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Models arising in biology are often written in terms of Ordinary Differential Equations. The celebrated paper of Kermack-McKendrick (19271, founding mathematical epidemiology, showed the necessity to include parameters in order to describe the state of the individuals, as time elapsed after infection. During the 70s, many mathematical studies were developed when equations are structured by age, size, more generally a physiological trait. The renewal, growth-fragmentation are the more standard equations. The talk will present structured equations, show that a universal generalized relative entropy structure is available in the linear case, which imposes relaxation to a steady state under non-degeneracy conditions. In the nonlinear cases, it might be that periodic solutions occur, which can be interpreted in biological terms, e.g., as network activity in the neuroscience. When the equations are conservation laws, a variant of the Monge-Kantorovich distance (called Fortet-Mourier distance) also gives a general non-expansion property of solutions.
Event date: 19/1/2023
Speaker: Prof. Benoît Perthame (Sorbonne University)
Hosted by: Department of Applied Mathematics
- Subjects:
- Biology and Mathematics and Statistics
- Keywords:
- Biomathematics Equations
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Universities conduct research for three reasons: to educate students, to contribute to society, and to understand the world. While society often holds a view of the scholar as a solitary and singular genius, in reality scholars today participate in a highly collaborative, worldwide search for shared understandings that stand the test of time and the scrutiny of others. The problems in the 21st century often demand effort by teams of researchers with resources at scale: laboratories and equipment, compute resources, and expert staffing. Working with faculty, students, and other stakeholders to identify the greatest opportunities and the resources needed to address them is both a privilege and a challenge for modern academic administrators. In this talk, I will share three examples: fostering collaborative proposal-writing; planning for shared capabilities in experimental facilities, data, and computation; and transforming academic structures.
Even date: 12/4/2023
Speaker: Prof. Kathryn Ann Moler
Hosted by: PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research
- Subjects:
- Statistics and Research Methods
- Keywords:
- Research Science
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
In this CIHK webinar, we will discuss the material conditions of and historical background to the use of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic in writing-mediated brush conversation between literati of Sinitic engaged in cross-border communication within Sinographic East Asia or the Sinographic cosmopolis, which corresponds with today’s China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan (including Okinawa, formerly the Ryukyu Kingdom) and Vietnam. Compared with speech as a modality of communication, real-time writing-mediated interaction between talking humans, synchronously face-to-face, seems uncommon. In any society, speaking is premised on one condition: the interlocutors must have at least one shared spoken language at their disposal, but even then, there are circumstances under which speaking is either physically not feasible or socially inappropriate. Could writing function as an alternative modality of communication when speaking is not an option due to the absence of a shared spoken language, as in cross-border communication settings? Whereas real-time writing-mediated face-to-face interaction is rare where a regional lingua franca was known to exist (e.g., Latin and Arabic), there is ample historical evidence of literati of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic from different parts of Sinographic East Asia conducting ‘silent conversation’, synchronously and interactively in writing mode using brush, ink, and paper. Such a pattern of writing-assisted interaction is still practiced and observable in pen-assisted conversation – pen-talk – between Chinese and Japanese speakers today, thanks to the pragma-linguistic affordance of morphographic, non-phonographic sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters and Japanese kanji). We will outline the historical spread of Classical Chinese or Sinitic texts from the ‘center’ to the ‘peripheries’, and the historical background to the acquisition of literacy in Sinitic by the people there. Their shared knowledge of Sinitic helps explain why, for well over a thousand years until the 1900s, literati from these places were able to speak their mind by engaging in ‘Sinitic brush-talk’ 漢文筆談 in cross-border communication.
Even date: 13/5/2022
Speaker: Prof. David C. S. Li
Hosted by: Confucius Institute of Hong Kong, Department of Chinese Culture
- Subjects:
- Chinese Language and Language and Languages
- Keywords:
- Chinese characters History Chinese language -- Written Chinese Written communication China East Asia
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Focusing on tensions and links between national formation and international outlooks, this talk shows how classical world visions persist as China’s modernizers and revolutionaries adopted and revised the Western nation-state and cosmopolitanism. The concepts of tianxia (all under heaven) and datong (great harmony) have been updated into outlooks of global harmony that value unity, equality, and reciprocity as strategies of overcoming interstate conflict, national divides, and social fragmentation. The talk will delve into two debates: the embrace of the West vs. aspirations for a common world, and the difference between liberal cosmopolitanism and socialist internationalism.
Even date: 16/9/2022
Speaker: Prof. Ban Wang
Hosted by: Confucius Institute of Hong Kong, Department of Chinese Culture
- Subjects:
- Chinese Studies
- Keywords:
- Civilization Diplomatic relations World politics China
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
More than one hundred years ago, Albert Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity (GR). One year later, Karl Schwarzschild solved the GR equations for a non-rotating, spherical mass distribution; if this mass is sufficiently compact, even light cannot escape from within the so-called event horizon, and there is a mass singularity at the center. The theoretical concept of a 'black hole' was born, and was refined in the next decades by work of Penrose, Wheeler, Kerr, Hawking and many others. First indirect evidence for the existence of such black holes in our Universe came from observations of compact X-ray binaries and distant luminous quasars. I will discuss the forty-year journey, which my colleagues and I have been undertaking to study the mass distribution in the Center of our Milky Way from ever more precise, long-term studies of the motions of gas and stars as test particles of the space time. These studies show the existence of a four million solar mass object, which must be a single massive black hole, beyond any reasonable doubt.
