Two-player turn-based zero-sum games on (finite or infinite) graphs are a central framework in theoretical computer science — notably as a tool for controller synthesis, but also due to their connection with logic and automata theory. A crucial challenge in the field is to understand how complex strategies need to be to play optimally, given a type of game and a winning objective. I will give a tour of recent advances aiming to characterize games where finite-memory strategies suffice (i.e., using a limited amount of information about the past). We mostly focus on so-called chromatic memory, which is limited to using colors — the basic building blocks of objectives — seen along a play to update itself. Chromatic memory has the advantage of being usable in different game graphs, and the corresponding class of strategies turns out to be of great interest to both the practical and the theoretical sides.[-]

An atomic class $K$ is the class of atomic first order models of a countable first order theory (assuming there are such models). Under the weak $\mathrm{GCH}$ it had been proved that if such class is categorical in every $\aleph_n$ then it is categorical in every cardinal and is so called excellent. There are results when we assume categoricity for $\aleph_1, \ldots, \aleph_n$. The lecture is on a ZFC result in this direction for $n=1$. More specifically, if $K$ is categorical in $\aleph_1$ and has a model of cardinality $>2^{\aleph_0}$, then it is $\aleph_0$-stable, which implies having stable amalgamation, and is the first case of excellence.
This a work in preparation by J.T. Baldwin, M.C. Laskowski and S. Shelah.[-]

The classical Barratt-Priddy-Quillen theorem states that the $K$-theory spectrum of the category of finite sets and isomorphisms is equivalent to the sphere spectrum. A more general statement is that for an unbased space $X$, the suspension spectrum $\Sigma_{+}^{\infty} X$ is equivalent to the spectrum associated to the free $E_{\infty}$ space on $X$. In this talk we will present a categorical construction of the latter that is lax monoidal. This compatibility with multiplicative structures is necessary when using this functor to change enrichments, as in the work of Guillou-May.This is joint work with Bert Guillou, Peter May and Mona Merling.[-]

Graded Lie algebras give a uniform approach to many questions in arithmetic statistics. I'll give some background about graded Lie algebras and show how they arise in proofs about families of algebraic curves. For a certain class of graded Lie algebras, Thorne showed that we can construct families of curves as fibers of a certain categorical quotient map. I'll talk about ongoing work with Jef Laga to generalize this construction, including new examples.[-]

An abelian surface defined over $\mathbb{Q}$ is said to be geometrically split if its base change to the complex numbers is isogenous to a product of elliptic curves. In this talk we will determine the algebras that arise as geometric endomorphism algebras of geometrically split abelian surfaces defined over $\mathbb{Q}$. In particular, we will show that there are 92 of them. A key step is determining the set of imaginary quadratic fields $M$ for which there exists an abelian surface over $\mathbb{Q}$ which is geometrically isogenous to the square of an elliptic curve with CM by $M$.

This is joint work with Francesc Fité.[-]

Polynomial optimization methods often encompass many major scalability issues on the practical side. Fortunately, for many real-world problems, we can look at them in the eyes and exploit the inherent data structure arising from the input cost and constraints. The first part of my lecture will focus on the notion of 'correlative sparsity', occurring when there are few correlations between the variables of the input problem. The second part will present a complementary framework, where we show how to exploit a distinct notion of sparsity, called 'term sparsity', occurring when there are a small number of terms involved in the input problem by comparison with the fully dense case. At last but not least, I will present a very recently developed type of sparsity that we call 'ideal-sparsity', which exploits the presence of equality constraints. Several illustrations will be provided on important applications arising from various fields, including computer arithmetic, robustness of deep networks, quantum entanglement, optimal power-flow, and matrix factorization ranks.[-]

Deep generative models parametrize very flexible families of distributions able to fit complicated datasets of images or text. These models provide independent samples from complex high-distributions at negligible costs. On the other hand, sampling exactly a target distribution, such as Boltzmann distributions and Bayesian posteriors is typically challenging: either because of dimensionality, multi-modality, ill-conditioning or a combination of the previous. In this talk, I will review recent works trying to enhance traditional inference and sampling algorithms with learning. I will present in particular flowMC, an adaptive MCMC with Normalizing Flows along with first applications and remaining challenges.[-]

We prove the existence of an active phase for activated random walks on the lattice in all dimensions. This interacting particle system is made of two kinds of random walkers, or frogs: active and sleeping frogs. Active frogs perform simple random walks, wake up all sleeping frogs on their trajectory and fall asleep at constant rate $\lambda$. Sleeping frogs stay where they are up to activation, when waken up by an active frog. At a large enough density, which is increasing in $\lambda$ but always less than one, such frogs on the torus form a metastable system. We prove that $n$ active frogs in a cramped torus will typically need an exponentially long time to collectively fall asleep —exponentially long in $n$. This completes the proof of existence of a non-trivial phase transition for this model designed for the study of self-organized criticality. This is a joint work with Amine Asselah and Nicolas Forien.[-]