Colloquium Speaker: Peter Sarnak, IAS & Princeton University Title: Bass-Note Spectra of locally uniform geometries Abstract: We formulate and report on the problem of the Bass-Note Spectrum of an invariant operator as one varies over locally uniform geometries. In the Euclidean setting this recasts classical problems of Mahler from the geometry of numbers in a new […]

Colloquium Speaker: Ariel Procaccia, Harvard University Title: Thinking Outside the Ballot Box Abstract: How should one design unprecedented democratic processes capable of handling enormous sets of alternatives like all possible policies, bills, or statements? I argue that this challenge can be addressed through a framework called generative social choice, which fuses the rigor of social choice theory […]

Colloquium Speaker: Anna Seigal, Harvard University Title: Factorizations for data analysis Abstract: We can find structure in data by factoring it into building blocks, which should be interpretable for the context at hand. A classical example is principal component analysis (PCA), which uses the eigendecomposition of the covariance matrix to find axes of variation in a dataset. Starting from […]