On Friday December 12th, Loren Acton and Jennifer Trosper will present a special colloquium.
L. Acton: 1:00pm – 1:45pm
J. Trosper: 2:00pm – 2:45pm
You are all invited to join. Titles and abstracts will follow, as well as location.
Loren W. Acton, P.hD. in solar physics. Dr. Acton flew on Space Shuttle mission STS-51-F in 1985, after seven years of training, as a payload specialist. During his mission, he orbited the Earth about 126 times. Dr. Acton is currently a research Professor in the Solar Physics Group at Montana State University.
Jennifer Trosper. Mars Curiosity Mission Manager and more recently Mars Curiosity Deputy Project Manager. Responsible for leading the Curiosity operational mission. 2013 named JPL Fellow in Mars rover surface operations, 2013 NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for Curiosity operations work, 2013 “Breaking the glass Ceiling” California Legislature award recipient.
Robert Bates will defend his doctoral dissertation.
Yuri Gurevich will visit 16-22 December.
We scheduled his talk for Dec 18 at 3-4PM in POST 302.
The graduation ceremony is at 4:30PM, and after that we will go for a dinner. The talk will not be on the topic of Yuri’s new interest: privacy. The abstract is below.
Please email Dusko Pavlovic by Friday Noon if you want to join us for dinner.
TITLE: Inverse Privacy
SPEAKER: Yuri Gurevich, Microsoft Research
ABSTRACT: We say that an item of your personal information is directly private if you
have it but nobody else does, and it is inversely private if somebody has
it but you do not. We analyze the provenance of inverse privacy and its ascent to dominance (by volume and value) over direct privacy, and we argue that — and how — inverse privacy can be reduced to more reasonable levels.
This is joint work with our Microsoft colleagues Efim Hudis and Jeannette Wing.
DRAFT PAPER ON:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gurevich/annotated.htm
Title: Game-theoretic probability: brief review
Abstract: The standard approach to probabilistic modelling is to assume a probability measure generating the observed outcomes. Game-theoretic probability weakens this assumption but still allows one to obtain many familiar results, such as laws of large numbers and iterated logarithm, central limit theorems, large deviation inequalities, and zero-one laws. It also leads to completely new results.
Speaker: Yuliy Baryshnikov (UIUC)
Title: Billiards with families of periodic orbits and non-holonomic systems.
Abstract
Periodic orbits in typical planar Birkhoff billiards are isolated, but
sometimes come in families (e.g. in ellipses). In this talk I will
explain the context, show how the question about families of periodic
orbits in planar billiard domains can be seem as a problem about
non-holonomic (or control) systems, and prove that planar billiards
cannot have a 2-parameter family of 3-periodic orbits, while spherical
billiard domains can, using this viewpoint.