (February 8, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/62642 62642-15416701@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 8, 2019 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics

Dark matter is the dominant source of matter in our Universe. However, while dark matter dictates the evolution of large-scale astrophysical systems through its gravitational effects, the particle nature of dark matter is unknown. This is despite the significant effort that has gone into the search for particle dark matter over the past decades. In this talk I will review the current status of the search for particle dark matter. I will focus specifically on a dark matter particle candidate called the axion, which is both well-motivated theoretically and also relatively unexplored experimentally. I will outline the near-term program for searching for axion dark matter and show that if this theory is correct, then we will probably know soon.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Wed, 27 Mar 2019 13:36:31 -0400 2019-02-08T15:00:00-05:00 2019-02-08T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics Lecture / Discussion West Hall
Quantitative Biology Seminar | Big Data Methods for EEG Analysis in Epilepsy (February 11, 2019 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/60969 60969-14999996@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 11, 2019 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Quantitative Biology Seminar

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 11 Feb 2019 18:16:50 -0500 2019-02-11T12:00:00-05:00 2019-02-11T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Simulating structure formation in different environments and the application on massive neutrinos (February 11, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/58684 58684-14544787@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 11, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The observables of the large-scale structure such as galaxy number density generally depends on the density environment (of a few hundred Mpc). The dependence can traditionally be studied by performing gigantic cosmological N-body simulations and measuring the observables in different density environments. Alternatively, we perform the so-called "separate universe simulations", in which the effect of the environment is absorbed into the change of the cosmological parameters. For example, an overdense region is equivalent to a universe with positive curvature, hence the structure formation changes accordingly compared to the region without overdensity. In this talk, I will introduce the "separate universe mapping", and present how the power spectrum and halo mass function change in different density environments, which are equivalent to the squeezed bispectrum and the halo bias, respectively. I will then discuss the extension of this approach to inclusion of additional fluids such as massive neutrinos. This allows us to probe the novel scale dependence of halo bias and squeezed bispectrum caused by massive neutrinos. Finally, I will present a recent confirmation of the neutrino effect on halo bias by a different simulation technique, and discuss the impact on constraining the cosmological parameters.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 11 Feb 2019 18:16:49 -0500 2019-02-11T16:00:00-05:00 2019-02-11T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Physics Department DEI Workshop Series | Cuts: Responding to Student Climate Concerns (February 12, 2019 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/60676 60676-14937163@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, February 12, 2019 10:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Though the University of Michigan aspires to cultivate a climate that is welcoming to the members of their diverse student, faculty, and staff bodies, we know that the lived experiences of many in our communities don’t always align with these aspirations. Join the CRLT Players for "Cuts: Responding to Student Climate Concerns" which invites participants to think together about the many forces that can shape campus climate both positively and negatively. Comprised of a series of vignettes focused on a Muslim student over a year as she encounters multiple issues of bias, the sketch depicts how such incidents build up over time to create a negative climate for targeted students. Discussion focuses on exploring the issues, as well as potential responses to them.

This workshop is open to all staff, faculty, and graduate students of the Physics/Applied Physics Department. Please RSVP by clicking the link below by Wednesday, February 6 to attend.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 04 Feb 2019 11:26:07 -0500 2019-02-12T10:30:00-05:00 2019-02-12T12:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Thermodynamic Limits far from Equilibrium (February 13, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/60395 60395-14875120@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 13, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Thermodynamics is a remarkably successful theoretical framework, with wide ranging applications across the natural sciences. Unfortunately, thermodynamics is limited to equilibrium or near-equilibrium situations, whereas most of the natural world, especially life, operates very far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Without a robust nonequilibrium thermodynamics, we cannot address a whole host of pressing research questions regarding the energetic requirements to operate outside of equilibrium, like the energetic cost to form a pattern, replicate an organism, or sense an environment, to name a few. Research in nonequilibrium statistical thermodynamics is beginning to shed light on these questions. In this talk, I will present two such recent predictions. The first is a novel linear-response-like bound that quantifies how dissipation shapes fluctuations far from equilibrium. Besides its intrinsic allure as a universal relation, I will discuss how it can be used to probe the energetic efficiency of molecular motors, offer energetic constraints on chemical clocks, and bound the dissipation in complex materials, both biological and synthetic, allowing us to gain insight into the fundamental energetic requirements to operate out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The second is an extended second law of thermodynamics with information that quantifies the precise energetic costs to process information, make a measurement, and implement feedback.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 13 Feb 2019 18:16:50 -0500 2019-02-13T16:00:00-05:00 2019-02-13T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Astronomy Colloquium Series Presents (February 14, 2019 3:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/58571 58571-14511744@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, February 14, 2019 3:30pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Astronomy

