Thursday, June 08, 2023, 14:30
- 16:30
Building 5, Level 5, Room 5209; https://kaust.zoom.us/j/98737157935
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Wide bandgap III-Nitride semiconductor blue light-emitting diodes (LED) development has spawned the prestigious Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014. Building upon this success, the scope of research has expanded to ultrawide bandgap semiconductors, which possess immense potential in the realm of ultraviolet (UV) photonics. These materials have gained attention for their applicability in various areas, such as public sterilization, solar-blind UV communication, and real-time UV monitoring.
Wednesday, June 07, 2023, 14:30
- 17:00
Building 2, Room 5209; https://kaust.zoom.us/my/yuxihong
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This thesis addresses the exponential growth of experimental data and the resulting computational complexity seen in two major scientific applications, which account for most cycles consumed on today's supercomputers.
Edmond Chow, Professor and Associate Chair, School of Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
Tuesday, June 06, 2023, 16:00
- 17:00
Building 2, Level 5, Room 5220
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Coffee Time: 15:30 - 16:00. Kernel matrices can be found in computational physics, chemistry, statistics, and machine learning. Fast algorithms for matrix-vector multiplication for kernel matrices have been developed, and is a subject of continuing interest, including here at KAUST. One also often needs fast algorithms to solve systems of equations involving large kernel matrices. Fast direct methods can sometimes be used, for example, when the physical problem is 2-dimensional. In this talk, we address preconditioning for the iterative solution of kernel matrix systems. The spectrum of a kernel matrix significantly depends on the parameters of the kernel function used to define the kernel matrix, e.g., a length scale.
Prof. Amitava Bhattacharjee, Dr. Michael Zarnstorff, Dr. Spencer Pitcher, Mr. Richard Carty
Monday, June 05, 2023, 16:15
- 16:45
Building 20, Auditorium
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“Practical fusion power is thirty years off and always will be.” Most people are instantly enraptured at the thought that a single glass of water will provide enough fusion fuel for their lifetime – if only it could be safely unlocked – and most of us have heard, as well, that we should not set our watches for when this will occur.
Prof. Amitava Bhattacharjee, Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University
Monday, June 05, 2023, 15:45
- 16:15
Building 20, Auditorium
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Generating fusion power from a stellarator is an exciting scientific and engineering challenge, one that promises to produce a stable, green, and nearly perennial energy source for mankind. To do so economically and safely will require a combination of several interdisciplinary breakthroughs including extreme scale computing (with adroit use of artificial intelligence and machine learning), high-temperature superconductors, materials science research, and robotics, to name a few. Overcoming this challenge will need a worldwide effort, involving academia, national laboratories, and industry, and contributions from diverse economies and people.
Prof. Amitava Bhattacharjee, Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University
Monday, June 05, 2023, 14:30
- 15:30
Building 20, Auditorium
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The most compelling transformational use of magnetically confined, high-temperature plasma is to realize sustained fusion energy. The tokamak, which is the leading magnetic confinement concept in the world today, first realized in 1958, has the geometry of a torus and toroidal symmetry, giving it good confinement properties. Nevertheless, the tokamak has a number of unresolved stability issues related to its current-carrying plasma that may be obstacles to its ultimate success.  In contrast, in the stellarator, the confining magnetic field is mostly produced by external current-carrying coils.
Prof. Amitava Bhattacharjee, Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University
Monday, June 05, 2023, 14:30
- 16:45
Building 20, Auditorium
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KAUST’s Extreme Computing Research Center and Program in Applied Physics are sponsoring an immersive Fusion Fest on the afternoon of June 5, 2023.  The program, which is designed to attract KAUST talent to address key challenges in bringing about commercially profitable “green” fusion power, consists of two live lectures by Professor Amitava Bhattacharjee and a hybrid live-virtual panel discussion (with Q&A) on a pathway to the realization of a commercial stellarator, led by physicist Bhattacharjee, with participation from engineering experts from ITER and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and a veteran financial advisor to the energy industry.
Sunday, June 04, 2023, 15:00
- 16:00
Building 4, Level 5, Room 5220; https://kaust.zoom.us/j/99802128930
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The Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations (INLA) method has become a commonly used tool for researchers and practitioners to perform approximate Bayesian inference for various fields of applications. It has become essential to incorporate more complex models and expand the method’s capabilities with more features. In this dissertation, we contribute to the INLA method in different aspects.
Morio Toyoshima, Director General of Wireless Networks Research Center, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology
Sunday, June 04, 2023, 14:30
- 15:30
Building 1, Level 3, Room 3119
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These discussions on the way how information and communication technology (ICT) should be in Beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G are accelerating, the space laser communication is becoming more advanced and active in the field of space communications.
