In view of the upcoming workshop, more and more people are gathering to the program. This includes eg. Meesoon Ha from KAIST, Matteo Palassini (Barcelona), Joachim Krug, and Chin-Kun Hu, Academia Sinica, Taipei, and so forth.
The early week has seen on Monday the Nobel Forum talk of Massimo Vergassola on Biological Strategies of Motility and further today some biophysics -oriented ones by Krug and Heiko Rieger (Dynamics of microbial evolution, and, Angiogenesis and vascular network modeling in a growing tumor, respectively). The program is of course a bit heavy with two daily talks, but maybe this is a good practice for the workshop?
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Friday, May 9, 2008
Final day of the first week, Friday
The program continues to enjoy nice weather.
Then, we had a quite pedagogical and interesting talk by Satya Majumdar on the distribution of the largest eigenvalue of some classes of random matrices. The crux of the matter is that one can compute this exactly, and the result turns out to be exponential in the square of N, matrix size (sometimes linear in N, in the Wishart case) times a constant. The constant depends on the ensemble, and on where one looks at that on the real axis. The fact that seems to have caught the interest of some participants is the fact that the Coulomb gas mapping used to compute finally the distribution is the most clear and simple of all available ones. See recent papers by Satya, including http://xxx.sissa.it/abs/cond-mat/0701193. Olav Tirkkonen pointed out some connections to communications theory.
Of course, the day was finished with wine and cheese (thanks Anne and Laila!) to celebrate the first week.
Then, we had a quite pedagogical and interesting talk by Satya Majumdar on the distribution of the largest eigenvalue of some classes of random matrices. The crux of the matter is that one can compute this exactly, and the result turns out to be exponential in the square of N, matrix size (sometimes linear in N, in the Wishart case) times a constant. The constant depends on the ensemble, and on where one looks at that on the real axis. The fact that seems to have caught the interest of some participants is the fact that the Coulomb gas mapping used to compute finally the distribution is the most clear and simple of all available ones. See recent papers by Satya, including http://xxx.sissa.it/abs/cond-mat/0701193. Olav Tirkkonen pointed out some connections to communications theory.
Of course, the day was finished with wine and cheese (thanks Anne and Laila!) to celebrate the first week.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Thursday, May 8th, and the SMDIS
Today, we had two interesting deviations from "normal program life".
First, prof. Joakim Enwall entertained the audience with a summary of the languages along the "silk roads", between the West and China. What were those, actually, and what happened to them? Of course this is inter-connected with the modern world and in particular with the fact that SMDIS has Chinese participants.
Then Luca Peliti continued, this time with a colloquium on the influenza virus and its epidemological modelling. It appears to be necessary to understand empirical data via the tendency of the virus to mutate during the course of an epidemic (which among others makes it possible for the same person to fall sick from apparently the same virus again and again...). Usual SIR-models can modified to account for the varying dynamic strain populations of the virus, but this is not yet adequate and Luca discussed extensively the reasons and future directions related to that.
Chinese SMDIS guests (Bing-Hong Wang and Haijun Zhou) and Heiko Rieger (Saarbrucken) have now joined us.
First, prof. Joakim Enwall entertained the audience with a summary of the languages along the "silk roads", between the West and China. What were those, actually, and what happened to them? Of course this is inter-connected with the modern world and in particular with the fact that SMDIS has Chinese participants.
Then Luca Peliti continued, this time with a colloquium on the influenza virus and its epidemological modelling. It appears to be necessary to understand empirical data via the tendency of the virus to mutate during the course of an epidemic (which among others makes it possible for the same person to fall sick from apparently the same virus again and again...). Usual SIR-models can modified to account for the varying dynamic strain populations of the virus, but this is not yet adequate and Luca discussed extensively the reasons and future directions related to that.
Chinese SMDIS guests (Bing-Hong Wang and Haijun Zhou) and Heiko Rieger (Saarbrucken) have now joined us.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Wednesday 7th at SMDIS
In today's first talk Dr. Paolo Muratore-Ginanneschi (University of Helsinki) discussed the scaling properties of the two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation, for which the existence and uniqueness of solution still remains without a proof. Paolo pointed out differences between two different theories of the problem, leading to the conclusion that the renormalization theory of two-dimensional fully-developed turbulence in the Navier-Stokes equation needs to be revisited - still work to be done by the participants and colleagues.
In the afternoon, Prof. Olav Tirkkonen (Helsinki University of Technology, Theory and NokiaCo. ) talked about his ongoing work on self-organizing communication networks. In particular, his idea is to draw lessons from statistical physics of synchronization phenomena and apply them to engineering problems related to ad hoc communication networks. In a very lively ex tempore discussion session following Olav's talk, several ideas and connections to earlier work rose from the audience that Tirkkonen and co-workers can exploit - even during the programme (hopefully).