Details to be announced

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Thu, 13 Dec 2018 14:42:20 -0500 2019-02-14T15:30:00-05:00 2019-02-14T16:20:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Astronomy Lecture / Discussion West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Tonglin Zhang, Associate Professor, Department of Statistics, Purdue University (February 15, 2019 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/60670 60670-14937153@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 15, 2019 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Recently, rapid advances in science and technology have brought extraordinary amount of data that cannot be analyzed by traditional statistical or machine learning approaches and algorithms. These advances provide unprecedented opportunities and challenges to tackle much larger and more complicated data in academics and industry. To overcome these difficulties, massive computing frameworks such as MapReduce and Spark are becoming increasingly important. However, statistical challenges have not been paid much attention to in the implementation of these frameworks. Recently, we have proposed to use sufficient statistics instead of the whole data in the analysis. We have investigated the concept of sufficient statistics under the framework of a variety of statistical approaches, including linear regression and generalized linear models. The current talk will focus on linear regression problems. It will briefly mention the idea to generalized linear models.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Thu, 07 Feb 2019 16:16:41 -0500 2019-02-15T11:30:00-05:00 2019-02-15T12:30:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Workshop / Seminar Tonglin Zhang
Building bulk observables in AdS/CFT (February 15, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/61024 61024-15018180@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 15, 2019 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics

The AdS/CFT correspondence relates a theory of gravity in anti-de Sitter space to a CFT on the boundary. A natural question is how local fields in AdS can be expressed in terms of the CFT. In the 1/N expansion this can be done by (i) identifying suitable building blocks - free bulk fields - in the CFT, (ii) assembling the building blocks to make interacting bulk fields. I'll present an approach where the first step is carried out using modular flow in the CFT and the second step is driven by requiring bulk causality.

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Wed, 27 Mar 2019 13:34:19 -0400 2019-02-15T15:00:00-05:00 2019-02-15T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics Lecture / Discussion West Hall
HET Seminars | Building Bulk Observables in AdS/CFT (February 15, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/61036 61036-15024922@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 15, 2019 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The AdS/CFT correspondence relates a theory of gravity in anti-de Sitter space to a CFT on the boundary. A natural question is how local fields in AdS can be expressed in terms of the CFT. In the 1/N expansion this can be done by (i) identifying suitable building blocks - free bulk fields - in the CFT, (ii) assembling the building blocks to make interacting bulk fields. I'll present an approach where the first step is carried out using modular flow in the CFT and the second step is driven by requiring bulk causality.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 11 Feb 2019 09:28:30 -0500 2019-02-15T15:00:00-05:00 2019-02-15T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: "Figure (of Personhood) Drawing: Pictorial Representations of Signing and Signers in Nepal" (February 15, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51729 51729-12214205@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 15, 2019 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Anthropology

"Nepali Sign Language (NSL) has primarily been represented in print through pictorial images of signing persons. This talk draws on long-term ethnographic research with Nepali signers to explore the affordances of drawings for representing and generating linguistic form, reference, connotation, and entanglement with other modes of semiosis. I focus specifically on post-Maoist Civil War changes in visual representations of the figures of personhood portrayed performing signs in NSL texts; the role of both drawings and the act of drawing in recent initiatives to include previously marginal elderly novice signers into deaf life; and my own efforts to follow deaf artists in incorporating drawings into my toolkit for recording, analyzing, and sharing representations of signing practices. Across these contexts, how does the production and interpretation of pictorial images function as a resource for creating indexical icons that can performatively call forth new conditions? In addition to analyzing social change among deaf networks in Nepal, this talk shows that ethnographic attention to drawing can contribute to conversations about how linguistic anthropology can forge connections with visual anthropology in order to help our research processes and products embody our commitment to analyzing multimodal total semiotic facts."

