Salam Distinguished Lectures 2024

Every year, the ICTP's Salam Distinguished Lectures feature a renowned scientist to showcase important developments and provide a visionary outlook on future directions of research in their field.

This year’s distinguished lecturer is Stéphane Mallat, an applied mathematician and a professor at Collège de France and at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris who specialises on signal processing and statistical learning. He is known for having introduced multi-resolution theory and the algorithm on which the JPEG-2000 image compression standard is based. His current work is devoted to mathematical models of deep neural networks, for data analysis and physics.

Mallat is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He was previously Professor at the Courant Institute of New York University, at Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He also was a founder and CEO of a semiconductor start-up company.

This year’s Salam Distinguished Lectures will consist of two colloquia and a special topic talk that are taking place on 1 and 2 February 2024 at ICTP in the Budinich Lecture Hall and livestreamed from the ICTP website (www.ictp.it/livestream).

Mallat's lecture series, entitled “Learning Multiscale Energies from Data by Inverse Renormalisation”, will be devoted to showing how inverse renormalisation group can be used to estimate energy in many body systems and avoid the complexities related to estimating high dimensional probability. It will also review some of the algorithms that can be used to this purpose.

The three lectures will be as follows:

• Lecture 1: Energy estimation and data generation by inverse renormalisation group (colloquium) – On Thursday 1 February at 14.00 hrs
• Lecture 2: Log-Sobolev stability, wavelets and interaction energies across scales (special topic) – On Friday 2 February at 11.00 hrs
• Lecture 3: Multiscale neural network models for generation by score diffusion (colloquium) – On Friday 2 February 1t 14.00 hrs

The Abdus Salam Distinguished Lecture Series receives generous support from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS).

An archive of past Distinguished Lectures can be viewed here.