Exploring New Frontiers of Physics

Submitted by vpabba on Mon, 12/01/2025 - 00:18

Current Activities

New mathematical frameworks reveal how stable thoughts emerge from chaotic brain activity

"The mind is what the brain does," as the pioneering artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky once said. So it’d be fantastic to understand at what level of anatomy, or complexity, the brain actually carries out its processing and computation.
This quandary is precisely what captivates Fatih Dinc, a postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) and Geometric Intelligence Lab. Read more

Talks Schedule

KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR THEORETICAL PHYSICS

TELEPHONE: (805) 893-4111
TELEFAX: (805) 893-2431
speakers@kitp.ucsb.edu

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA BARBARA, CA 93106-4030
http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu

KITP Program of Scientific Activities

Day of Jul 01, 2026

2026

Wednesday, Jul 01, 2026

Simons Amphitheater 09:00AM Biological Learning without a Brain
- Alison Patteson (Syracuse) New Talk
- Jordi Garcia Ojalvo (UPF) Minimal internal representations in living systems

Simons Amphitheater 01:30PM New Trends in Non-equilibrium Dynamics

Peter Foster (USC) Physical Bioenergetics of Oocytes

KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR THEORETICAL PHYSICS

TELEPHONE: (805) 893-4111
TELEFAX: (805) 893-2431
speakers@kitp.ucsb.edu

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA BARBARA, CA 93106-4030
http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu

KITP Program of Scientific Activities

Week of Jun 29 - Jul 05, 2026

2026

Monday, Jun 29, 2026

Simons Amphitheater 09:00AM Biological Learning without a Brain
- Armita Nourmohammad (Washington) New Talk
- Ilya Nemenman (Emory) New Talk

Fred Kavli Auditorium 12:15PM Blackboard Lunch

Karen Alim (TU Munich) “Learning with the flow”.

Simons Amphitheater 01:30PM New Trends in Non-equilibrium Dynamics

Giuseppe Mussardo (SISSA) Integrability and Nonequilibrium Dynamics in Quantum and Classical Field Theory

2026

Tuesday, Jun 30, 2026

Simons Amphitheater 09:00AM Biological Learning without a Brain
- Wallace Marshall (UCSF) the cell as a low pass filter: frequency domain analysis of habituation in Stentor
- Manu Prakash (Stanford) New Talk

Simons Amphitheater 01:30PM New Trends in Non-equilibrium Dynamics

Mathis Guéneau (LPTHE) Spatiotemporal Characterization of Active Dynamics in Channels: Theory and Experiments

Simons Amphitheater 03:30PM Biological Learning without a Brain

Jeremy Gunawardena (Harvard) Tutorial

2026

Wednesday, Jul 01, 2026

Simons Amphitheater 09:00AM Biological Learning without a Brain
- Alison Patteson (Syracuse) New Talk
- Jordi Garcia Ojalvo (UPF) Minimal internal representations in living systems

Simons Amphitheater 01:30PM New Trends in Non-equilibrium Dynamics

Peter Foster (USC) Physical Bioenergetics of Oocytes

2026

Thursday, Jul 02, 2026

Simons Amphitheater 09:00AM Biological Learning without a Brain
- Mingming Wu (Cornell) Mechanical adaptation and learning in cells
- Arvind Murugan (U. Chicago) New Talk

Simons Amphitheater 01:30PM New Trends in Non-equilibrium Dynamics

Note: General Interest Talk

John Barton (Pittsburgh) Learning from and forecasting evolutionary dynamics
Henry Alston (ENS Paris) Optimal sensing with phase separation

Simons Amphitheater 03:30PM Biological Learning without a Brain

Aleksandra Walczak (ENS Paris) Tutorial: learning in the the immune system

2026

Friday, Jul 03, 2026

No talks scheduled.

2026

Saturday, Jul 04, 2026

No talks scheduled.

2026

Sunday, Jul 05, 2026

No talks scheduled.

Seminar Rooms, Commons Room, and Founders' Room are located on the 1st floor of Kohn Hall. Coffee and cookies are served daily in Kohn Hall Commons Room at 3:15 p.m. except on those Tuesdays when there is a Physics Department Colloquium.

KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR THEORETICAL PHYSICS

TELEPHONE: (805) 893-4111
TELEFAX: (805) 893-2431
speakers@kitp.ucsb.edu

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA BARBARA, CA 93106-4030
http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu

KITP Program of Scientific Activities

Week of Jul 06 - Jul 12, 2026

2026

Monday, Jul 06, 2026

Simons Amphitheater 09:00AM Biological Learning without a Brain
- Meet and Greet
- Nidhi Pashine (Syracuse) Mechanical memories in soft matter systems

Simons Amphitheater 01:30PM New Trends in Non-equilibrium Dynamics

Giuseppe Del Vecchio Del Vecchio (Univ. Paris-Sud) TBA

Simons Amphitheater 03:30PM Biological Learning without a Brain

Nathalie Balaban (Hebrew Univ.) Tutorial

2026

Tuesday, Jul 07, 2026

Simons Amphitheater 09:00AM Biological Learning without a Brain
- Shenshen Wang (UCLA) New Talk
- Gautam Reddy (Princeton) Learning as Distributed Computation

Simons Amphitheater 01:30PM New Trends in Non-equilibrium Dynamics

Pierre Illien (Sorbonne Univ.) Non-Gaussian density fluctuations in the Dean-Kawasaki equation

2026

Wednesday, Jul 08, 2026

Simons Amphitheater 09:00AM Biological Learning without a Brain
- Douglas Durian (U. Penn) Intelligent electronic metamaterials that learn how to compute
- Thierry Mora (ENS Paris) New Talk

Simons Amphitheater 01:30PM New Trends in Non-equilibrium Dynamics

Léo Touzo (ENS Paris) Odd wave turbulence

Simons Amphitheater 03:30PM Biological Learning without a Brain

Yuhai Tu (Flatiron Institute) Tutorial

2026

Thursday, Jul 09, 2026

Simons Amphitheater 09:00AM Biological Learning without a Brain
- Jen Schwarz (Syracuse) New Talk

Small Seminar Room 01:30PM New Trends in Non-equilibrium Dynamics

Corey O'hern (Yale) Cell shape emerges from motion
Marco Biroli (Univ. Paris-Saclay) Discovering and decoding latent mean-field structure with variational autoencoders