Two Online Colloquia This Week

ICTP is welcoming two great speakers for Colloquia this week! Join the online events to hear Pete Warden, Lead of the TensorFlow Mobile/Embedded team at Google, on Tuesday and John Michael Kosterlitz, 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics winner, on Wednesday. 

ICTP's Quantitative Life Sciences and Applied Physics sections are pleased to welcome Pete Warden, Lead of the TensorFlow Mobile/Embedded team at Google, for an Online Colloquium on Tuesday, 13 October, 2020, at 16:00 CET.

Warden was senior engineer at Apple and CTO of Jetpac. He is the author of the Data Source and of the TinyML handbooks for O'Reilly. He will be speaking on "How TinyML Could Help Developing Countries." Registration is open to anyone, free and required for access. The Colloquium can also be watched via livestream on ICTP's YouTube page.

On Wednesday, ICTP is joining with Trieste’s Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) to host a Online Colloquium by John Michael Kosterlitz, who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in using topology to explain superconductivity in two-dimensional materials. Join on Wednesday, 14 October, 2020, at 16:00 CET: registration is open to all, and the Colloquium will also be livestreamed on ICTP’s Youtube page.  

Kosterlitz‘s Colloqium is titled “A Random Walk Through Physics To The Nobel Prize.” He is a Professor of Physics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, and has received the Maxwell Medal and Prize by the British Institute of Physics in 1981 and the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society in 2000. He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and elected in 2017 to the National Academy of Sciences.

Abstract of Warden‘s Colloquium: Machine learning on embedded hardware is a new field that's only beginning to be used in the developed world, but it has some characteristics that may make it particularly appropriate for developing countries. The hardware and software required to train students, advance research, and build products is much cheaper than the equivalents for Cloud ML, and since the devices don't need reliable network or even mains power connections, they can be deployed almost anywhere. Pete Warden is the Technical Lead of the TensorFlow Micro open source project from Google, and has previously helped projects like Plant Village use on-device deep learning in West Africa. In this talk he'll introduce some of the possibilities that edge compute opens up for the world outside the west, and will be looking to learn from the audience what problems in their domains it might be applicable to.

Abstract of Kosterlitz‘s Colloqium: The talk is the story of my random walk through physics via Cambridge, Oxford, Turin and Birmingham finishing up at Brown University. I describe my very crooked path through life including physics and my other life as a mountaineer. I also include a somewhat simplified version of my prize winning work. The talk will be followed by a question/answer session.