Thursday, November 17, 2011 (all day)
Speaker: Sasha Gutfraind (University of Texas at Austin)
Applied Mathematics Colloquium
Tuesday, November 1, 2011 (all day)
Mark Hancock, assistant professor in the Department of Management Sciences (University of Waterloo), lectures on how people can start thinking of their bodies as an extension of the virtual world. He discusses studies that investigate human perception, and presents solutions that leverage people’s understanding of the physical world using examples such as an interactive table for sandtray therapy — a form of art therapy often used with children — and a technique for exploring 2D information as if it were on a virtual cloth.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 (all day)
Dr. Monica Cojocaru, associate professor of mathematics (University of Guelph), discusses her current research on the dynamic modelling approaches to population behaviour incorporating both objective and subjective decision factors. She presents a time-dependent extension of the standard, static model of consumer choice for differentiated products. Of central interest to her research is how consumers react to the introduction of a new product in the market.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 (all day)
Professor Shreyas Sundaram of the University of Waterloo provides an overview of some recent approaches to analyzing the dynamics of information propagation in networks. He describes how tools from Markov chain theory, linear system theory, and structured system theory can be used to analyze global behaviour arising from a certain class of linear dynamics, and examine the effect of the network’s topology on its resilience to misbehaving agents.
Thursday, March 31, 2011 (all day)
Speaker: Mike Batty
While in the past, systems were often understood as static, controllable, and well-defined, new research reveals that many systems are chaotically dynamic and unclassifiable. In this seminar, Mike Batty of the University College London Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis explains how these new ideas are increasingly being applied to cities and are changing the ways in which we design and invent urban futures.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011 (all day)
Dr. Steve Purdey of the University of Toronto argues that the emphasis on growth, which has been the focus of the world economy for over 200 years, is no longer sustainable in a world of increasing scarcity. He introduces the concept of steady-state economics (SSE) and highlights some of the socio-economic and political challenges involved in transitioning to a no-growth economic system.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011 (all day)
Professor Marten Scheffer of Wageningen University discusses his research on how to discern generic early-warning signals in complex systems that indicate a critical threshold is approaching. Such research is important because tipping points can cause a sudden shift to a contrasting dynamical regime.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011 (all day)
Speakers: Eric Lambin, Peter Deadman, Raymond Cabrera, and Christophe Le Page
Speaker #1: Professor Eric Lambin of the University of Louvain and Stanford University discusses the mechanisms through which economic globalization increasingly drives land use change and uses case studies to illustrate the conditions under which local land use policies are effective in reducing conversion of natural ecosystems.
Thursday, February 10, 2011 (all day)
Speaker: W. Brian Arthur
View a recording of this lecture and discussion on the Perimeter Institute website.
In this lecture and discussion at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, W. Brian Arthur reviews the thesis of his book The Nature of Technology with Lee Smolin, Frances Westley, and Thomas Homer-Dixon. In his book, Arthur develops a sweeping theory of technological innovation and change.