Sunday, June 04, 2023, 12:30
- 14:00
Building 1, Level 3, Room 3119
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The goal of this work is to investigate and advance a research on various topics, vital for the development of the future generations of optical communication technology. In the first part of the work, we present a fast and efficient simulation method of structured light free space optics (FSO) channel effects from propagation through the turbulent atmosphere.
Prof. Stefano Castruccio, Associate professor, University of Notre Dame, USA
Sunday, June 04, 2023, 10:00
- 11:00
Building 1, Level 4, Room 4102
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It is widely acknowledged how the relentless surge of Volume, Velocity and Variety of data, as well as the simultaneous increase of computational resources have stimulated the development of data-driven methods with unprecedented flexibility and predictive power. However, not every environmental study entails a large data set: many applications ranging from astronomy or paleo-climatology have a high associated sampling cost and are instead constrained by physics-informed partial differential equations. Throughout the past few years, a new and powerful paradigm has emerged in the machine learning literature, merging data-driven and physics-informed problems, hence providing a unified framework for a whole spectrum of problems ranging from data-rich/context-poor to data-poor/context-rich. In this talk, I will present this new framework and discuss some of the most recent efforts to reformulate it as a stochastic model-based approach, thereby allowing calibrated uncertainty quantification.
Tuesday, May 30, 2023, 15:30
- 17:30
Building 1, Room 4102; https://kaust.zoom.us/my/zhedong
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The commonly used leave-one-out and K-fold cross-validation methods are not suitable for structured models with multiple prediction tasks. To overcome this limitation, we introduce leave-group-out cross-validation, which allows groups to adapt to different tasks. We propose an automatic group construction method and provide an efficient approximation for latent Gaussian models. Moreover, this method is conveniently implemented in the R-INLA software.
Sunday, May 28, 2023, 15:00
- 16:00
Building 1, Level 4, Room 4102; https://kaust.zoom.us/j/7276313489
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Latent Gaussian models (LGM) are widely used but struggle with certain datasets that contain non-Gaussian features, such as sudden jumps or spikes. This dissertation aims to provide tools for researchers to check the adequacy of the fitted LGM (criticism); if the check fails, offer efficient and user-friendly implementations of latent non-Gaussian models, which lead to more robust inferences (robustification).
Prof. Fatemah Alharbi, Assistant Professor, the Computer Science Department, Taibah University, Yanbu, KSA.
Thursday, May 25, 2023, 15:30
- 16:30
Building 4, Level 5, Room 5220.
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The Domain Name System (DNS) is a core protocol for the Internet. It resolves mappings between Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and their corresponding Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs). Since all Internet communications rely on it, DNS structuring should therefore be resilient and robust against failure to avoid any service interruption. While the research community and experienced practitioners have established best practices to this end, many worldwide DNS implementations are still prone to many types of configuration errors. In this talk, I discuss the adoption of these approaches in some countries. Also, a case study is presented considering domains in Saudi Arabia (.sa) that illustrates the value of measuring the DNS at this scale. The results are valuable to improve the DNS infrastructure in the kingdom. Lastly, I provide recommendations to improve DNS service resilience and robustness.
Prof. Jorge L. Mazza Rodrigues
Thursday, May 25, 2023, 11:30
- 13:00
Building 2, Level 5, Room 5220
In this seminar Prof. Jorge Mazza Rodrigues from the University of California, explains how deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, mainly due to cattle pasture, leads to increased nitrogen fixation and methane emissions. The Amazon Rainforest Microbial Observatory found abundant carbohydrate utilization genes in pastures. Rodrigues studies microbial diversification and its impact on global biogeochemical cycles.
Michalis Matthaiou, Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom
Wednesday, May 24, 2023, 11:00
- 12:00
Building 1, Level 3, Room 3119
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This talk provides an overview of current research efforts on the CF-mMIMO systems and their promising future application scenarios.
Wednesday, May 24, 2023, 09:00
- 10:45
Building 1, Level 3, Room 3119
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This work is geared toward the design and analysis of reliable Hyperloop communication systems. Hyperloops pose several challenges for the communication system for providing a reliable communication system while dealing with a complex structure, moving at tremendous speeds inside an evacuated tube. The adopted sealed steel-structured tube in the Hyperloop prevents signal penetration, isolating the inner world from the outside and creating a highly scattering environment for electromagnetic (EM) waves. Furthermore, the exceptionally high speed of the traveling pod results in severe Doppler shifts and frequent handovers, leading to increased transmission errors and delays. We propose a novel system configuration where wireless transmitters or access points (APs) are placed inside the tube to communicate with the moving receiver using optical fiber as a backhaul link.
