A group of 48 researchers from the U.S., Canada and Europe gathered at the Simons Foundation on February 13 and 14 for the 2015 annual meeting of the Collaboration on the Many Electron Problem.
One of the characteristic features of life — specificity — emerges in metabolism, information transfer from DNA to protein, embryology, immunology and virtually every other process. Its explanation on the molecular level is thermodynamic stability and structural complementarity. Yet one disturbing issue persists: the protein and nucleic acid sequences coding for that specificity are generally too small to distinguish actual partners from competitors. Similarly, protein degradation conveys specificity through very short sequences. The process is so kinetically complex that bulk kinetic experiments and a few molecular structures are insufficient to explain how specificity is achieved. Using single molecule kinetic measurements, we have deconvolved much of that specificity.
February 22-28, 2015 Organizers: Sanjeev Arora, Princeton University Uriel Feige, Weizmann Institute Michel Goemans, Massachusetts Institute of Technology David Shmoys, Cornell University This is the second Simons Symposium on Approximation Algorithms for NP-hard problems. The first, in January 2013, focused on core techniques and problems of this field. The upcoming meeting is expected to...
4:15 pm: Tea 5:00 pm: Lecture 6:15 pm: Reception More information coming soon.
Kathryn Zurek will review evidence for the presence of dark matter in our universe and the need for a new theory to describe the dark matter sector.
In this lecture, Hazen will examine how Earth’s near-surface environment has evolved as a consequence of selective physical, chemical and biological processes — an evolution that is preserved in the mineralogical record.
March 15-21, 2015 Organizers: Shamit Kachru, Stanford University Hirosi Ooguri, Caltech Subir Sachdev, Harvard University Since our last symposium, quantum entanglement has become even more important in areas of theoretical physics ranging from condensed matter physics and quantum information to quantum gravity. In quantum gravity, it is playing a key role in elucidating the...
People spend hours a day interacting in online settings, ranging from social media sites to a broad range of digital communities designed for work, education and entertainment. Such systems are generally intended to elicit particular activities or forms of engagement, yet we have relatively little understanding of the resulting behaviors or of how system design may contribute to those behaviors. This talk will discuss work that aims to develop models of human behavior in online settings, both to inform system design but also to address fundamental questions in the social sciences.
March 22–28, 2015 Organizing committee: Fedor Bogomolov, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences Brendan Hassett, Rice University Yuri Tschinkel, Simons Foundation The second Simons Symposium on Geometry over Nonclosed Fields took place March 22-28. The first symposium in this series focused on rational curves on higher-dimensional algebraic varieties and outlined applications of the theory of...
All life on Earth is based on electron transfer reactions far from thermodynamic equilibrium. In this talk, Paul Falkowski will discuss the possibility that photobiochemical reactions of minerals were transformational in the origins and persistence of biologically catalyzed electron transfer reactions on Earth.
In this lecture, Maureen Durkin will discuss trends in the prevalence of ASD, focusing on the role of intellectual disability — both as a co-occurring condition with ASD and in terms of using ASD as a diagnostic substitute for intellectual disability.
Speakers: Curtis Huttenhower, Aviv Regev, Dana Pe’er, Michael Schatz Curtis Huttenhower High-precision Functional Profiling of Microbial Communities and the Human Microbiome https://vimeo.com/125281142 Aviv Regev Towards a Human Cell Atlas https://vimeo.com/125270869 Dan Pe'er Single Cell Mapping of Developmental Trajectories Underlying Health and Disease https://vimeo.com/125270868 Michael Schatz Algorithms for Single Cell and Single Molecule Biology https://vimeo.com/125281143
In this lecture, Mark Liberman will describe the origins and development of the ‘Common Task’ method in DARPA’s human language technology program, its broader influence on recent research and development practices, and its lessons for the future.
Advanced data generation capabilities require other enhanced abilities — with increasing data size and complexity, the development of more efficient acquisition and analysis methods is essential. In this lecture, Lawrence R. Frank will discuss how this new paradigm of imaging exploration is manifest.
Stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM), breaks the diffraction limit on light microscopy by using selective activation of photo-switchable fluorescent probes to temporally separate the spatially overlapping images of individual molecules. This approach has allowed multicolor and 3-D imaging of living cells with nanometer-scale resolution, enabling discoveries of novel sub-cellular structures. In this talk, Prof. Zhuang will discuss her group's development of STORM and its biological applications.
The Bonini laboratory focuses on applying the extraordinary power of a very simple model organism — the fruit fly Drosophila — to the complex problem of human neurodegenerative disease.
In this lecture, Michael Oppenheimer will describe the physical mechanisms causing observed increases in sea level.
In this lecture, Sonya Dyhrman will focus on photosynthetic microbes called phytoplankton, highlighting the critical and beneficial roles that phytoplankton play in marine systems.
In this lecture, Alfred V. Aho will discuss the role that software plays in the modern world.
David W. Hogg will explore how planets are discovered in the Kepler dataset, how the data are understood and how researchers can make inferences about the full population of planets in the galaxy.
This lecture will explore algorithms for estimating the unknown pose parameters. The main focus will be on algorithms that are based on semidefinite programming relaxations that can be viewed as extensions to existing approximation algorithms to max-cut and unique games, two fundamental problems in theoretical computer science.
Everything around us — everything each of us has ever experienced and virtually everything underpinning our technological society and economy — is governed by quantum mechanics. Yet this most fundamental physical theory of nature often feels like a set of somewhat eerie and counterintuitive ideas of no direct relevance to our lives. Why is this? One reason is that we cannot perceive the strangeness (and astonishing beauty) of the quantum mechanical phenomena all around us by using our own senses.
Recent studies have implicated adult-born hippocampal neurons in pattern separation, a process by which similar experiences or events are transformed into discrete non-overlapping representations. Impaired pattern separation, Dr. Hen proposes, underlies the overgeneralization often seen in age-related memory impairments and in anxiety disorders. Dr. Hen will present evidence that strategies aimed at stimulating hippocampal neurogenesis result in improved pattern separation.
This lecture explores the biological bases of critical periods in brain development. Mechanisms that open and close windows of plasticity (E/I balance and molecular brakes, respectively) are implicated in autism, suggesting mistimed maturational processes that can be strategically rescued at the circuit level.
In this lecture, Yael Niv will argue that the key to learning efficiently in real-world scenarios is to use a simplified representation of the task that includes only those dimensions of the environment that are relevant to obtaining reward.
Thursday, October 22nd – Friday, October 23rd, 2015 Download the 2015 Annual Meeting booklet (PDF). The Mathematics and Physical Sciences Annual Meeting gathered together Simons Investigators, Simons Fellows, Simons Society of Fellows and Math + X Chairs and Investigators to exchange ideas through lectures and informal discussions in a scientifically stimulating environment. Agenda Thursday, October...
In this lecture, Catherine Dulac will discuss the cellular and molecular architecture of neural circuits underlying instinctive social behaviors of mice. She will describe her group’s recent advances in uncovering the identity of sensory neurons that detect social cues and the identity of command circuits associated with specific social responses in male and female mice.
This Biotech Symposium will focus on clinical and translational genomics and the shift to precision medicine.
The study of genes and social behavior is still a young field. In this lecture, Gene E. Robinson will discuss some of the first insights to emerge that describe the relationship between them. These include the surprisingly close relationship between brain gene expression and specific behavioral states; social regulation of brain gene expression; control of social behavior by context-dependent rewiring of brain transcriptional regulatory networks; and evolutionarily conserved genetic toolkits for social behavior that span insects, fish and mammals.
In this lecture, David S. Mandell will talk about why autism interventions rarely are implemented in community practice and why they fail to achieve the same outcomes as those observed in clinical trials.
Prime numbers have intrigued mathematicians, amateur and professional alike, for thousands of years. Some of the most pertinent questions today probably stem from classical times. In this lecture, Dr. Granville will discuss some well-known patterns in the primes and explain some of the latest progress.
