Newsroom
Stay informed with our latest news and announcements on this page. For more in-depth content, we also encourage visitors to explore our bimonthly STRUCTURES Newsletter magazine, which features a variety of articles, interviews with members, and background information on our latest research and activities.
We are happy to announce the public talk by Anil Ananthaswamy, HITS Journalist in Residence 2023, titled “ChatGPT and its ilk - The rise of large language models and why we should care”. The event will take place on July 5, 2023, 7pm at the “MAINS” (Mathematik-Informatik-Station), located near the main station.
In his talk, organized in collaboration with the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation, Anil Ananthaswamy will explain the foundations of large language models (LLMs), their training process and their impact on society. He will discuss the curious emergent properties of these AI models, such as their ability to solve math problems despite not being explicitly trained for it. The question of whether LLMs possess genuine reasoning capabilities or merely engage in sophisticated pattern matching will be examined. The talk will also highlight the dangers of large language models, as they are currently designed, and why it’s important for society to become aware of the promises and perils of such AIs, as the technology has reached a point of no return.
Anil Ananthaswamy, currently serving as “HITS Journalist in Residence” at Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), is an award-winning science journalist and author. With his extensive expertise in science communication, he has contributed to reputable publications such as the New Scientist, Quanta, Scientific American and Nature, among others. Leveraging his background as a software engineer and his authorship of three popular science books, Ananthaswamy brings unique perspectives to his analysis.
Further information:
Strukturen treten in allen möglichen Formen auf und prägen das Universum auf vielfältige und entscheidende Weise. Das Exzellenzcluster STRUCTURES der Universität Heidelberg bietet im Rahmen der Akademischen Mittagspause 2023 spannende Einblicke in die Erforschung von Strukturen von subatomaren Teilchen zur Kosmologie und von der fundamentalen Quantenphysik bis hin zu den Neurowissenschaften.
Das Format der Akademischen Mittagspause besteht aus 15-minütigen Fachvorträgen, allgemeinverständlich und unterhaltend, mit anschließender Frage- und Diskussionsrunde. Ergänzt wird die Veranstaltungsreihe zusätzlich von der Hochschule für Kirchenmusik durch musikalische Beiträge zum Thema „Orgelmusik sehen“. Alle Termine, Details und aktuelle Hinweise finden Sie auf unserer Übersichtsseite.
Zeit & Ort:
Bis 19. Juli Jeden Mo-Fr 13:00 bis 13:30 in der Peterskirche
We are happy to announce this year's iteration of the Schöntal discussion workshop. The topic will be Turbulence & Chaos and will take place between August 22-25, 2023. The Schöntal workshop has been called into life a few years ago and is designed to stimulate discussions between members of the YRC about a specific topic. It is targeted towards young researchers from physics and mathematics and does not require any special prerequisites. For more information, please note the poster below.
Further information:
We are happy to announce the Arepo Development Workshop for ISM simulations, which takes place from September 11 to 15, 2023 in Manchester, United Kingdom, and is supported by the STRUCTURES Cluster of Excellence.
The goal of this highly interactive workshop is to bring together people who use and develop Arepo for ISM studies, allowing them to share their knowledge on improvements and modules they have introduced to the code. The code framework Arepo is a widely used tool for simulations in the astronomical community, whether it be for cosmological, galaxy or cloud scale simulations. In the field of ISM physics, many researchers use it as a basis for their models. Within STRUCTURESthe code is used especially in the context of comprehensive project CP1, which combines multi-scale numerical simulations with data analysis techniques and functional methods to answer the key question: Why is so much of nature structured rather than diffuse? In order to keep up with research of ever-increasing complexity, new and more elaborate physics has been introduced in the code in recent years.
Further information:
Workshop webpage
We are happy to announce the HEGL community seminar talk on Monday, June 26, at 2:15 pm, Mathematikon (Seminarraum C), in which Philip Engel will be talking on "Weaving Quasicrystals".
Abstract: I will begin by talking about joint mathematical work with Peter Smillie on tilings, quasicrystals, and moduli spaces of higher differentials. We will review the beautiful constructions of N. G. de Bruijn, who classified the Penrose tilings of the plane. Then, we will discuss how to generalize some parts of this work to build tilings of closed, flat surfaces.
For the second half of the talk, I will describe a joint art project with fiber artist Victoria Manganiello, on visualizing quasicrystals and higher dimensions. How are patterns made, converted into a format suitable for weaving, and then actually woven?
Further dates and information:
HEGL Community Seminar webpage
We are delighted to announce the special “Math colloquium” in honour of our external member and former STRUCTURES speaker Anna Wienhard, organized by the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS). The colloquium, which will take place on July 8, 11 am at Studio Villa Bosch, will be a special event in honour of Anna Wienhard, who took up her new position as Director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in November 2022.
The distinguished speakers at the colloquium will be:
- Steve Trettel (University of San Francisco): “Geometry from the Inside” (Abstract)
- Richard Schwartz (Brown University): “Divide and Conquer: 5 Point Energy Minimization” (Abstract)
After the talks and discussion, Anna Wienhard will be awarded HITS Fellow by HITS Scientific Director Tilmann Gneiting.
We are happy to announce the Topological Data Analysis (TDA) seminar on Thursday, June 22, 11:15 am at Mathematikon (room 00.200), in which Tobias Buck, research group leader at IWR and ZAH, will be talking about “Enhancing computational astrophysics with interpretable machine learning”.
The seminar is organized within the STRUCTURES Exploratory Project Mathematics and Data, a platform across the fields of the natural sciences and mathematics to discuss applications and foundations of topological data analysis and beyond. TDA provides versatile tools to uncover potentially hidden topological structures in data. Researches who use TDA in statistical contexts are regularly surprised by its vast sensitivity to non-local correlations. The goal of the TDA seminar is to bring together people from various backgrounds, with an emphasis on synergies with Machine Learning. Topics range from applications on real world problems to the abstract mathematical foundations of the subject.
Please find more information and the preliminary schedule for upcoming talks on the seminar website.