Events Calendar

CS Distinguished Lecture: Christos Papadimitriou (UC Berkeley) - Life Under the Lens

Speaker: Christos Papadimitriou, UC Berkeley

Talk Title: Life Under the Lens

Series: CS Distinguished Lectures

Abstract: Applying the algorithmic point of view to the natural, life, and social sciences often results in unexpected insights and progress in central problems, a mode of research that has been described as "the lens of computation." I will focus on examples in the life sciences, from joint work with Erick Chastain, Costis Daskalakis, Adi Livnat, Umesh Vazirani, Santosh Vempala, and Albert Wu: Evolution of a population through sexual reproduction can be rethought of as a repeated game between genes played through the multiplicative weight updates algorithm. In an infinite population, when selection acts not on genes alone but on pairs of genes, fixation can take exponentially many generations. And a neurally plausible device can be the basis of spontaneous unsupervised learning.

This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium. The lecture can be screened HERE.

Biography: Christos H. Papadimitriou is the C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Before joining Berkeley in 1996, he taught at Harvard, MIT, NTU Athens, Stanford, and UCSD. He has written five textbooks and many articles on algorithms and complexity, and their applications to optimization, databases, control, AI, robotics, economics and game theory, the Internet, evolution, and the brain. He holds a PhD from Princeton, and eight honorary doctorates. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering. He has also written three novels: "Turing," "Logicomix" (with Apostolos Doxiadis) and "Independence" (in Greek).

Host: Computer Science Department

Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/548743552

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/548743552

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair