Kavita Ramanan

Brown University

Day 2 (April 12) @ 10:00 – 10:45 Keynote

Beyond Mean-Field Limits: Stochastic Processes on Sparse Graphs

Phenomena arising in a wide variety of applications in statistical physics, epidemiology, neuroscience, engineering and operations research can be modelled by a large collection of interacting particles, where the state or random evolution of each particle is directly influenced only by the states of neighboring particles in a certain underlying graph.   When the graph is dense, the study of principled approximations for such processes is classical and falls under the rubric of mean-field limits.  We describe more recently developed theory that captures both typical and atypical (or large deviations) behavior in the complementary setting of interacting particle systems on sparse (random) graphs.

Biography

Kavita Ramanan is the Roland George Dwight Richardson University Professor and Associate Chair at the Division of Applied Mathematics, Brown University.  Her research interests lie in the area of probability theory and stochastic processes, including high-dimensional probability, interacting particle systems, large deviations, applications to asymptotic convex geometry and stochastic networks.  Her research has received recognition in the form of an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians, a Clay Senior Scholarship, Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Newton Award, a Simons Fellowship, and the Erlang Prize from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society.  She is an elected fellow of multiple societies including the AAAS, AMS, IMS, INFORMS and SIAM, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She cares deeply about math communication and outreach, having initiated the SEAM (Social Equity and Applied Math) seminar series, founded a math outreach group called the Math CoOp, and organized the Mathematics-Sin-Fronteras lecture series.