Colloquium - Souvik Dhara

Date: February 10, 2022

Time: 4:00PM - 5:00PM

Location: BLOC 117

Speaker: Souvik Dhara, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Description:
Title: Latent structures in high-dimensional systems with complex interactions
Abstract: Large-scale systems with units interacting via a complex mechanism are ubiquitous in modern research across diverse fields, ranging from spread of epidemics, dynamics of social networks, to recognizing hidden patterns in biological systems such as the brain. Often, the core mathematical question of interest in such systems is to identify macroscopic properties that govern their behavior, famously referred to as the universality phenomenon. In conjunction, it is also of immense interest to use our understanding of these complex systems to develop efficient algorithms for performing various machine learning tasks. In this talk, I will discuss theoretical aspects of these broad questions through the lens of probability and graph theory. In more detail, I will describe my contributions to emerging areas such as
(a) Universality phenomenon for percolation,
(b) Non-asymptotic and model-free analysis for spread of epidemics, and
(c) Community detection algorithms.