(Thanks to Matti Peltomäki for a concise summary).
In the afternoon, Prof. Olav Tirkkonen (Helsinki University of Technology, Theory and NokiaCo. ) talked about his ongoing work on self-organizing communication networks. In particular, his idea is to draw lessons from statistical physics of synchronization phenomena and apply them to engineering problems related to ad hoc communication networks. In a very lively ex tempore discussion session following Olav's talk, several ideas and connections to earlier work rose from the audience that Tirkkonen and co-workers can exploit - even during the programme (hopefully).
(Thanks to Matti Peltomäki for a concise summary).
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Tuesday 6th at SMDIS
Today, more people showed up, so that the non-Nordic visitors were Paolo Muratore-Ginanneschi, Olav Tirkkonen (well, from HUT), Luca Peliti, Satya Majumdar, Matteo Marsili, at the end of the day.
The main highlight was the seminar of Luca Peliti (copies of the slides should be available via the web site here and for the talks in general ) on Sequence evolution in phenotypic space: An overview. The main idea is to look at statistical mechanics models on transcription factor binding, and think about the space of possible simple models, and what that implies of how organisms work and how experiment should be interpreted. Related work has been done in particular by the group of Michael Lässig, recently.
The main highlight was the seminar of Luca Peliti (copies of the slides should be available via the web site here and for the talks in general ) on Sequence evolution in phenotypic space: An overview. The main idea is to look at statistical mechanics models on transcription factor binding, and think about the space of possible simple models, and what that implies of how organisms work and how experiment should be interpreted. Related work has been done in particular by the group of Michael Lässig, recently.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Monday 5th at Nordita
Today the program started. And it did it so via an opening talk by Erik Aurell. He explained the background of SMDIS and its funny relation to the sister program at KITPC, Beijing. Together these account for three months of science that at the end may help to define what is this "SMDIS". Erik went through a number of issues discussed in China to explain to the non-experts some of the challenges that a physicist faces in particular in Constraint Satisfaction Problems (3-SAT is a keyword), like what to say about the UNSAT-phase. Then, the constraint density is so high that an instance of the (say) 3-SAT problem can not be solved, it has a "positive energy" in that the optimal assignment leaves some constraints violated. It is a challenge to find physics-based approaches to beat the computer science techniques for proving unsolvability.
Finally, Erik listed some (pet) directions that really deal with "SMDIS" or at least contain the DIS-part and look for statistical mechanics for new ideas - or did so already. Examples arise in distributed Peer-to-Peer systems, in overlay network management (dynamics), and in designing distributed algorithms for evolving, complex networks.
Tomorrow we shall have a first real talk (sorry Erik) by Luca Peliti (Naples), then on Wednesday Olav Tirkkonen (TKK, Helsinki).
Finally, Erik listed some (pet) directions that really deal with "SMDIS" or at least contain the DIS-part and look for statistical mechanics for new ideas - or did so already. Examples arise in distributed Peer-to-Peer systems, in overlay network management (dynamics), and in designing distributed algorithms for evolving, complex networks.
Tomorrow we shall have a first real talk (sorry Erik) by Luca Peliti (Naples), then on Wednesday Olav Tirkkonen (TKK, Helsinki).
Saturday, May 3, 2008
On the eve of the Nordita program
At this point, the upcoming weeks look interesting. There has been some last minute extra interest concerning both the program and the mid-term workshop on May 15-17. This event will be in particular packed with three full days of program... but, while one should give the participants a chance to work on science, we also will be kept busy with one or two daily talks for the bread-and-butter part of the schedule before and after the workshop.
It should also be acknowledged already, that we have had extra support for PhD students (from Sweden, the Access Foundation, from Finland, the National Graduate School for Materials Physics - which obviously also includes the physics of complex systems...).
The real scientific program will kick-off on Tuesday 6th by a talk from Luca Peliti from Naples. A glance at the rest of the week tells that in addition to "program events" there will also be talks by participants at other occasions and institutions in Stockholm: a welcome sign. Updates of the scientific life will be published here regularly.
Speaking of welcomes on Monday the 5th there will be a welcome event for the people who have reached Nordita already by then.
It should also be acknowledged already, that we have had extra support for PhD students (from Sweden, the Access Foundation, from Finland, the National Graduate School for Materials Physics - which obviously also includes the physics of complex systems...).
The real scientific program will kick-off on Tuesday 6th by a talk from Luca Peliti from Naples. A glance at the rest of the week tells that in addition to "program events" there will also be talks by participants at other occasions and institutions in Stockholm: a welcome sign. Updates of the scientific life will be published here regularly.
Speaking of welcomes on Monday the 5th there will be a welcome event for the people who have reached Nordita already by then.
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