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Mon, 07 Jan 2019 09:11:06 -0500 2019-02-15T15:00:00-05:00 2019-02-15T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Anthropology Lecture / Discussion West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Dark Energy: status and prospects after the 6th and final observing season of DES (February 18, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/59061 59061-14677936@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 18, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is the state-of-the art imaging survey for dark energy. Since its first observing campaign, in 2013, DES has produced many exciting results, including: the most precise cosmological measurements from weak gravitational lensing of 400M galaxies, the first ever observation of the optical transient associated with a gravitational wave emitting astrophysical event (the binary neutron star merger GW1708117), and the first ever measurement of the rate of expansion of the universe using a dark gravitational wave standard siren (the binary black hole merger GW170814). After six years of data taking, on January 9 2019 DES completed its main survey observations. The collaboration now focuses on obtaining the most precise cosmological measurements, and prepare for target of opportunity observations of upcoming gravitational wave events. In this talk, I present an overview of the most exciting science produced by DES so far and discuss the prospects for the next few years before the start of the next-generation survey with the upcoming LSST instrument.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 18 Feb 2019 18:16:57 -0500 2019-02-18T16:00:00-05:00 2019-02-18T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Antenna Characterization Using Vapor Cell Rydberg EIT (February 19, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/61222 61222-15054305@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, February 19, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Atomic detectors for sensing and measurement of AC electric fields show certain advantages over traditional dipole antenna, such as the capability to measure absolute electric field strengths, and a higher physical resolution. Here I will present experimental detection of incident RF fields, using electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) spectroscopy on Rydberg states within an atomic vapor. The small (5.5 x 5.5 mm cross-section) Rubidium vapor cell is used to image the field the near-field from a microwave horn, to a spatial resolution of lambda/10, covering a field-amplitude range from 50 to 350 V/m. Results are compared to finite-element field simulations, and further experiments demonstrating the ability to record absolute field amplitude and frequency values will be discussed.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Tue, 19 Feb 2019 18:16:43 -0500 2019-02-19T16:00:00-05:00 2019-02-19T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Collective Physics for Breaking Quantum and Thermal Limits on Precision Measurements (February 20, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/61223 61223-15054306@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 20, 2019 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

A long-standing theme of atomic physics is a continual striving to gain ever greater control over single quantum objects, starting with their internal degrees of freedom and now extending to their external degrees of freedom. Having learned to exert nearly complete control over single atoms, what are the new frontiers? One direction is to now exert similar levels of control over the interactions and correlations between atoms, with examples including quantum computing with trapped ions, quantum many-body simulations in degenerate atomic gases, and the deterministic assembly of molecules. Our lab has been asking the question: is it also possible to exploit atom-atom correlations and entanglement to advance the field of precision measurement beyond the single-atom paradigm that dominates the field? Using laser-cooled and trapped rubidium and strontium atoms inside of high finesse optical cavities, we have explored this question along two fronts by surpassing the standard quantum limit on quantum phase estimation by a factor of 60 and overcoming thermal limits on laser frequency stability. If time permits, I will also discuss the emergence of spin-exchange interactions between atoms mediated by the optical cavity. Possible future impacts include robust millihertz linewidth optical lasers, advanced optical lattice clocks, and searches for new physics.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Wed, 20 Feb 2019 18:16:52 -0500 2019-02-20T16:00:00-05:00 2019-02-20T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | *To Be Confirmed* (February 21, 2019 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/61331 61331-15088051@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, February 21, 2019 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

*To Be Confirmed*

]]>
Lecture / Discussion Mon, 18 Feb 2019 09:39:40 -0500 2019-02-21T12:00:00-05:00 2019-02-21T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Lecture / Discussion West Hall
Statistics Department Seminar Series: Peter Hoff, Professor, Statistical Science Department, Duke University (February 22, 2019 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/60671 60671-14937154@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 22, 2019 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Statistics

Mixed effects models are used routinely to share information across groups and to account for data dependence. The statistical properties of such models are often quite good on average across groups, but may be poor for any specific group. For example, commonly-used confidence interval procedures may maintain a target coverage rate on average across groups, but
have near zero coverage rate for a group that differs substantially from the others. In this talk, we review some basic mixed effects modeling tools, discuss their group-specific properties, and present some new tools for multiple testing and inference problems that permit information sharing across groups while controlling group-specific frequentist error rates.

]]>
Workshop / Seminar Mon, 11 Feb 2019 15:37:29 -0500 2019-02-22T11:30:00-05:00 2019-02-22T12:30:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Statistics Workshop / Seminar Peter Hoff