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Upcoming Seminars


MONDAY, October 15, 2007


        APPLIED ANALYSIS AND PDE READING SEMINAR     PSA 304   1:40 p.m.
        Moderators: Slim Ibrahim, Svetlana Roudenko, Sergei Suslov,
                    Department of Mathematics and Statistics
          "Local and Global Analysis of Nonlinear Dispersive Equations"
        ABSTRACT: We study in details modern approaches in Analysis and
        Nonlinear PDEs based on the book from CBMS series by Terence
        Tao (Field's Medalist 2006). Graduate students and postdocs are
        especially welcome.

TUESDAY, October 16, 2007


        GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH SEMINAR           PSA 206   12:00 p.m.
        Yun Kang, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
          "Dynamics of a Plant-Herbivore Model with Applications to
          Gypsy Moth Outbreaks"
        ABSTRACT: We formulate a novel host parasite model to study
        the dynamics of the outbreak of the gypsy moths. Assuming a
        Ricker dynamics for the host population and an infestation that
        takes place after the growth limitations take effect in the
        plant dynamics, a two dimensional discrete model of the leaf
        mass and the gypsy moths mass is constructed. The parameter
        space is determined by the growth rate of the host population
        and a parameter describing the damage done by a gypsy moth.
          Bifurcation curves in that parameter space are presented.
        Bistability and a crises of a strange attractor suggest two
        control strategies: Reducing the population of the gypsy moths
        under some threshold or increasing the growth rate of the plant
        leaves. Modified model and Spatial-temporal dynamics are
        discussed. This is the joint work with Dieter Armbruster and
        Yang Kuang.
                Bagels will be served in PSA 206 at 11:50 a.m.

        MATHEMATICS AND COGNITION SEMINAR         ISTB1 401   12:15 p.m.
        Linell Cady, Department of Religious Studies
        Director, Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict
          "Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict:
          Aims, Challenges, and Project"
        ABSTRACT: I will provide a brief overview of the rationale
        behind the creation of such a multidisciplinary center to
        explore this topic, discuss some of the challenges of bridging
        humanities and social science inquiry, and briefly mention some
        of our projects.
          For additional information e-mail tom.taylor@asu.edu

        COMPUTATIONAL AND APPLIED MATHEMATICS
        PROSEMINAR                                   PSA 206   3:40 p.m.
        Larry Winter, Deputy Director, NCAR, Boulder, CO
          "Two Stochastic Models for Probabilistic Risk Assessment of
          Groundwater Contamination"
        ABSTRACT: Our estimates of the state of groundwater flow and
        contaminant transport are almost always uncertain because we
        lack detailed information about the initial and boundary
        conditions, forcings and parameters of groundwater systems.
        This talk will review the use of stochastic models to quantify
        that uncertainty, especially as it applies to groundwater
        contamination. Two types of models will be discussed:
          1) stochastic pdes that are based on the physics of porous
        media flow and
          2) a model of reduced complexity for assessing the risk of
        groundwater pollution from a point-source.

WEDNESDAY, October 17, 2007


        ANALYSIS/PDE SEMINAR                         PSA 306   1:40 p.m.
        S. Keraani, University of Rennes I, France
          "On the Global Existence for the Axisymmetric Euler System"
        ABSTRACT: We present a result of global well-posedness of the
        3D axisymmetric Euler equations for initial data lying in some
        critical Besov spaces. For these initial data the Beale-Kato-
        Majda blowup criterion cannot be applied (to be precise, it is
        not known if it can be applied or not).

        COMPRESSIVE SENSING SEMINAR                  ECA 225   4:00 p.m.
          (In cooperation with Department of Electrical Engineering)
        Video Lecture by Ronald DeVore, University of South Carolina
          "Construction of Compressed Sensing Matrices with the Best
          Restricted Isometry Properties"
         (This is the lecture that was scheduled for last week and had
        to be postponed due to technical difficulties with the IMA
        video server.)

