Schmidt Center - MIT EECS Colloquium: CocycleHunter: a topological and geometric tool for phase estimation in single-cell RNA-seq data by Kathryn Hess BellwaldMonday, April 7 4:00 - 5:00 pm (refreshments at 3:30 pm) Yellowstone (415 Main St.)📅 Add to your calendar ✍️ Register herePlease join us for a colloquium featuring Kathryn Hess Bellwald, professor of mathematics and life sciences at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Member of the Academic Board of the Swiss National Science Foundation, on CocycleHunter: a topological and geometric tool for phase estimation in single-cell RNA-seq data.This colloquium is part of a series hosted jointly by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Kathryn’s colloquium will run from 4:00-5:00 pm with refreshments served at 3:30 pm.The colloquium will be held at the Broad Institute in Yellowstone as well as virtually via YouTube Livestream: broad.io/ewsc. If you do not have a Broad badge, please show up at the 415 Main Street entrance 10 minutes prior to the event to be escorted to the talk.✍️ Register and view the abstractWe look forward to seeing you soon!-Caroline Uhler and the Schmidt Center TeamQuestions? Email Amanda Ogden at aogden@broadinstitute.org.

Time: 3:00 PMLocation: Cambridge, MA

Jesse Shapiro Harvard University (joint with IDSS)

Stop by for snacks and tea with the SHASS community, students, and instructors!HumaniTea is a program partnering with other units in SHASS to gather, share some food and thought, and enrich our shared MIT experience in the process. Once a month, SHASS community members, instructors, and students from diverse fields of studies, backgrounds, and interests can stop in and enjoy a cup of tea or snack.Monday, February 24 Monday, March 17 Monday, April 7 Monday, May 5@ 4:15 – 5:45PM Building 14E-304**Directions: Third floor of Building 14 from the Lewis Music Library stairs, through the CMS/W doors. Alternatively, take the elevator to the 3rd floor and navigate to the opposite end of the hallway, through third floor and CMS/W doors!Sign up for HumaniTea info: bit.ly/mithumanitea

Speaker: Youngtak Sohn (Brown)Title: Stochastic Block Model with Many CommunitiesAbstract:The stochastic block model (SBM), a random graph generalizing the Erdős–Rényi model, has long served as a framework for community detection. For SBMs with $n$ vertices and a fixed number of communities $q$, Decelle et al. (2011) predicted that efficient recovery is possible above the Kesten–Stigum (KS) threshold and impossible below it. We review recent progress toward proving this conjecture. We then turn to the case where $q = q_n$ grows with $n$, a setting for which no prediction currently exists. We show that the KS threshold can be surpassed efficiently when $q_n \gg \sqrt{n}$, while low-degree algorithms fail to beat the KS threshold when $q_n \ll \sqrt{n}$. Based on joint work with Byron Chin, Elchanan Mossel, and Alex Wein.

Speaker: Rok Gregoric (Johns Hopkins University)