The theory of strings started as an attempt to describe the forces holding quarks together. Important remnants of that idea survive in the form of the flux tubes of quantum chromodynamics and their description as “strings” in the gauge-string duality. Applications to quark-gluon plasmas have yielded some of the most quantitative comparisons of string theory with experimental data. For example,...
In this lecture, Dr. Holger Müller will explain recent experimental searches for certain models of dark energy. How can it be that dark energy, which is supposedly ubiquitous in the cosmos, has never been observed in experiments?
In this lecture, Gordon Fishell will describe his investigations of the developmental and genetic origins of interneuron development.
In this lecture, Brian Keating will discuss the search for the polarization of the cosmic microwave background and measurements by the POLARBEAR telescope, which pave the way for the upcoming Simons Array.
In this lecture, Andrew Marks will present new data on the high-resolution structure of the mammalian RyR1/intracellular calcium-release channel obtained using cryogenic electron-microscopy.
In this lecture, Gerald Rubin will discuss efforts to develop and apply the tools that will be required for a comprehensive analysis of the anatomy and function of the fly brain at the level of individual cell types and circuits, using examples from his lab’s recent work on visual perception, as well as the mechanisms of learning and memory.
In this lecture, F. DuBois Bowman will discuss how he and his colleagues are working to identify functional or anatomical properties of the brain that reliably distinguish individuals with Parkinson's disease from healthy controls.
In this lecture, Juna Kollmeier will take you on a cosmic journey, starting with the infant universe and explain the current thinking about how “structure” emerges from this humble start.
In this lecture, Dr. Gloria Coruzzi will focus on time — building predictive network models based on time-series transcriptome data, and perturbing transcription networks in time.
This talk will outline the current state of genetics research in autism, highlight some of the key findings that remain to be discovered, and consider how these findings could ultimately benefit individuals with autism and their families.
In this lecture, Catherine Monk will describe her lab’s studies on women in the perinatal period and fetal and infant neurobehavioral development.
April 3-9, 2016 Organizers: Krzysztof Oleskiewicz, University of Warsaw Elchanan Mossel, University of Pennsylvania Ryan O’Donnell, Carnegie Mellon University Related Links: Discrete Analysis: Beyond the Boolean Cube (2014) Analysis of Boolean Functions: New Directions and Applications (2012) Analysis of Boolean Functions Blog This third symposium for Analysis of Boolean Functions focused on "New Analytic...
April 10-16, 2016 Organizers: Werner Mueller, Mathematisches Institut der Universität Bonn Sug Woo Shin, UC Berkeley Nicolas Templier, Cornell University Related Links: Geometric Aspects of the Trace Formula (external site) 2014 Simons Symposium on Families of Automorphic Forms and the Trace Formula The second gathering of the Simons Symposium on the Trace Formula paved...
In this talk, Robert Kirshner will show how we discovered cosmic acceleration and present evidence that we live in a universe that is only 4 percent ordinary matter, with the balance being dark matter and dark energy.
April 17-23, 2016 Organizers: Fedor Bogomolov, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences Brendan Hassett, Brown University Yuri Tschinkel, Simons Foundation Related Links: 2012 Simons Symposium on Geometry Over Nonclosed Fields 2015 Simons Symposium on Geometry Over Nonclosed Fields The focus of this third symposium on Geometry Over Nonclosed Fields was zero-cycles and related Chow-theoretic and...
In this lecture, Alexei Borodin will illustrate how these two concepts work together in examples from random matrices to random interface growth.
Christopher Walsh will review recent work on ‘somatic mutations’ — de novo mutations that are present in some brain cells but not in all cells of the body — in several neurological conditions associated with intellectual disability and seizures.
In this lecture, Thomas Schulthess will show how recent developments in architecture have moved us away from traditional abstractions, forcing software development and mathematical algorithms to acknowledge the physical reality of computing systems.
A canonical task in machine learning is to fit a model to a dataset. Sanjeev Arora will describe models fitted to real-life datasets, which display randomlike properties that can offer insights into the algorithms used for the task.
In this lecture, Eric Betzig will describe advanced optical tools being developed to help scientists delve deeper into the complexity of biological systems.
