Much progress has been made in recent years in the area of information retrieval, in particular as embodied in Internet search engine technology. Much progress has also been made in probabilistic, graph-theoretic AI. What are the possibilities for bringing these two lines of research together — for viewing large-scale information retrieval as a core enabling technology for AI systems, and for a...

s of Invited Talks Giorgio Buttazzo, Avi Efrati, John Hooker, Claude Le Pape and

The controversial attempt to scrap the 24-year-old international moratorium on commercial whaling collapsed last month, to the delight of many anti-whaling campaigners and to the frustration of Japan, Norway and Iceland, the three countries which continue to hunt whales in defiance of world opinion. Delegates from the 88 member states of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Aga...

A Runge–Kutta method takes small time steps, to approximate the solution to an initial value problem. How accurate is this approximation? If the error is asymptotically proportional to hp, where h is the stepsize, the Runge–Kutta method is said to have “order” p. To find p, write the exact solution, after a single time-step, as a Taylor series, and compare with the Taylor series for the approxi...

s − Invited Talks Eric Clément, Philippe Claudin, Bruno Andreotti PMMH-ESPCI , 10 rue Vauquelin, 75005, Paris. "Creep, fluidity and non-local microscopic processes in granular rheology" Granular materials belong to the class of amorphous athermal systems. Like foams, emulsions, suspensions, or metallic glasses, they exhibit a dynamical phase transition between static and flowing states. Analogo...

Money MesMeRizes a nd MysTifies. Its influence extends far beyond the steely confines of numbers, ledgers, and rational calculations. Yet, for a long time economists managed to keep monetary analysis safely constrained within technical territory. Coinciding with Gertrude Stein’s (1936: 88) sober dictum that “whether you like it or whether you do not, money is money and that is all there is abou...

s of Invited Talks Ian Affleck UBC, Vancouver Phase Diagram of a Chain of Interacting Majorana Fermions While the interacting Dirac fermion chain is well understood, the chain of Majorana (Hermitean) fermion operators has recently been proposed as an experimentally realizable model. I will discuss its fascinating phase diagram which includes the supersymmetric tri-critical Ising point and a gen...

One of the most challenging questions of today, in the overlap of computer science, mathematics, and physics, is the exploration of potential capabilities of quantum computers. Milestones which intensified and enlarged research considerably were the algorithm of Shor [1], who showed that quantum computers could factor large integers efficiently (which is widely believed to be infeasible on clas...

P REVIOUS STUDIES insdicate that L-cyst-eiise or related compounds may be importamst ins the metabolism of leukocytes. Thus L-cysteine, and to a lesser extent homocyst-eimse and glutathione, modify the leukopenia induced by nitrogen mustard.’ . 2 This protective effect appears to be specific in that mamsy highly reactive compoutsds w-ith structures closely related to L-cysteimse fail to prevent...

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