Statistical physics, Optimization, Inference and Message-Passing algorithms

If you recall how message passing algorithm are chainging our approach to compressive sensing, you might be interested in the following announcement sent to me by Lenka Zdeborova:

Dear Colleague, 

It is our pleasure to announce that in September 30 -- October 11, 2013 the Les Houches center for theoretical physics will be hosting an autumn school "Statistical physics, Optimization, Inference and Message-Passing algorithms" organized by Florent Krzakala, Federico Ricci-Tersenghi, Lenka Zdeborova and Riccardo Zecchnia.

The aim of this two-weeks school is to teach in a widely accessible manner about Statistical physics, Optimization, Inference and Message-Passing algorithms. Lectures will be given both by physicists and by researchers from computer science, machine learning and signal processing. The goal is to present methods and applications from several different angles and help the participants to cross bridges between different disciplines. The school is aimed not only for PhD students, postdocs but also for confirmed researchers who wish to understand better the presented topics. More information and a list of confirmed lecturers can be found on the workshop website:

http://www.espci.fr/usr/fk/LESHOUCHES2013/home.htm

All students and researchers wishing to participate should apply on the website by April 30, 2013. According to the number of applicants they will be informed in June about subsequent steps.

Please forward the link to the website to all students, postdocs and researcher that might be interested.

With best regards and looking forward to see many of you next October in Les Houches

The organizers

Florent Krzakala

Federico Ricci-Tersenghi

Lenka Zdeborova

Riccardo Zecchina

The planned program looks like:

First week - FUNDAMENTALS: 5 sets of long lectures (titles tentative, ~6h to 7h each) 

** Cris Moore (Santa Fe Institute): The nature of computation 

** Andrea Montanari (Stanford Univ.): Signal processing, sparse inference and message passing 

** Marc Mezard (ENS Paris): Cavity method: message passing from a physics perspective. 

** Giorgio Parisi (La Sapienza Roma): Replica theory and spin glasses 

** Devavrat Shah (MIT): Inference and machine learning 

Second week - APPLICATIONS: several sets of lectures (titles tentative, ~3h each) 

** Riccardo Zecchina (Politecnico Torino): Stochastic optimization or inverse dynamical problems 

** Manfred Opper (Berlin Univ.): Expectation-propagation, topics in inference 

** Rudiger Urbanke (EPFL): Error correcting codes 

** Amin Coja-Oghlan (Frankfurt Univ.): Rigorous results for constraint satisfaction problems 

** Possible other topics include (lecturers to be confirmed): compressed sensing; tomography, inference in biological systems; inverse Ising model; image processing, rigorous results related to the cavity and replica method, message passing beyond BP etc.. 

Thanks Lenka !

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