Quantitative Life Sciences Colloquium

ICTP is pleased to host Prof. Lenka Zdeborova for a special Quantitative Life Sciences ICTP Colloquium on Thursday, 13 December at 16:30 in the Euler Lecture Hall. Prof. Zdeborova’s talk is entitled “Statistical physics of computational problems.” Refreshments will be available after the talk. 

The Colloquium will address a fundamental question: What are the problems we can solve using a computer? Prof. Zdeborova will describe how do we use statistical physics to address this question, and discuss what insights physics brings to the field of algorithmic hardness and how such insights are used to develop better algorithms. She will cover examples of applications in artificial neural networks, compressed sensing or data clustering. 

Prof. Zdeborova is a researcher at CNRS working in the Institute of Theoretical Physics in CEA Saclay, France. Her work focuses on the applications of methods developed in statistical physics, such as advanced mean field methods, replica method and related message passing algorithms, to problems in machine learning, signal processing, inference and optimization. 

Prof. Zdeborova earned her PhD in physics from University Paris-Sud and from Charles University in Prague in 2008. She spent two years in the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the Director's Postdoctoral Fellow, and in 2014, she was awarded the CNRS Bronze Medal, in 2016 Philippe Meyer Prize in Theoretical Physics and an ERC Starting Grant.