HLF – Day 2

By in Conferences, HLF2017

Martin Hellman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Hellman) opened the day talking about cryptography history and about the hidden figures of cryptography. He also talked about the creation of the cryptography almost simultaneously in three different groups, and that their results were much similar. He also talked about the discussion of cryptography publication as being something considered as a threat to national security in USA in the late 70’s. And he ended saying that better to have a friend than an enemy. And that is up to the new young researchers to build bridges between institutions, governments and between people to make science better.

 

 

Aaron Ciechanover – talked about personalized medicine, he showed that there could exist personalized medicine but the cost of it, is not trivial. And most medicine threats that the world faces can be somehow mitigated with simple measures, that are not so expensive and can be done without so much technology. He gave the example of all the mosquito’s problems that we faced in the last years. The same treatment does not have the same results with different patients with the same disease, there is a molecular bases problem that make the cells to react differently; and in a near future computer science and medicine will be entangled working together.

 

Dan Spielman (http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/spielman )

I never taught I could go back to Laplace after I finish undergrad years ago, and I’m now hearing about it, and how it is important in ways I never imagined. With that in mind, I must mention the importance to all instructors, teachers to show how to students how what they are teaching could be applied in real life. Sipelman got the audience by the hand to a Gaussian elimination and discussed some applications of Laplacian algorithms: spectral graph theory, scientific computing, machine learning, optimization.

 

Martin Hairer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Hairer)  – “The mathematics of randomness” – Martin was the first mathematician to present. He connected to the audience presenting math and probabilities with a lot of examples:  two envelopes paradox, each one has a check. One has twice money as the other. You open one, then you must decide to stay with it, or to change it. And you cannot go back. And you do not know how much money each one have. There is 50% chance of having more money on the other envelope, should you change your mind? Or stick with it? The outcomes are not symmetric, it is too much of a risk to change if the money is too much. There is an expectation about the money distribution that someone could give you in this kind of game.

He pointed out the case of Sally Clark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark), the probability of two infant children dying of the same mother is too low. But after being in jail for more than two years, a pathologist found out that both of his sons had natural causes. She was incarcerated based on probabilities and not on facts.

 

 

Piergiorgio Odifreddi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piergiorgio_Odifreddi) – “Ménage a trois: arts, math and computer science” He explained the art exhibition on the old building of the university called Math and Art, He showed lots of work classified by themes that shows the connection between math and art, with photos examples and explanations of works done Some of his examples have math and it was obviously at the eye level, but that there are some work that have a lot of math inside, in patterns, in perspective, in distance, rules. There is even sophisticated math in art, such as, Dali (San Sebastian on the horse) there is a non-Euclidian hyperbolic geometry.

And in the last part he showed when computer science come in, producing new tools for arts. Now we have computer screens and software, a stiletto dodecahedron exists on the floor of the exit of San Marco Cathedral in Venice; and it is possible to generate this kind of dodecahedron in computers, and computers allows to build recursions of dodecahedron; what is almost impossible to draw by hand. Another example are the fractals, they existed before the computers, the pitagorians star, which is a small fractal. Mathematics and art becomes indistinguishable and in the last years’ computer science is getting even more entangled with them, with algorithms and software.

 

In the afternoon there were Workshops, six workshops happened in Parallel while some of the participants went for a short city tour. I participated on the Workshop 6 – Boundaries between math and computer science. The workshop was great and it was possible to see that these boundaries are a moving target and each country according to its context have different opinions about it. But something that was not clear, is how much math a computer scientist should know; it was a consensus that it is important, but how much, is a big problem. Then in the second part of the afternoon there were other 6 workshops and other city tours

At night, we went to a opening dinner in a place called Hale2, the dinner was amazing. Every table have a laurate sited and all the young researchers had the chance to talk with a Laureate.  I had the honor to sit at the table with Leslei Lamport (Turing Award) and his wife. We had a very good time and I was impressed by the German ratatouille.

 

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