Seminars

September 15, 2026: (4PM)-(Location: Smith Hall Annex, A-Level, Physics Seminar Room)
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
September 22, 2026: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
September 29, 2026: (4PM)- Hao Li, University of California, San Francisco
To Be Announced.
Host: Jialong Jiang
To come.
Tuesday, October 6, 2026: (4PM)- Ilya Nemenman, Emory University (Location: Smith Hall Annex, A-Level, Physics Seminar Room)
Learning Dynamics, and Dynamics of Learning.
Host: Eric Siggia
The Rescorla–Wagner model of associative learning is a staple of animal learning theory. I will start with the model’s strong spots, but then show, by analyzing two experiments — in songbirds and in worms — that it cannot give a quantitative account of the dynamics of learning in these animals. The worm needs multiple associative channels of differing sign, magnitude, and learning rate to explain spontaneous recovery and other features of its behavior. The bird is better described by Bayesian filtering with non-Gaussian error channels. And both animals generalize what they learn to different contexts. I will show how modified related models explain the data much better, and what this implies for how learning is implemented in real nervous systems and should be implemented in artificial ones. Switching gears, I will then walk you through our lab’s attempts to learn biological dynamics directly from data, with machine learning that keeps the inferred models interpretable — from the nociceptive response of C. elegans to our recent attempts to write a fairly generic dynamics inference agent, which I hope some of you may want to use.
Thursday, October 8, 2026: (4PM)- Mackenzie Mathis, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) (Location: Smith Hall Annex, A-Level, Physics Seminar Room)
To Be Announced.
Host: Nikolas Schonsheck
To come.
October 20, 2026: (4PM)- Seppe Keuhn, The University of Chicago
To Be Announced.
Host: Avi Flamholz
To come.
October 27, 2026: (4PM)- Sangjin Kim, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
To Be Announced.
Host: Shixin Liu
To come.
November 3, 2026: (4PM)- Nikta Fakhri, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
To Be Announced.
Host: Jialong Jiang
To come.
November 10, 2026: (4PM)- Dipti Nayak, University of California, Berkeley
To Be Announced.
Host: Jeremy Rock
To come.
November 17, 2026: (4PM)- Jerome Gros, Pasteur Institute
To Be Announced.
Host: Alan Rodrigues
To come.
December 1, 2026: (4PM)- Yuhai Tu, Flatiron Institute
To Be Announced.
Host: Jialong Jiang
To come.
December 8, 2026: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
December 15, 2026: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
February 16, 2027: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
February 23, 2027: (4PM)- Michael Manhart, Rutgers University
To Be Announced.
Host: Avi Flamholz
To come.
March 9, 2027: (4PM)- Kerwyn C. Huang, Stanford University (Location: Smith Hall Annex, A-Level, Physics Seminar Room)
To Be Announced.
Host: Jeremy Rock
To come.
March 16, 2027: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
March 23, 2027: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
March 30, 2027: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
April 6, 2027: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced.
To come.
April 20, 2027: (4PM)- Amanda Larracuente, University of Rochester
To Be Announced.
Host: Li Zhao
To come.
April 27, 2027: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
May 4, 2027: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
May 11, 2027: (4PM)- Tom Shimizu, AMOLF
To Be Announced.
Host: Avi Flamholz
To come.