Thursday Colloquium

April 24th, 2025

Session One – 3:00 pm to 3:50 pm

Speaker: Maciej Zworski (UC Berkeley)

Host: Michael Hitrik

Title: Why is our world classical despite being governed by quantum mechanics?

Abstract. This question has been much discussed in physics and one suggestion is that the long time persistence of classical/quantum correspondence is due to interaction of a small, observed system with a larger environment. Lindblad or GKSL evolution is one of the standard models for describing such interactions. In that context the question of the length of time of classical/quantum agreement was recently revisited in physics by Hernandez–Ranard–Riedel.

In my talk I will introduce the concept of Lindblad evolution and present results showing that the evolution of a quantum observable remains close to the classical Fokker–Planck evolution in the Hilbert–Schmidt norm for times vastly exceeding the Ehrenfest time (the limit of such an agreement when there is no interaction with a larger system). The time scale is the same as in two recent papers by Hernandez–Ranard–Riedel but the statement and methods are different. The talk is based on joint work with J Galkowski and numerical results obtained jointly with Z Huang. I will also comment on recent progress on trace class estimates by Z Li and on the hypoelliptic case by H Smith.

Session Two – 4:00 pm to 4:50 pm

Speaker: Roberto Calandra (TU Dresden)

Host: Guido Montufar

Title: Why is our world classical despite being governed by quantum mechanics?

Abstract. With the recent trends of AI & robotics, the modern development of embodied agents is often done at two independent stages where first an robot is designed by roboticists, and later the AI/software is developed by machine learning experts. In this talk, I will instead argue for the need to tackle embodied AI in a holistic manner, where the fine interplay between hardware and software matters. As an example, I will discuss recent development in the fields of touch sensing and touch processing, and the benefits of vertical integration. Following, I will briefly discuss the co-adaptation of hardware and software as one of the next frontiers of AI & robotics, where both “bodies” and “brains” of robots are co-optimized for specific environments and tasks using reinforcement learning.

Bio: Roberto Calandra is a Full (W3) Professor at the Technische Universität Dresden where he leads the Learning, Adaptive Systems and Robotics (LASR) lab. Previously, he founded at Meta AI (formerly Facebook AI Research) the Robotic Lab in Menlo Park. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (US) in the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab. His education includes a Ph.D. from TU Darmstadt (Germany), a M.Sc. in Machine Learning and Data Mining from the Aalto university (Finland), and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the Università degli Studi di Palermo (Italy). His scientific interests are broadly at the conjunction of Robotics and Machine Learning, with the goal of making robots more intelligent and useful in the real world. Among his contributions is the design and commercialization of DIGIT — the first commercial high-resolution compact tactile sensor, which is currently the most widely used tactile sensor in robotics. Roberto served as Program Chair for AISTATS 2020, as Guest Editor for the JMLR Special Issue on Bayesian Optimization, and has previously co-organized over 16 international workshops (including at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ICRA, IROS, RSS). In 2024, he received the IEEE Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation.

May 1st, 2025

Speaker: Fred Diamond (King’s College London)

Host: Chandrashekhar Khare

Title: Modularity of elliptic curves, and beyond, and beneath

Abstract. In his celebrated work completed in 1995, Wiles, in part with Taylor, proved that every semistable elliptic curve over Q is modular, in the sense that its L-function is also that of a modular form. Their methods were subsequently extended by Breuil, Conrad, Taylor and myself to prove the modularity of all elliptic curves over Q. The Modularity Theorem can be viewed as a special case of Langlands reciprocity conjectures, which continue to see exciting advances stemming from Wiles’ work in combination with further innovations. In the first half of the talk, I’ll give an overview of Wiles’ method and subsequent developments.

In addition to its most famous consequence, namely Fermat’s Last Theorem, modularity also underpins all major progress on the Birch—Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture. Like the Modularity Theorem, the Birch—Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture can also be viewed as an instance of a vast family of conjectures, in this case relating arithmetic invariants to special values of L-functions. In the second half of the talk, I’ll explain how the proof of the Modularity Theorem is itself related, by work of Hida, to another instance of these conjectures, namely for adjoint L-functions.

May 8th, 2025

Speaker: Ruriko Yoshida (Naval Postgraduate School )

Host: Guido Montufar

Title: TBA

Abstract. TBA

May 15th, 2025

Speaker: Ryan Tibshirani (UC Berkeley)

Title: TBA

Abstract. TBA

May 22nd, 2025 (in conjunction with the Distinguished Lecture Series)

Speaker: Robert Lazarsfeld (Stony Brook University)

Host: Terence Tao

Title: Further developments and open problems

Abstract. I will survey some further developments on these matters, and discuss some of the many open problems that present themselves.

May 29th, 2025 

Speaker: Jamie Haddock (Harvey Mudd College)

Host: Guido Montufar

Title: TBA

Abstract. TBA