On October 26-27, UC Davis hosted NCC26, the 3rd Annual meeting of the Northern and Central California Section of SIAM. The two plenary talks were given by Stefan Wild from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Sunčiča Canic from UC Berkeley. Stefan Wild's talk, titled Reinforcement Learning and Adaptive Subspace Assisted Zeroth-Order Optimization Solvers for Improved Robustness, provided an overview of the speaker's joint work with Pengcheng Xie and Kwassi Joseph Dzahini on zeroth-order optimization solvers.
As I begin my one-year term as department chair, I want to thank my predecessor, Bruno Nachtergaele, for his leadership and contributions to the department. Bruno is currently on sabbatical at the Newton Institute in Cambridge, England, where he is helping to organize a programme (as the English say) on the Mathematics of Many-Body Entanglement.
Bruno Nachtergaele welcomes incoming chair Joel Hass, and provides updates on Department members, the budget, and some upcoming focus for the next academic year.
This is my first year as GGAM Chair and the first time I have the honor of writing this column. I took over from Javier Arsuaga last summer. Javier did an incredible job moving GGAM forward—many thanks to him—and I am grateful to be able to build on and continue that work.
It has been another busy year for our undergraduate mathematics programs, with many exciting changes on the horizon. This year, our Undergraduate Program Committee is leading teams of faculty members in a review of all four of our majors – Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Analytics and Operations Research, and Scientific Computation – with a view towards modernizing and improving what our current programs offer. The intent is to both add breadth to our current course offering, and to add support to mathematics students in the form of discussions across all of our classes.
With the anticipation of Data Science activities in full swing at UC Davis, in Fall 2020, our campus decided to renovate the first floor and basement of the former Physical Sciences and Engineering Library (PSEL) for the use of campus-wide Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) related activities. The renovation was finally completed in December 2023.
Shizhou Xu, originally from China, earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 2024 under the supervision of Professor Thomas Strohmer. His research focuses on the intersection of mathematics and trustworthy artificial intelligence, with particular emphasis on fairness, privacy, interpretability, and robustness in machine learning.
