News and Events

Duality and symmetry in interacting particle systems

Mini-course: Duality is an important concept in the study of stochastic interacting particle systems. For arbitrary initial measures duality expresses expectations of a family of functions at time $t$ in terms of the transition probability of a dual process which may be simpler to analyse. Focussing on countable state space we discuss duality from the perspective of the generator. Unlike the more traditional approach of looking at duality in a pathwise manner this allows us to understand straightforwardly how dualities arise from symmetries, or more generally, from invariant subspaces of the generator and leads to constructive methods for finding useful dualities. Also the new concept of reverse duality comes out naturally. It yields the full probability measure of the process at time t for a family of initial measures in terms of transition probabilities of the dual process and thus allows for the computation of arbitrary expectation values.

Sessions on March 19 and 20, 1:00PM to 2:30PM.

A new seminar series starts with three introductory short courses: Introduction to Machine Learning for mathematicians (João Costa, CAMGSD), Universal approximation theorems and reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (Luís Carvalho, CAMGSD) and Infinitely wide Neural Networks (Gonçalo Oliveira, CAMGSD).

This workshop aims to bring together international researchers working on non-associative algebras to share their latest results. Past editions were held in Brazil, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden.

Analogical reasoning is a remarkable human capability, allowing us to adapt to novel situations - an ability that current AI systems still lack.

Much research has suggested that analogies are key to non-brittle systems that can adapt to new domains. Attempts to attack this problem have been fragmented, with different groups focusing on narrow aspects of the problem, each group using their own separate evaluation metrics. We believe that the lack of unifying foundational mathematical frameworks and evaluation benchmarks has been limiting progress in analogy research.

With this conference we aim to bring together leading experts from various research and applied fields to join forces, share perspectives, and collectively define the research agenda for the immediate future. Recognizing the need for foundational work in this area, we seek unifying frameworks, methodologies, and basic principles that will serve as the cornerstone for future advancements.

Principia Analogiae 2025 will involve keynote presentations, followed by working groups to tackle several challenges related to analogy theory and applications. These will be soon announced.

The conference is free of charge but registration is mandatory and places are limited. See the conference site for instructions.

This meeting celebrates Rui Loja Fernandes’ 60th birthday and his important contributions to these areas. The conference will feature both distinguished speakers and promising young researchers.

Hugo Tavares, vice-president of the Mathematics Department, tells us about Math@Técnico.

Patrícia Gonçalves, a full professor at the IST Department of Mathematics, was the 2024 Schramm Lecturer of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the Bernoulli Society at the most important event in the field of Probability, the World Congress in Probability and Statistics, held from 12 to 16 August  in Bochum, Germany.
 

The MATHS-DISC consortium, consisting of Università di Verona, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Igor Sikorsky Polytechnic Institute Kiev, Universidade de Lisboa and Université Grenoble Alpes, and the partner university NTNU Trondheim, was successful with its proposal for an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master (EMJM) in Mathematical Modelling, Simulation and Data Science together with more than 20 partners from leading industry and research centers (e. g. Siemens, Intel, Bosch, Bayer, d-fine, uRoboptics, Vodafone Ukraine, IDOM, ENGYS, Otto Bock, DLR, Terranova, NeuronsLab, Computer Solutions SA, Royal IHC, …) from different sectors and from all over Europe.

This novel EMJM will have a total budget of about 5 million Euros in funding from the European Union over six years. The program is also supported by the European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry (ECMI) and the European Network of Mathematics for Industry and Innovation (EU-MATHS-IN) to train the PhD students of tomorrow and to establish interdisciplinary networks to share best practices at European level to overcome geographical and scientific fragmentation. 

The program is scheduled to start in the winter semester 2025/26 and applications should be possible from February 2025. For more general information about this EMJM, please contact Prof. Cláudia Nunes.