Even date: 9/2/2023
Speaker: Prof. Reinhard GENZEL
Hosted by: PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research
- Subjects:
- Physics and Cosmology and Astronomy
- Keywords:
- Nobel Prize winners Astrophysics Astronomy Deep space -- Milky Way Black holes (Astronomy) General relativity (Physics)
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
As a recent New York Times editorial proclaimed, "The Global Order Isn't Working. It's Time for Something Different." To teach environmental history and environmental ethics is to reacquaint ourselves with the facts that we need to try to build, while there is still time, a new cooperative order that understands this: simple fact: that other people and other countries are quite literally "the air we breathe." Moreover, all who claim to be ethical persons must take seriously the notion of inter-generational equity and try to act upon it. This notion should, in theory, come more easily to countries whose traditions have built upon classical/ Confucian learning, for those traditions say that the most important marker of human behavior is working toward common ends (qun 群) while "learning what is enough" (zhi zu 知足). Put another way, many resources within the Chinese tradition may strengthen our resolve to act more constructively in less short-sighted ways.
Event Date: 14/11/2022
Speaker: Prof. Michael Nylan (University of California, Berkeley)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities
- Keywords:
- Environmental ethics Intergenerational relations Philosophy Confucian Confucian ethics
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
The notion of expertise is integral to all forms of institutional and professional practice in many domains – in education, healthcare, social welfare, law, journalism, banking, information technology, marketing, translating and interpreting services etc. It is a concept addressed by scholars across many disciplines – cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, psychology, language/communication studies, among others. There are, however, enduring problems of definition, description and measurement of expertise. Some scholars draw attention to the ongoing ‘crisis in expertise’ and others pronounce the ‘death of expertise’ in contemporary society.
More humbly, I begin with a characterisation of professional expertise very broadly to include scientific, experiential, technological, organisational, legal, ethical and communicative knowledge. This then leads me to the notion of ‘distributed expertise’, which extends beyond the individual remit and the conventional lay-expert divide. For instance, in the healthcare domain, a significant development afforded by internet-based technology is the increased level of patients’ e-health literacy and, consequently, democratisation of expertise. This amounts not only to accessing health information digitally, but also the phenomenon of patients ‘doctoring’ themselves in ‘the now of its presence’, i.e., ‘expert patients’ becoming instrumental in self-diagnosis and even self-treatment.
Additionally, ‘distributed expertise’ is also constitutive of ‘expert systems’, e.g., diagnostic and interventionist technologies as well as decision aids mediated by algorithms and templates. This is what I refer to as the technologization of expertise. I suggest that there is overreliance on ‘expert systems’ by both experts and lay persons in everyday decision making. Access to and use of ‘expert systems’ in optimal ways inevitably necessitates a reconfiguration of the very conditions and consequences of professional expertise.
Event Date: 25/11/2022
Speaker: Prof. Srikant Sarangi (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities
- Keywords:
- Information technology -- Social aspects Democratization Expertise
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Professor Yigong Shi will reflect on the challenges in global higher education, based on his 37 years of learning, scientific research, and teaching experience in academia. He will present Westlake University's educational reforms in university operations, governance, talent recruitment, student development, research and academic evaluation, and interdisciplinary studies, which altogether provide new opportunities for future-oriented higher education.
Even date: 6/12/2022
Speaker: Prof. Yigong Shi
Moderator: Prof. Qingyan Chen (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Hosted by: PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research
- Keywords:
- Educational change China Education Higher
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Before the advent of computers around 1950, optimization centered either on small-dimensional problems solved by looking at zeroes of first derivatives and signs of second derivatives, or on infinite-dimensional problems about curves and surfaces. In both cases, "variations" were employed to understand how a local solution might be characterized. Computers changed the picture by opening the possibility of solving large-scale problems involving inequalities, instead of only equations. Inequalities had to be recognized as important because the decisions to be optimized were constrained by the need to respect many upper or lower bounds on their feasibility. A new kind of mathematical analysis, beyond traditional calculus, had to be developed to address these needs. It built first on appealing to the convexity of sets and functions, but went on to amazingly broad and successful concepts of variational geometry, subgradients, subderivatives, and variational convergence beyond just that. This talk will explain these revolutionary developments and why there were essential.
Event date: 1/11/2022
Speaker: Prof. Terry Rockafellar (University of Washington)
Hosted by: Department of Applied Mathematics
- Subjects:
- Mathematics and Statistics
- Keywords:
- Convex functions Convex sets Mathematical optimization Computer science -- Mathematics
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Geospatial information science is a discipline that focuses on using geospatial information technology to understand people, places, nature and processes of the earth. IoT refers to Internet of things, the combination of sensors, software and other technologies to connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet. The era of IoT brings us opportunities and challenges for geospatial information science. In the keynote, five characteristics and three scientific issues of geo-spatial information science in the era of IoT are summarised.
Even date: 6/9/2022
Speaker: Prof. Daren Li
Moderator: Prof. Christopher Chao (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Panel members: Prof. Qingyan Chen, Prof. Qinhao Chen (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Hosted by: PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research
- Subjects:
- Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics
- Keywords:
- Internet of things Geospatial data Spatial data mining
- Resource Type:
- Video
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