Report on Thursday 22nd

The main event of the Thursday was the talk of Satya Majumdar on the relation between the Integer Partitioning Problem and the statistics of extremes. By the right choice for the energy of the state ("number") one can map the problem to the statistics of a Bose gas. Then, even an interpretation can be found in how the Gumbel distribution a long ago found in mathematics arises. Many extensions could be foreseen (many of which were already resolved by Satya).

Meanwhile, the weather got better and warmer.

A Wednesday passed (the 21st)

Yesterday we had one talk, by Matteo Palassini. He discussed some recent work in Barcelona on the p53 regulatory network: the appearance of noise-induced oscillations in its dynamics due to number (of molecules) fluctuations. A coupling of the eigenvalues of the dynamical system and the noise gives rise to this. Matteo had a bit of PowerPoint trouble, but at the end it was resolved by the traditional means of a (white)board which then enlivened the audience...

... meanwhile the weather got better.

Tuesday 20th passed...

We have had a perfectly ordinary day with just one talk by prof. Bing-Hong Wang, about three different models of co-operation and adaptation and their spatial behavior. He overviewed the Prisoner's Dilemma Game, the Snowdrift Game, and finally the Naming Game. The two first models exhibit various properties as regards the graph structure's and the pay-off matrix' influence on the likelihood of co-operation taking place. In the Naming Game it seems that asymmetric dynamics and emphasizing the role of "hubs" in networks both create interesting effects.

Back to (program) business - Monday 16th

After some rest and relaxation a normal Monday followed: work and a talk by prof. Chin-Kun Hu on protein folding. Here, one of the essential issues is to understand the folding pathways. The talk presented us some results that illustrated the challenges how to model the problem and how to design experiments by force microscopy, such that they work by giving the right sequence. It appears that here simple statistical physics have a lot to give, but also some distance to go.

Saturday, last workshop day - May 17th

Last night, social activities interfered with science as we had a very nice workshop dinner at Restaurant Godthem in Djurgården.

Today instead, the last day was celebrated (during an otherwise rainy day) with a lot of program. The audience reached again 40-45 at maximum (the early morning being an exception). The first part was on computer science/physics -related issues, with three long contributions. First Johan Håstad told us why (eg.) MAX-SAT is so very difficult to approximate (actually you can as well try a random assignment...). Then, Ashish Sabharwal and Alexander Hartmann educated the audience more on why Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP) are interesting. Ashish talked about how to sample the number of solutions cleverly, and Alex about analyzing clustering in COL and 3-SAT and its relation to what Local Search does. The structure of the CSP solution (and energy) landscape was also addressed in short talks by Frederico Ricci-Tersenghi, Florent Krzakala, and Lenka Zdeborova.
They all presented very recent results.

Finally, the Saturday was finished with some mixed topic -talks, and with Matteo Marsili discussing How to Be Lucky, or how to park (in Marseille).

Hopefully all participants liked this event, in particular those who came to Stockholm/Nordita only for the workshop and not also for the program.

Long days, long talks at SMDIS workshop - Friday 16th

Though the program is crowded there is still a sizeable crowd following the workshop, at 16 + \epsilon amounting to about 50 people.

Today's program has more long, 40 minute talks than yesterday (Thursday). We heard then from Riccardo Zecchina how to understand random Steiner trees using statistical mechanics (using a combination of belief propagation and the cavity equation approach) and then Jeremy Stribling discussed how to put together a distributed file system (or how to share data) "without problems": how to create a protocol for doing that in the P2P-spirit.

The Friday program has contained no less than five long talks. First Massimo Vergassola outlined the role of non-coding RNAs in bacteria. Then, Haijun Zhou overviewed his recent work on dynamics on networks: how the scale-free character influences opinion model dynamics (it is much dependent on the degree distribution exponent) and how such dynamics can be coupled with network evolution to create scale-free -looking networks. Scott Kirkpatrick told us how to treat the Sudoku puzzle as a challenging optimization problem (and how to solve it by various techniques). This was contrasted nicely by Ilkka Niemelä, whose presentation contained a lot of information on industrial SAT problems, how they are to be solved efficiently (and why), and what the real challenges in SAT are in the future. Finally, Neil Gershenfeld finished the day by a tale about how to program bits and atoms. Or, more precisely, how to inject programming into our surroundings, and how to learn from physics and biology to make such a holistic view work, including a mixture of nano-fabrication and really ubiquitous computing.

Wednesday and Thursday of SMDIS

We have now entered the heavy part of the program. Wednesday saw an interesting talk in the morning by György Dan of the KTH here in Stockholm. He discussed dynamical analysis of the workings of various peer-to-peer systems. Then the day continued with the K-SAT related licentiate thesis defense of John Ardelius (SICS, Stockholm). This was aptly carried out via Skype since his opponent Bart Selman (Cornell) is not yet here.

And, on Thursday morning commenced the program. The many talks are on the web program, just to mention that Supriya Krishnamurthy was the first speaker. Tonight the main social event is a visit to the opera. We had about 50 people typically present.