Colloquium

Flavors of Baroclinic Instability in the Global Ocean Baroclinic instability is the fundamental mechanism responsible for large-scale and mesoscale motions in rotating, stratified fluids. In Earth's atmosphere, it produces weather systems in midlatitudes; in the ocean, it drives the formation of the mesoscale eddy field, releasing the superabundant available potential...

Will Kleiber The challenge of creating historical weather products for the United States Abstract: Historical gridded weather products are critical components in climate, hydrologic and ecologic applications. A large number of historical gridded data products exist, but many of these do not adequately account for various sources of uncertainty. We...

Stephen Becker Imaging, Optimization and Randomness We will take a look at some of the work going in my research group, including work on super-resolution imaging problems (and their associated ill-conditioned optimization formulations), robust variants of PCA, random embeddings for machine learning problems, and even finding buried Mayan ruins in...

Modeling Arctic Sea Ice The pack ice is effected by both thermodynamic and mechanical processes. Thermodynamic processes result in mass changes at the atmosphere and ocean boundaries. These processes are coupled with mechanical properties that determine ice motion and deformation. The ice pack is able to move and deform in...

The Hunt for the Swamp Monster There is a criminal on the loose in Tensorland. As innocent tensor approximation programs go about their work, sometimes they get ``swamped''. A swamped program has to work for many iterations without making appreciable progress before finally breaking free; sometimes they expire while trying...

What Partial Differential Equations Can Teach Us About Social Behavior and Movement of Populations Models based on partial differential equations have been used extensively to describe fundamental and ubiquitous phenomena in several areas of ecology and more recently in the social sciences. While these models are simplified versions of reality,...

Spatio-temporal Dynamics of Synthetic Microbial Consortia Modeling is essential in the design of genetic circuits with desired properties. I will review several examples where mathematical models have been central to the development and understanding of the dynamic of synthetic organisms. I will focus on synthetic bacterial microconsortia that exhibits emergent...

Decisions depend on the reward at stake and the effort required. However, these same variables influence the vigor of the ensuing movement, suggesting that factors that affect evaluation of action also influence performance of the selected action. In this talk, I will describe a mathematical framework that links decision-making with...

Waveform Design for Radar Detection and Imaging This talk addresses 3 related questions: 1) What is the best space-time waveform to transmit for detecting the presence of a weakly scattering object in free space? 2) What is the best waveform to use to suppress clutter in synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) imaging?...

Event Description: Mevin Hooten, Department of Statistics, Colorado State University De Motu Animalium: Modern Models for Animal Trajectories Advances in animal telemetry data collection techniques have served as a catalyst for the creation of statistical methodology for analyzing animal movement data. Such data and methodology have provided a wealth of...