The ACM seminar provides a regular venue for presenting and discussing topics such as numerical analysis, scientific computing, modeling, simulation and visualization. The seminar also hosts regular group meetings and special presentations associated with the NSF-funded RTG program Computation- and Data-Enabled Science (CADES).
Faculty, students and researchers are welcome to attend and present.
Meetings will be held in FHM 462, the large conference room in our department, unless specifically indicated otherwise. Starting in Fall 2025, the seminar meeting time will be Fridays at 10:30am.
Notification of upcoming presentations, including Zoom links when relevant, will be sent as calendar invitations to those on our mailing list. To subscribe, click here.
Organizer: Prof. Jeffrey Ovall (jovall@pdx.edu)
Current Seminar Schedule: Fall 2025
No seminar meeting on October 3
October 10 (10:30am): Daniel Appelö, Virginia Tech
Title: Sublinear methods for discretizing partial differential equations using data science techniques
Abstract: This talk is not about neural networks.
Finding an approximate solution to Poisson’s equation in D dimensions on a grid with nD grid points can be done in time O(nD) using multigrid. In this talk we will show that when the solution is low rank it is possible to do this in time O(n) using techniques from data science.
More precisely we will discuss how the SVD factorization, CUR and matrix Cross approximation can be used to design numerical methods for PDE in two dimensions and how generalizations of these factorizations to tensor networks can break the curse of dimensionality when solving PDE in D dimensions. Our discussion will be guided by examples of increasing complexity, starting with linear PDE and explicit time stepping, and moving towards non-linear PDE and implicit time stepping.
This work is joint with Prof. Yingda Cheng and described in arXiv:2503.03909 and arXiv:2509.18554
October 17 (10:30am): RTG Group Meeting
Research Updates:
October 24 (10:30am): Stefan Henneking, UT Austin
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October 31 (10:30am): TBA
November 7 (10:30am): RTG Group Meeting
Research Updates:
Nick Fischer
Rebecca Bryant
November 14 (10:30am): TBA
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November 21 (10:30am): TBA
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December 5 (10:30am): RTG Group Meeting
Research updates:
Dates for Winter 2026
January 9:
January 16:
January 23:
January 30:
February 6:
February 13:
February 20:
February 27:
March 6:
March 13: