Mathematical models for mosquito and pest population control:

Due to urbanization, global travel and exchanges and climate change, the burden of malaria, dengue, Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases is among the most important public health problems worldwide. Most dengue control programmes today rely on conventional mosquito abatement methods that are resource intensive and often unsustainable since the insecticides pollute the environment and severely impact biodiversity. Moreover, mosquito vectors rapidly develop insecticide resistance which reduces control effectiveness. The situation is compounded by the rapid and global expansion of the invasive tiger mosquito (which has rapidly progressed in Europe, including Portugal, in recent years).

Alternative methods for disease vector population control are thus an essential part of epidemic prevention worldwide, in particular for mosquito-borne diseases. Among these novel control methods, the sterile incompatible and insect techniques (SIT, IIT) and replacement strategies have gained traction in the scientific community.

In this talk we will see some mathematical models for disease vector population control and how mathematics can be use to conceive robust control strategies or optimize the intervention cost while minimizing its environmental impact. Similar models can also be used in agro-ecology for pest control.

Short-Bio:

Luís Almeida is a CNRS Senior Researcher (Directeur de Recherche) at Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions of Sorbonne Université. His present research interests are mostly in mathematical modeling in life sciences and agroecology and include wound healing, Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), tumor growth and cancer therapy optimization, agriculture pest and disease vector population dynamics and control.

Pendulum clocks, spontaneous synchronization (and detecting communities in networks):

In the 1600s, Christiaan Huygens realized that two pendulum clocks (an invention of his!) placed in the same wooden table eventually fall into synchrony. Since then, synchronization of coupled oscillators has been an important subject of study in classical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics. In this talk we will discuss spontaneous synchronization (in the, so called, Kuramoto model) and, if time permits, relate it to the performance of certain algorithms in the problem of detecting communities in graphs (a central problem in network science).  

Short-Bio:

Afonso Bandeira is a Professor of Mathematics at ETH Zurich with research interests including, among other things: High Dimensional Probability, Mathematical Statistics, Theoretical Computer Science, Combinatorics, and Optimization.

On the design of discrete diffusion filters:

Image restoration is one of the major concerns in image processing with many interesting applications. In the last decades there has been intensive research around the topic and hence new approaches are constantly emerging. Partial differential equation (PDE) based models, namely of non-linear diffusion type, are well-known and widely used for image noise removal. In this talk we will start with a concise introduction about reaction diffusion models for image restoration. Then we will explore fully-discrete filters which reveal similar features as their continuous counterparts as scale-space invariances as well as the existence of Lyapunov functions. Finally, we will discuss a flexible learning framework in order to optimize the parameters of the model improving the quality of the denoising process.  

Short-Bio:

Sílvia Barbeiro is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Coimbra, member of the Numerical Analysis and Optimization group of the Centre for Mathematics of University of Coimbra. She studied at the University of Coimbra and at the Technical University of Berlin and she received her PhD degree in Applied Mathematics in 2005 from the University of Coimbra. She was awarded a L'Oréal Portugal Medal of Honor for Women in Science 2010, a prize promoted by the Foundation for Science and Technology, the L'Oréal Portugal and the UNESCO National Commission. Her research interests are in numerical analysis and computational mathematics, including modeling and the development and analysis of numerical methods for partial differential equations and integro-differential equations. Her research focuses on theory and applications, namely problems in biomathematics, engineering, geosciences and medical imaging.

Real Toric Lagrangians:

Lagrangian submanifolds lie at the core of Symplectic Geometry — the geometry of manifolds equipped with a closed nondegenerate 2-form, which include all phase spaces from Physics.  Toric symplectic manifolds form a most symmetric class of symplectic manifolds.  After a brief review of these spaces, this talk will explain a classification of lagrangian submanifolds best fitting the symmetry and generalizing real projective spaces inside complex projective spaces.  This is joint work with Yael Karshon.

Short-Bio:

Ana Cannas is a Titular Professor of Mathematics at ETH Zurich with research interests mostly in Symplectic Geometry, Geometric Topology and Geometric Analysis. She graduated in 1990 from Técnico with a Licenciatura in Mathematics.