        ABSTRACT: The restricted isometry property (RIP) is closely
        related to the uniform uncertainty principle (UUP) introduced
        in the previous lectures by Professor Candes. It provides an
        avenue to establish sufficient conditions for compressive
        sensing of sparse signals. This lecture begins with a
        discussion of the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma about the
        existence functions from high-dimensional spaces to
        low-dimensional spaces that approximately preserve distances
        for finite point sets.
          Introduction and summary will be provided by this week's
        moderator, Dave Kaspar.

        ECOSYSTEMS ENGINEERING SEMINAR             ISTB2 299   4:40 p.m.
          (Presented by Environmental Fluid Dynamics Program,
           Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering)
        Alex Mahalov, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
          "High Performance Computing of Environmental Flows:
          Atmospheric Decision Aid on HPC Platforms"
        ABSTRACT: In this talk we discuss recent advances in high
        performance computing of environmental flows: incoming new
        generation of many-core processors with revolution of HPC
        capabilities for personal computers, laptops and HPC
        Appliances; improved sub-grid scale parametrizations for
        multiscale atmospheric flows; mesoscale WRF simulations on HPC
        platforms; horizontal and vertical nesting and adaptive
        vertical gridding in microscale codes; initial and  boundary
        conditions from GFS and high resolution T799L91 ECMWF analysis.
        These are joint projects with AFRL, HPCMP, NCAR, ECMWF and
        Intel.

FRIDAY, October 19, 2007


        C*-ALGEBRA SEMINAR                           PSA 307   9:40 a.m.
        Kamran Reihani, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
          "On C*-Algebras Generated by Irreducible Representations of
          Discrete Heisenberg-Type Groups, II"
        ABSTRACT: It is known that irrational rotation algebras can be
        characterized as the infinite-dimensional C*-algebras generated
        by irreducible representatios of the three-dimensional discrete
        Heisenberg group. In this talk, we find analogues of these
        C*-algebras by analyzing the irreducible representations of
        some higher dimensional Heisenberg-type groups, and will
        characterize them by invariants of K-theory.

        COMPUTATIONAL AND APPLIED MATHEMATICS
        PROSEMINAR                                   GWC 487   2:40 p.m.
        Rosemary Renaut, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
          "Determining the Regularization Parameters for the Solution
          of Ill-Posed Inverse Problems"
        ABSTRACT: Determining the solution of some overdetermined
        systems of equations Ax = b, A \in \mathcal{R}^{m \times n},
        x \in \mathcal{R}^n and b \in \mathcal{R}^m, may not be a well-
        posed problem. Specifically, this means that in some cases
        small changes in the right hand side vector b can lead to
        relatively larger changes in the solution vector x. Problems
        for which this occurs are called ill-posed. For example the
        deblurring of an image or the restoration of a signal from its
        blurred and noisy data typically yields an ill- posed problem.
        In such cases, a standard approach is to include a
        regularization term which constrains the obtained solution with
        respect to some expected characteristics of the solution. This
        approach, however, raises a new question on the relative
        weights of the regularization term and the measure of how well
        the obtained x fits the system of equations. In this talk, I
        will illustrate the problem of ill-posedness for signal
        restoration, and show how the solution obtained depends on the
        regularization term and its relative weight. I will review
        typical approaches that have been used for finding the
        weighting of the regularization, the regularization parameter,
        such as the L-curve and cross-correlation methods. I will also
        then introduce a new method, based on a technique introduced by
        Mead (2007) in which the regularization weighting may be found
        assuming a statistical result. This yields an optimization
        problem using the observation that the cost functional follows
        a \mathcal{X}^2 distribution with n degrees of freedom, where
        n is the dimension of the data space. I will discuss the
        development of an algorithm which uses this result, and also
        provides best possible confidence intervals on the parameter
        estimates, given the covariance structure on the data.
        Experiments to show the validity of the new model, and a
        practical application from seismic signal restoration will be
        presented.
          Acknowledgement: This research was partially supported by NSF
        grant DMS 0513214. It is joint research with Jodi Mead at Boise
        State University.

MATH BIOLOGY SEMINAR PSA 102 3:40 p.m.

