14
Nov
Friday, November 17th, 2006, 3:30 pm
Wean Hall 7220
Broadcasting on trees: Beliefs, Evolution and Reconstruction
Elchanan Mossel
UC Berkeley
Broadcasting processes on trees play a fundamental role in various algorithmic inference problems including: The reconstruction of evolutionary trees in biology, the reconstruction of language evolution in linguistics, network tomography and in the analysis of message passing algorithms such as Belief Propagation and Warning Propagation.
In the talk I will survey several theoretical and applied developments in this area obtained using and extending techniques from discrete probability and statistical physics.
