Presidential Lectures

In this lecture, Eric Betzig will describe advanced optical tools being developed to help scientists delve deeper into the complexity of biological 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, 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.

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, Alexei Borodin will illustrate how these two concepts work together in examples from random matrices to random interface growth.

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.