Institute for Computational Sustainability

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Seminar Series

Past Seminars

Climate Controversies: Leading Figures Address Leading Issues about Global Climate Change

The Institute for Computational Sustainability is pleased to join the Cornell Climate Change Forum, the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future, the College of Engineering, and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in presenting this series.

Where: Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

When: 4:30 PM, upcoming speakers on April 6 and April 29

Please visit the Cornell Climate Change Forum home page page for additional information and abstracts

Chris Danforth, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, University of Vermont

1st appearance:
Wednesday, April 8
3:00 PM in the Morrison Room, Ground floor Atrium, Corson-Mudd Hall
Host: Mary Lou Zeeman

Title: Measuring Happiness in Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents

Abstract: The importance of quantifying the nature and intensity of emotional states at the level of populations is evident: we would like to know how individuals feel, so that we may improve public policy, build more successful organizations, and more fully understand economic and social phenomena. By incorporating direct human assessment of words, we measure and analyze the psychological valence(or pleasantness) of a diverse set of texts which reflect human experience. We discuss several striking observations regarding the relationship between author demographics (e.g. age, location) and the emotional impact of millions of weblogs. This project is in collaboration with Peter Sheridan Dodds at UVM.

2nd appearance:
Wednesday, April 8
5:00 PM at 228 Malott Hall (Bache Auditorium)
Mathematics Awareness Month Event: Mathematics and Climate Change

Title: Mathematics and Climate Change, a panel discussion in celebration of Math Awareness Month (Please click here to view streaming video of the event.)

Speakers:

• Chris Danforth, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Vermont
• Tom Pfaff, Department of Mathematics, Ithaca College
• Zellman Warhaft, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University
• Mary Lou Zeeman, Department of Mathematics, Bowdoin College and Visiting Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behaviour, Cornell University

Margaret Wertheim, Science Writer and Exhibition Curator

(Please click here for special undergraduate student luncheon opportunity on Tuesday, March 24)

Monday, March 23
7:30 PM at Bache Auditorium, Malott Hall
Co-sponsored with the Cornell Center for Applied Mathematics, IGERT, and Cornell Plantations

Title: Reefer Mathness: Confronting Coral Reef Destruction and Global Warming through Mathematics, Collective Art Practice, and Crochet

Lecture is followed by a reception.

Tom Dietterich, Professor and Director of Intelligent Systems, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University

Friday, March 6
Lunch available at 12:00 noon, talk starting at 12:15pm
Where: 5130 Upson Hall
Host: Carla Gomes

Title: "Computer Vision and Machine Learning for Automated Arthropod Biodiversity Studies

Abstract:
Population counts of arthropod species provide important data for understanding and monitoring the health of ecosystems. Arthropod samples are easily collected from lakes, streams, soils, and the ocean. However, analysis of these samples to count the number of specimens of each species is currently a time-consuming manual task that requires a high degree of expertise. This talk will describe the BugID project at Oregon State, which is developing robotic devices and computer vision methods to automate the processing of arthropod samples. We will describe the computer vision and machine learning techniques that we have developed for this problem. We have developed a novel ensemble learning technique and developed a mathematical model that shows why this technique performs better than existing methods.

We will also present data that suggest that these methods are applicable to the more general problem of generic object recognition.

Chris Jones, Bill Guthridge Distinguished Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Warwick Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick

1st appearance: IGERT Seminar
Monday, February 16
12:15 -1:14, 204 Thurston Hall

Title: "Data and models: a match made in mathematics"

2nd appearance:
3:30 PM at TBD
Hosted by M. Zeeman
Joint Center for Applied Mathematics and Institute for Computational Sustainability

Title: Climate change: can mathematics help clear the air?

Hans Kaper, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Ill. and Department of Mathematics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC

Friday, February 13
3:30 PM at 655 Rhodes
Hosted by M. Zeeman

Title: Reduction Methods for Systems of Differential Equations

Abstract:
We consider systems of nonlinear ordinary differential equations that involve two time scales: a fast time scale, where the dynamics take the orbits close to an invariant low-dimensional manifold, and a slow time scale, where the dynamics evolve in the neighborhood of the invariant (slow) manifold. Reduction methods offer a systematic way to identify the slow manifold and reduce the original equation to an autonomous equation on the slow manifold. In this talk I will focus on two particular reduction methods: the computational singular perturbation method proposed by Lam and Goussis (1988) and the zero-derivative principle proposed by Gear and Kevrekidis (2007).