Seminars and Colloquiums
for 2010-2011
Week of October 11, 2010
Speaker:
Professor Vasileios Maroulas, Monday
Dr. Tom Ingersoll, NIMBioS Postdoctoral Fellow, Tuesday
Mr. Keith Penrod, Wednesday
Professor Ken Stephenson, Wednesday
Dr. David Anderson, Thursday
Carroll Johnson, Chem. Sci. Div., ORNL (consultant/retiree), and Math Dept, UTK (adjunct), Thursday
If you are interested in giving or arranging a talk for one of our seminars or colloquiums,
please review our calendar.
If you have questions, or a date you would like to confirm, please contact Dr. Fernando Schwartz.
Monday, October 11
PROBABILITY SEMINAR
TIME: 10:10 – 11:00 am
ROOM: Temple 303
SPEAKER: Professor Vasileios Maroulas, UTK
TITLE: "Improved particle filters and an application in the problem of
multi-target tracking-Part IV"
Tuesday, October 12
NIMBIOS SEMINAR
TIME: 3:30 pm
ROOM: 403, Blount Hall, 1534 White Ave.
SPEAKER: Dr. Tom Ingersoll, NIMBioS Postdoctoral Fellow
TITLE: "Using the mathematical programming language R for statistical modeling with counts of bats"
ABSTRACT: Statistical modeling of relative animal abundance or habitat use presents several challenges. Animals may be easy or difficult to detect, affecting the relationship between counts and abundance. Animal activities may facilitate or interfere with detection probability. Activity measured by counts may not conform to typical statistical modeling assumptions of approximate normality of errors or independent sampling. Covariates of counts may interact with time and location, which should then be considered in models. Of all animals, bats exemplify these complications. In general, bats are cryptic, motile, and highly variable in their activity levels, depending on time and place. Bat counts are over-dispersed and serially correlated. Bat count data are particularly unwieldy, yet these are precisely the sorts of data that animal ecologists would like to model and understand. Bat counts are of special concern due to impending impacts of emergent diseases such as white nose syndrome, along with climate change and other anthropogenic threats, yet many methods for modeling bat counts are of
limited defensibility. We compared differences in bat counts between two habitats in a variety of scenarios. We examined conditions where bats were easily detected during mating and hibernation, investigated the effects of variable activity levels on hierarchical model performance with simulated bat data, and produced models that account for seasonal differences in bat activity, comparing habitat use with continuously recorded acoustic data for ten species, each with different detectability levels. Investigating these scenarios required a variety of techniques including information theoretics, generalized linear models (GLM), hierarchical models such as occupancy and N-mixture
models, along with a variety of other mixed effects models, such as generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) and generalized additive mixed models (GAMM). Our research encompasses a survey of many current count modeling techniques in R, from the routine to the limits of the software.
*Join us for refreshments in the NIMBioS Lobby at 3 pm
Wednesday, October 13
TOPOLOGY SEMINAR
TIME: 12:20 – 1:10 pm
ROOM: BEC 202
SPEAKER: Keith Penrod
TITLE: "Infinite Product Spaces - 2"
ANALYSIS SEMINAR
TIME: 3:35 – 4:25 p.m.
ROOM: AC 113
SPEAKER: Professor Ken Stephenson
TITLE: "Flipping Crazy"
ABSTRACT: We study combinatorial flips and potential applications, from games to combinatorial tunnelling.
Thursday, October 14
JUNIOR COLLOQUIUM
TIME: 3:35 – 4:25 p.m.
ROOM: HBB 102
SPEAKER: Professor David Anderson
TITLE: "The Quaternions"
ABSTRACT: On the evening of October 16, 1843, a man and his wife were strolling along the Royal Canal in Dublin. He had a flash of genius, took out his penknife, and carved the equations
i^2 = j^2 = k^2 = ijk = -1
on a stone on Brougham Bridge. The man was Sir William Rowan Hamilton, and these equations describe what is now called the division ring of quaternions, a number system like the complex numbers except that multiplication is not commutative. In this talk, we will discuss the quaternions, their role in the development of algebra, and the number of solutions of a quadratic equation. No specific mathematics is needed other than a knowledge of the complex numbers.
APPLIED/COMPUTATIONAL MATH SEMINAR
TIME: 5:10 – 6:00 p.m.
ROOM: AC 113
SPEAKER: Carroll Johnson, Chem. Sci. Div., ORNL (consultant/retiree), and Math Dept, UTK (adjunct)
TITLE: "Crystal Structures (and Thermal Ellipsoid Drawings) Viewed as Dynamical Systems"
ABSTRACT: Crystal structures provide a physical application area for dynamical systems theory. Crystal structure analysis is based on Fourier transforms of mainly x-ray and neutron diffraction data sets from mineral, metal, inorganic, organic and biological specimens ranging from quartz to virus crystals to form a data base of roughly 100,000 crystal structures. Flows, vector fields of vector valued functions, and ordinary differential equations, the basic operation in dynamical systems, become thermal motion flow from smaller to larger equiprobability ellipsoids representing the Gaussian atomic probability functions of structure analysis. This directional flow from repeller source ellipsoids to attractor sinks forms a network of intertwining towers of Gaussian measures. Each bond yields a Radon-Nikodym derivative cocycle calculated from the derivatives of connected Gaussian functions and used to construct a rigidity filtering network for calculation of bond vibration angles and their curvilinear distortion of thermal ellipsoids.
Past notices:
Seminars from 2009-2010 academic year
Seminars from 2008-2009 academic year
Seminars from 2007-2008 academic year
Seminars from 2006-2007 academic year