Category Archives: Seminar

Kids’ time: baptism by fire of the newcomers, AGAIN!

28 Wednesday Mar 2018

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Dear Nedoers,

Nedo strikes back!

After several reorganizations, we will finally have the baptism by fire of the newcomers: Matteo Bruno, Mirko Hu, Emiliano Marchese, Matteo Serafino will have a Nedo on 5th December at 17.30 (we had to postpone it!), a quarter of hour each. The seminars will take place in the Classroom 1.

For the speakers: check the rules of Nedo seminars and remember, NO SLIDES!

Stay tuNED(o)!

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Diego Garlaschelli@IMT

21 Tuesday Feb 2017

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Dear Nedoers,

Diego Garlaschelli (Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics, Leiden University) is going to held a seminar on February the 28th, at 09.30, in classroom 2 (San Francesco building).

Maximum entropy for economic and brain networks: network reconstruction, early-warning signals, and module detection

In many cases of practical relevance, one needs to construct ensembles of random networks, or random time series, that obey specified constraints. In these cases, the maximum entropy construction is a natural recipe to generate randomness, however the presence of several heterogeneous constraints leads to important differences with respect to the traditional construction. For instance, in order to reliably estimate the risk of collapse of a financial system, one needs to infer the network of linkages between banks and/or firms, but this network is empirically unaccessible due to confidentiality. One therefore has to reconstruct the network from partial, publicly available information about individual financial institutions. I will discuss various maximum-entropy network reconstruction methods, highlighting the importance of capturing the heterogeneity of the constraints correctly. I will also discuss how ensembles of reconstructed networks can be used as benchmarks to detect early-warning signals of upcoming crises in empirical interbank networks. Then, I will describe maximum-entropy ensembles of constrained time series, and use their properties to empirically identify communities of correlated stocks in financial markets and functional modules of correlated neurons in the brain. I will conclude showing that, in all the cases considered, the presence of an extensive number of constraints leads to a surprising breaking of the equivalence between canonical and microcanonical ensembles, with important consequences for the statistical physics of systems with many constraints.

Stay tuNED(O)!

Manlio De Domenico@IMT

29 Sunday Jan 2017

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ear Nedoers,
Nedo never sleeps and comes back in the new year with a sooper-special event: Manlio De Domenico (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain) is going to present his seminar “Multilayer Network Maps of Functional Human Brain” (sorry for previous wrong titles). Here is the abstract:

Understanding how the human brain is structured, and how its architecture is related to the function, is of paramount importance for a variety of applications, including, but not limited to, new ways to prevent, deal with and cure brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, and psychiatric disorders, such as Schizophrenia. The recent advances in structural and functional neuroimaging, together with the increasing attitude to interdisciplinary approaches involving computer science, mathematics and physics, are fostering interesting results from computational neuroscience, that are quite often based on the analysis of complex network representation of human brain. In the last years, this representation experienced a theoretical and computational revolution that are breaching neuroscience, allowing to cope with the increasing complexity of human brain across multiple scales and in multiple dimensions, and to model structural and functional connectivity from new perspectives, often combined with each other.
In this talk we will discuss about one recently proposed approach, based on frequency decomposition, to represent the functional human brain as a multilayer network. We will briefly introduce the theoretical and computational tools required to analyze multilayer functional networks and we will show how this novel framework allows to distinguish between healthy and schizophrenic populations, achieving higher accuracy than conventional network approaches in clinical applications.

The seminar is going to be held in classroom 1 at 14 on the 31st of January, stay tuNEDO!