Speaker: Juan Casanova; Current Student, CDT in Data Science

Title: Is it *really* the same, though?

Abstract: The concept of two things being the same seems pretty straightforward, but it is actually a very hard question from a philosophical point of view, and an extremely important one from a mathematical one. I will talk about some ideas around this, such as the notion of identity, essence and equivalence; and evaluate them in different contexts. I promise lots of skewed opinions stated as irrefutable facts, philosophical and historical inaccuracy and no useful conclusions at all.

Speaker: Martino Sorbaro

Title: Models of epidemic spreading (including zombies)

Abstract: There is an extensive literature on models of epidemic spreading, which are interesting both from the points of view of epidemiology and of physics. Each class of model describes a disease that drives agents from being susceptible to infected, and finally either to susceptible again (SIS) or to permanently recovered (SIR), defining a set of differential equations on real space or on a network.

I’ll give a very partial introduction to the subject, and move on to talk about a recent paper that — in a serious way — extends them to a zombie-apocalypse disease, where the states are Susceptible, Zombie and Removed, or killed (SZR). I hope with this to give an interesting overview of a complex system that has applications in biology and network science.