Location:
Faculty Hall
I. G. Sarma Memorial Lecture Series
Department of Computer Science and Automation
Speaker : Prof. Christos Papadimitriou
Columbia University
Title : Computation as a Scientific Weltanschauung
Date : Thursday, January 4, 2018
Time : 4:00 PM
Venue : Faculty Hall, Indian Institute of Science
Abstract
Looking at the natural, life, and social sciences from the point of view of computation often results in unexpected insights, and progress in important problems. I will focus on some recent work in the life sciences: Evolution of a population through sexual reproduction can be rethought of as a repeated game between genes played through a well known, and powerful, algorithm, while selection, when acting in gene combinations instead of genes alone, can take exponentially long to fixate. Finally, experiments on the formation of stable memories in the human medial temporal lobe, and the associations between memories, can be explained through a random graph model and a connection to the sparsest k-subgraph problem.
Biography of the speaker
Christos H. Papadimitriou is the Donoval Family Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia this year, he taught at Harvard, MIT, NTU Athens, Stanford, UCSD, and at Berkeley since 1995. He has written many books and articles on the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its applications to optimization, databases, control, AI, robotics, economics and game theory, the Internet, evolution, and the brain. He holds a PhD from Princeton, and honorary doctorates from nine universities. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering, and is a recipient of the Knuth prize, the Gödel prize, the Kalai prize for CS in Game Theory, the EATCS award, and the von Neumann medal. He has also written three novels: “Turing,” ” Logicomix,” and his latest “Independence” (2017).
