Luciana Basualdo Bonatto
Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Insititute for Mathematics in Bonn
Projects
Women in Maths
Mathematrix is a student-led group in the Mathematical Institute where postgraduates, postdocs and staff discuss and explore topics related to challenges in academic life and being a minority in the maths community. The group hosts weekly discussions and informal events during term time.
I was an organiser for the Mathematrix from 2018 to 2020. Here is a list of some of the events we organised. If you'd like to share or discuss ideas about women in maths, the challenges and how to address them, feel free to contact me!
Women in Maths Mentorship Scheme
From the beginning of 2019, I helped organise a mentorship scheme that paired women and non-binary undergraduates to graduate students in the Mathematical Institute. The goal was to help women feel welcome in mathematics and provide them with personal connections with mathematicians further along their academic career.
The project won the MPLS Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Fund 2019-2020 and we used this funding to organise events throughout the year to bring the participants together. The scheme is now being continued in the 2020-2021 academic year.
European Talbot Workshop
Since 2018 I have been one of the organisers of the European Talbot Workshop which happens every year over the summer in Germany. The goal of the event is to bring together a group of 30-35 graduate students and postdocs to work on a focused topic under the guidance of two senior mentors.
The next Talbot will be on Operads in deformation theory and homotopical algebra and it will be mentored by Geoffroy Horel and Bruno Vallette.
Last year, the workshop was about Algebraic K-Theory and it was mentored by Benjamin Antieau and David Gepner.
Outreach
The Royal Institution Masterclass programme is a series of hands-on extra-curricular workshops to young students all over the UK.
I was part of the Masterclass speaker development programme and I gave lectures in London and Oxford about Non-Euclidean Geometry.
The lecture was called "Geometry in Weird Universes" and it involved drawing triangles in a cylinder, a Christmas bauble and a pringle!
The Oxford Maths Ambassadors are an outreach mathematics group of current maths students, junior research fellows and PDRAs at the University of Oxford, championed by Professor Marcus du Sautoy, the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.
One of the activities I have been involved in is the Oxford Maths Festival, a two-day event held in 2018 and 2019, in which there were plenty of maths demonstration, games and crafts.
I was also involved in the preparation of the exhibition Dimensions: the mathematics of symmetry and space at the Ashmolean Museum.
Interdisciplinary Projects
The Influence of Memory in Multi-Agent Consensus (pdf), Kohan Marzagão, D.; Basualdo Bonatto, L.; Madeira, T.; Gauy, M.; and McBurney, P.; in Proceedings of The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2021.
In this project, we investigate how multi-agent consensus is influenced by the addition of memory. Multi-agent consensus problems can be seen as a sequence of autonomous and independent local choices between a finite set of decision options, with each local choice undertaken simultaneously, and with a shared goal of achieving a global consensus state. Being able to estimate probabilities for the different outcomes and to predict how long it takes for a consensus to be formed, if ever, are core issues for such protocols.
We propose a framework to study what we call memory consensus protocol. We show that the employment of memory allows such processes to always converge, as well as, in some scenarios, such as cycles, converge faster. We provide a theoretical analysis of the probability of each option eventually winning such processes based on the initial opinions expressed by agents. We also perform experiments to investigate network topologies in which agents benefit from memory on the expected time needed for consensus.
The results of this project are in the following paper which is to appear in the Proceedings of The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2021.