Lightning Talks

Unless otherwise noted, lightning talks will be held in person (MIT Kolker Room, Building 26, Room 414) and over Zoom.

Upcoming Lightning Talks

Lightning Talks will continue in Fall 2024.

Past Lightning Talks

Access recordings of past lightning talks (for IAIFI members only)

• IAIFI Thematic Discussion: Generative Modeling
  • Friday, April 19, 2024, 2:00pm–3:00pm
  • Led by IAIFI Fellows Carol Cuesta-Lazaro and Denis Boyda
  • In this thematic discussion, we will present three distinguished speakers who will deliver 7-minute lightning talks:
    • “Generating Generative Models from Physics” - Presented by Ziming Liu
    • “Symphony: Improving Autoregressive Models for 3D Molecule Generation” - Presented by Ameya Daigavane
    • “Peeking Through A Pinhole: Foundation Priors for Robot Perception” - Presented by Ge Yang
  • After the lightning talks, a panel discussion on generative modeling will be conducted. The discussion will focus on open questions about applying generative modeling in physics and incorporating physical principles into generative modeling techniques. Attendees are encouraged to bring questions from their respective fields to enrich the discussion.
• IAIFI Thematic Discussion: Uncertainty Quantification
  • Friday, October 20, 2023, 2:00pm–3:00pm
  • Led by IAIFI Fellows Gaia Grosso and Jessie Micallef
  • The discussion will begin with a few flash presentations (~5 min each) by current IAIFI colleagues working on this subject. Gaia and Jessie will then lead a guided discussion to collect uncertainty quantification and robustness challenges across IAIFI and discuss pathways towards potential solutions and future work. Through this discussion, the aim is to bring together IAIFI researchers to learn from each other’s experience, build connections and possibly research collaborations–you are encouraged to join the discussion no matter your research interests or background!
• Lightning Talks: Fellows Showcase
  • Friday, October 20, 2023, 2:00pm–3:00pm
  • This IAIFI Lightning Talk session featured several IAIFI Fellows discussing their research interests, current projects and opportunities for collaboration!
  • Fellows who presented: Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, Alexander Gagliano, Gaia Grosso, Di Luo, and Ge Yang
  • Recording
• IAIFI Symposium
  • Friday, April 14, 2023, 2:00pm–4:00pm
  • IAIFI Senior Investigators will each briefly present their research. This will be followed by an opportunity to hold breakouts and/or network with researchers whose interests align with yours.
  • List of IAIFI Members presenting are: Phiala Shanahan (MIT), Cora Dvorkin (Harvard), Marin Soljacic (MIT), Di Luo (MIT), Lina Necib (MIT), Tracy Slatyer (MIT), Will Detmold (MIT), Denis Boyda (MIT), Fabian Ruehle (Northeastern), Max Tegmark (MIT), Siddharth Mishra-Sharma (MIT), Carol Cuesta-Lazaro (MIT), Daniel Eisenstein (Harvard), Lisa Barsotti/Nikhil Mukund (MIT), Jessie Micallef (MIT), Mike Williams (MIT), Ge Yang (MIT), Anna Golubeva (MIT), Pulkit Agrawal (MIT), Taritree Wongjirad (Tufts), Matt Schwartz (Harvard), Phil Harris (MIT)
  • Symposium Recording (IAIFI Members only)
• Spring 2023 Lightning Talk Session II: Geometric learning/embedding strategies
  • Friday, March 17, 2023, 2:00pm–3:00pm
    • Arthur Tsang (Grad Student, Harvard), “Finding Subhalos in Galaxy-Galaxy Strong Lensing Systems”(IAIFI Members only)
    • Emmanouil Theodosis (Grad Student, Harvard), “Constraining neural networks to craft representations”(IAIFI Members only)
    • Giorgi Butbaia (Grad Student, UNH), “Numerical Calabi-Yau metrics using Spectral neural networks”(IAIFI Members only)
• Spring 2023 Lightning Talk Session I: Robustness/fault tolerance
  • Friday, February 17, 2023, 2:00-3:00 pm
    • Niklas Nolte (Postdoc, MIT), “Lipschitz Network classification” (IAIFI Members only)
    • Yin Lin (Postdoc, MIT), “Contour deformation for lattice QCD” (IAIFI Members only)
    • Andrew Tan (PhD student, MIT), “Fault-tolerant neural networks from biologically inspired error correction codes” (IAIFI Members only)
• Fall 2022 Lightning Talk Session III: Constructing Likelihoods with Neural Nets
  • Friday, December 9, 2022, 2:00–3:00 pm
    • Georgios Stratis (Postdoc, Northeastern), “Sample generation for the spin-fermion model using neural networks” (IAIFI Members only)
    • Ziming Liu (Grad Student, MIT), “Poisson flow generative models” (IAIFI Members only)
    • Eric Moreno (Grad Student, MIT), “Embedded Spaces to Detect Unmodelled Gravitational-Wave Signals”
• Fall 2022 Lightning Talk Session II: Physics-Motivated Gradient Descent
  • Friday, November 18, 2022, 2:00–3:00 pm
    • John Martyn (Grad Student, MIT), “Neural Network Quantum States for Quantum Fields” (IAIFI Members only)
    • Anna Golubeva (IAIFI Fellow), “Fokker-Planck Equation for the Stochastic Gradient Descent” (IAIFI Members only)
    • Matthew Farrell (Postdoc Fellow, Harvard), “Expressivity of deep neural networks under geometric constraints (equivariance) (IAIFI Members only)
• Fall 2022 Lightning Talk Session I
  • September 23, 2022, 2:00pm-3:00pm
    • Andrew Saydjari (Grad Student, Harvard), “Marginalized Data-space Gaussian Inference for Component Separation (MaDGICS): An Application to Stellar Spectra”
    • Harold Erbin (Postdoc, MIT), “Neural networks for string field theory” (IAIFI Members only)
    • Zev Imani (Grad Student, Tufts), “Score-Based Generative Modeling” (IAIFI Members only)
• Spring 2022 Lightning Talk Session II
  • February 24, 2022, 2:00–3:00 pm
    • Mehmet Demirtas (Postdoc, Northeastern), “Mass Manufacturing String Compactifications” (IAIFI Members only)
    • Peter Lu (Grad Student, MIT), “Discovering Conservation Laws via Manifold Learning” (IAIFI Members only)
    • Doug Finkbeiner (Professor, Harvard), “De-blending galaxies in crowded images”
    • Akshunna Dogra (Post-bach, Harvard), “Effective theories/mathe-physical perspectives on deep learning” (IAIFI Members only)
• Spring 2022 Lightning Talk Session I
  • February 11, 2022, 2:00–3:00pm
    • Julian Urban (Postdoc, MIT), “Reconstructing QCD spectral functions with Gaussian processes” (IAIFI Members only)
    • Keiran Llewellan (Grad Student, MIT), “Building Graph Neural Networks for measurements of the Higgs boson properties” (IAIFI Members only)
    • Gabriel Margolis (Grad Student, MIT), “Agile Locomotion via Model-free Learning” (IAIFI Members only)
• AI Lightning Talks
  • Friday, December 17, 2:00-3:00pm
    • Rumen Dangovski (Grad Student, MIT), “Equivariant Contrastive Learning,” (IAIFI Members only)
    • Taritree Wongjirad (Assistant Professor, Tufts) and Tess Smidt (Assistant Professor, MIT), “Sparse Equivariant Convolutions for Neutrino Event Classification” (IAIFI Members only)
    • Akshunna Dogra (Post-bach, Harvard), “Can you see the shape of a jet?” (IAIFI Members only)