Yalchin Efendiev, Professor, Institute for Scientific Computation, Texas A and M University
Sunday, May 21, 2023, 12:00
- 13:00
Building 9, Level 3, Room 3128
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In this talk, I will talk about general approaches for multiscale modeling (closely related to porous media applications). I will mainly focus on numerical approaches, where multiscale finite element basis functions are constructed and used in approximating the solution. In these approaches, macroscopic equations are formed via some variational formulations of the problem. I will discuss how these approaches are used in deriving, so called upscaling techniques and the relation to well known upscaling methods. The concepts discussed in the talk are used for linear and nonlinear problems. I will discuss some applications.
Stochastic Numerics PI Professor Raul Tempone (Chair) and Computational Probability PI Professor Ajay Jasra (Co-Chair)
Sunday, May 21, 2023, 08:00
- 17:00
KAUST, Building 9
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Dear Kaustians, We are excited to announce the upcoming Stochastic Numerics and Statistical Learning: Theory and Applications Workshop 2023, taking place at KAUST, Building 9, from May 21 to June 1, 2023. Following the highly successful 2022 edition, this year's workshop promises to be another engaging and insightful event for researchers, faculty members, and students interested in stochastic algorithms, statistical learning, optimization, and approximation. The 2023 workshop aims to build on the achievements of last year's event, which featured 28 talks, two mini-courses, and two poster sessions, attracting over 150 participants from various universities and research institutes. In 2022, attendees had the opportunity to learn from through insightful talks, interactive mini-courses, and vibrant poster sessions. This year, the workshop will once again showcase contributions that offer mathematical foundations for algorithmic analysis or highlight relevant applications. Confirmed speakers include renowned experts from institutions such as Ecole Polytechnique, EPFL, Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris VI, and Imperial College London, among others.
Thursday, May 18, 2023, 15:00
- 16:00
Building 5, Level 5, Room 5209
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My research at the University of Toronto involves designing and fabricating CMOS-compatible nano-plasmonic waveguide structures and devices for on-chip communication. By taking advantage of the absence of diffraction limits, strong modal confinement is made possible using plasmonic device architectures, laying the foundations for improved optical processes and photonic circuit integration. All-oxide structures have emerged as promising plasmonic materials that can serve as relatively low carrier density Drude metals and dielectric spacers by their electro-optic tunability and versatility. I demonstrated the facile integration of all-oxide heterointerfaces into metal–insulator–semiconductor (MIS) electro-optic structures. From there, I fabricated MIS devices that incorporated semiconductive oxide layers with oxide dielectric spacers on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platforms, constituting graded-index coupled hybrid plasmonic waveguide (CHPW) optical modulators.
Sunday, May 14, 2023, 09:00
- 16:00
Building 18, Level 4, Fellowship Hall
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This joint workshop between KAUST and Fudan University covers a variety of topics related to optical communication and devices for visible light communication. Theoretical modeling, device engine/materials investigation and sub-system development will be discussed. These research are essential to eventually realize the goals of connecting all the unconnected, SMART systems and optical internet-of-things. The workshop will be running in hybrid mode, and presenters will be from both KAUST and Fudan University.
Alpar Meszaros, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Durham University (UK)
Thursday, May 11, 2023, 10:30
- 12:00
Building 1, Level 4, Room 4102
The theory of mean field games (MFG for short) aims to study limiting behavior of Nash equilibria of (stochastic) differential games when the number of agents tends to infinity. While in general existence of MFG Nash equilibria can be established under fairly general assumptions, uniqueness is the exception rather than the rule.
Eduardo Teixeira, Full Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Central Florida (USA)
Thursday, May 11, 2023, 08:30
- 10:00
Building 1, Level 4, Room 4102
How does an elastic membrane lie on a given obstacle? This naive looking question hides a beautiful mathematical theory integrating powerful tools with far-reaching applications. In this mini-course we will discuss the obstacle problem as a free boundary model. All necessary tools will be carefully constructed from scratch. We will mainly focus on: optimal regularity of solutions, non-degeneracy estimates, weak geometric-measure properties of the free boundary, classification of global profiles, and differentiability of the free boundary.
Wednesday, May 10, 2023, 14:00
- 16:00
Building 1, Level 3, Room 3119
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Edge devices refer to compact hardware that performs data processing and analysis close to the data source, eliminating the need for data transmission to centralized systems for analysis. These devices are typically integrated into other equipment, such as sensors or smart appliances, and can collect and process data in real time.
Prof. Luigi Carlo Berselli
Tuesday, May 09, 2023, 16:00
- 17:00
Building 2, Level 5, Room 5220
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I consider the vector counterpart of the classical p-Laplace and p-heat equations which are some of the building blocks for the mathematical description of non-linear plasticity, non-Newtonian fluids, and turbulent eddy viscosity models. I will discuss results of “natural regularity” and their role in the study of the well-posedness of the nonlinear pdes as well as in the theory of convergence for space-time discretisation methods. In particular, I will present the “A-approximation" method which generalises results by Necas and which reduces the problem to a family of linear ones. Coffee Time: 15:30 - 16:00