Lightning Talks

Upcoming Lightning Talk sessions

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

• 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.

Past Lightning Talks

Access recordings of past lightning talks (for 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”
    • Emmanouil Theodosis (Grad Student, Harvard), “Constraining neural networks to craft representations”
    • Giorgi Butbaia (Grad Student, UNH), “Numerical Calabi-Yau metrics using Spectral neural networks”
• 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)