        Kevin Flores, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
          "A Mathematical Model to Correlate the Importance of Gene
          Specific Mutations and Tumor Development"
        ABSTRACT: Understanding the correlation of gene specific
        mutations and tumor development has important implications in
        cancer therapy. Recent empirical data have elucidated the
        candidate cancer genes responsible for carcinogenesis through
        mutation and expression analysis. This work has revealed the
        heterogeneities in genotype that encode cancers of the same
        malignancy grade, providing evidence for the existence of
        multiple mutational paths that a population of cancer cells can
        take to manifest itself as a disease. The cell genotypes that
        are present in a tumor affect the malignancy grade through
        their effect on the phenotypes of individual cells that the
        tumor is comprised of.
          We use a graph theoretical approach to connect the gene
        expression and mutation data to cell phenotype. We have
        constructed a gene regulatory network from the KEGG pathway
        database.  This network includes most accurately and completely
        the relevant pathways that contain the known cancer genes,
        which in turn encode distinct cell phenotypes. We are analyzing
        the network to predict the sensitivity of cell signaling
        pathways that control cell growth and death to alterations
        caused by gene mutations. The prevalence of gene mutations show
        no correlation to the betweenness- centrality of their
        respective nodes in the network and a low correlation with the
        number of paths that affect proteins whose expression are known
        to cause different cell phenotypes.  Because of the lack of
        necessary reaction rate data to model any of the interactions,
        we turn to a network boolean dynamics model. With synchronous
        updating we find that the phenotypic output resulting from the
        deterministic network dynamics are insensitive to the candidate
        gene mutations. With asynchronous updating we find that the
        state space of the dynamics becomes too large to sample using
        random initial conditions. We employ the Wang-Landau monte
        carlo algorithm with the network states in which the expression
        of specific phenotype proteins determine the energies of the
        initial conditions. We consider 4 energies that correspond to
        distinct cell phenotypes: Proliferation, Apoptosis, Survival,
        and None of the above. With this type of sampling we can
        determine whether changes in the network caused by mutations
        lead to altered proportions of states whose asynchronous
        progression will end in the phenotypes that are represented by
        the predefined energies.

        Carlos Torre, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
          "Spatial Transmission Dynamics of Dengue Fever in Peru"
        ABSTRACT: According to the NIH, 50 to 100 million cases of
        dengue infection occur each year. This includes 100 to 200
        cases in the United States, mostly in people who have recently
        traveled abroad. Dengue cases range from asymptomatic,
        clinically non-specific flu like symptoms, dengue fever, dengue
        hemorrhagic fever, and dengue shock syndrome. We developed a
        spatial mathematical model that incorporates the epidemiology
        of dengue fever to study the patterns of transmissibility of
        dengue in Peru. We used data of the number of weekly dengue
        cases in Peru at the level of Provinces and departments for the
        years 1994-2006. We assessed the correlations of
        transmissibility and final epidemic size with climatological,
        demographic, and geographic variables. We also studied the
        distribution of the final epidemic size and the distribution of
        epidemic duration. We are currently evaluating different ways of
        coupling 195 provinces to study the global spread of dengue in
        Peru.

        Chad Gonzales, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
          "Estimating the Impact of Seasonal Influenza on a
          Subtropical City"
        ABSTRACT: Influenza is a common illness and is a major cause of
        acute respiratory diseases. It infects millions of people
        annually and it is one whose complications, usually secondary
        infection with pneumonia, cause an estimated one million deaths
        worldwide. Estimating the burden of influenza is difficult due
        to the transmission mechanism and is an important public health
        problem.
          We have constructed a compartmental model of the transmission
        dynamics of influenza followed by secondary infection with
        bacterial pneumonia. The model coupled with data from pneumonia
        hospitalization cases in Guadalajara, Mexico have allowed us to
        estimate the annual burden of influenza.
          We also estimated the transmissibility of the influenza
        seasons as measured by the reproduction number (R), defined as
        the number of secondary cases caused by an infectious
        individual in a partially immune population. If R is greater
        than 1 an epidemic can occur. If R is less than 1, the epidemic
        cannot be sustained. We estimated the reproduction number for
        each of the years of data and found estimates that range from
        1.6 to 1.9, which is in agreement with the estimates obtained
        using data from France, Australia and the United States..