The Rest of AMC 2009

To continue my posts on AMC 2009, should mention that I did not go to Days 3 & 4 of the conference with much disappointment since I had some other duties to attend to. Anyway, I will list down the plenary lectures and the talks that I would have gone to if I'm there.

On Day 3, the plenary lectures are

• Xing Chaoping, "Algebraic Curves over Finite Fields and their Applications"
• Dongwoo Sheen, "Laplace Transformation Methods for Parabolic Equations"

Some other interesting talks on that day are:

• Ng Chi-Keung, "Geometric Unitaries in Operator Algebras and Operator Spaces"
• Do Ngoc Diep, "Geometry of Quantum Fields"
• Soren Eilers, "Classification of Graph C*-Algebras"
• Carsten Thomassen, "Graph Decomposition"
• Lee Chan Lye, "Crossing Numbers and Skewness of some 5-Regular Graphs"
• Ma. Nerissa M. Abara, "Characterizations of Symplectic, Lorentz and Skew-Convolutory Matrices"
• Tiang Poomsa-Ard, "Identities in Universal Graph Algebras"
• Eqab M. Rabei, "Hamilton-Jacobi Treatment of Lagrangian with Holonomic Constraints as Singular Systems"

On Day 4, the last day, there seems to be no plenary talks, but there are some interesting talks like the ones below:

• Dimitri A. Timashev, "Natural Differential Operations on Manifolds: An Algebraic Approach"
• Fatemah Ayatollah Zadeh Shirazi, "On Orbit Spaces in Transformation Groups with a Compact or Lindelof Phase Space"
• Kumatha Thinakaran, "Simulating the Circumambulation of the Ka'aba Using Sim Walk"
• Job A. Nable, "Star-Products, Quantum Moment Mappings and Lie Group Representations"

For the record, I should also mention presentations from UPM colleagues like Isamiddin Rakhimov, Anvarjon Akhmedov and others.

AMC 2009 Day 2

For the second day of AMC2009, I decided to sit in the Operator Algebra special session. Much to my fear of not knowing much, only starting to learn the subject (and in fact in a different emphasis), I only caught few glimpses of ideas llistening to the technical talks. The ones I attended are:

• Wayne Lawton, "Extending Pure States on C*-Algebras and Feiehtinger's Conjecture"
• Marie Choda, "Entropy for a Pair of Subalgebras Arising from Automorphisms"
• Le Anh Vu, "The Topology of Foliations Formed by the Generic K-Orbits of a Subclass of the Indecomposable MD5-Groups"

After the third talk, I slipped off to go to the plenary lecture by Park Jinsung on "Spectral Invariants and Dynamical Zeta Functions over Hyperbolic Manifolds" at noon. Systems on hyperbolic surfaces are research interests of my students and I for some time particularly for noncompact finite area ones. They have both continuous and discrete energy spectra. The subject of the talk however are pretty much more general and not limited to two dimensions. When it comes to identifying spectral invariants, the case of noncompact hyperbolic manifolds has a problem due to the continuous spectrum. But with proper regularization, spectral invariants are still definable. The details are however pretty technical.

The final talk that I've attended was on "Disjointness Preserving Maps of C*-Algebras" by Wong Ngai Ching in the special session on operator algebras. After that I fled with the rest of the group. The talks I've missed are

• Yasuo Watatani, "Composition Operators and C*-Algebras Associated with Complex Dynamical Systems"
• Ong Sing Cheung, "Dixmier's Theorem on Matrices over C*-Algebras"
• Zhu Chengbo, "Some Uniqueness Results in Representation Theory"
• Huang Jing-Song, "Dirac Operators in Representation Theory"

These are from the operator algebra special session but there are others that I would like to listen:

• Fedor Duzhin, "Simplicial Description of Artin's Braid Groups and their Representations"
• Enrico Paolo C. Bugarin, "On Colorings of Non-Periodic Tilings"
• Ma. Carlota B. Decena, "On the Index 3 and 4 Subgroups of Triangle Groups"

AMC 2009 Day 1

This post is long overdue; had too many things to do and partly because I was not too familiar with the subject matter. Hopefully from now on, I will not hesitate too much to display my ignorance.


Malaysia plays host to the 5th Asian Mathematical Conference last week i.e. June 22-26, 2009. Most of the public universities contributed to the organization of the conference but the main organizer is the Universiti Sains Malaysia. The conference had well over 500 papers and I was fortunate to be able to participate at least for a few days.


The conference kicked off with two plenary lectures in the morning. The first was Nalini Joshi who gave her talk on "Hunting Nonlinear Mathematical Butterflies". It is on her lifelong work of finding solutions of Painleve equations. These are nonlinear differential equations whose movable singularities are poles. Why butterflies? Well, it is named after the butterfly effect in chaos - solutions which are sensitive to initial conditions. From the talk, I gather the sensitivity here is with respect to the moving singularities.


The next plenary lecture was Yasuyuki Kawahigashi on "Quantum Field Theory and Operator Algebras". Prof. Kawahigashi is a long-time player in te field of algebraic quantum field theory, very mathematical stuff of handling quantum fields via operator algebras. He is also responsible for a special session on Operator Algebras throughout the conference. In his talk, he quickly run through definitions, motivations and some of his recent works towards the end of the talk.


In the afternoon, I briefly attended half of the invited talk by Robert Fitzgerald Morse on "Computing the Nonabelian Tensor Squares of Groups" and it touched upon something of my interest namely central extensions from the product of two groups. It is too abstract for me but would love to just see some results that I could use.


The next invited talk was Hyungju Park on "A Generalization of Castelnuovo-Mumford Regularity for Representations". He gave a nice motivation for the research he is doing namely trying to quantify the measure of complexity of collection of points. This is done by augmenting the degree of associated polynomials with some relations. After the introduction, my understanding degraded severely as he delves into abstract details of algebraic geometry.


I would have loved to go to other talks (despite the little understanding that I can get), but had to go back to the office as I was travelling with a group. Some of the talks that I would have like to go to are:

• L. Wicharn, "A Horizontal Categorification of Gelfand Duality"
• Paolo Bertozzini, "Morphisms of Spectral Geometries"
• Sadahiro Maeda, "Characterizations of Standard Real Hypersurfaces and Ruled Real Hypersurfaces in a Nonflat Complex Space Form"
• Ma. Louise Antonette N. Delas Penas, "On the Subgroups of the Extended Hecke, Hecke and Picard Groups"

These cover some areas I'm trying to follow at the moment.

Theses Week

Stacked up for me to read and should finished them very soon:

• Microwave Dielectric Properties of Selected Malaysian Herbal Leaves at Frequencies 0.13-20 GHz
• Dielectric Properties of Mangosteen at Microwave Region 0.13 GHz to 20 GHz
• Application of Surface Plasmon Resonance to Characterize Grapeseed Oil
• Effect of Nitric Acid on Producing SiO_2 from Rice Husk
• Producing Alumina Crucible by Slip Casting
• Application of Surface Plasmon Resonance to Characterizing Fish Oil
• The Addition Effect of Nano Fe_3O_4 Particle in High T_c Superconductor YBaCuO
• Preparation and Characterization of (Tb_1-xDy_x)MnO_3 (Multiferroic), x=0.1, 0.2 and 0.3
• Electrical Studies of (ZnO)(CaO)(P_2O_5)

What a variety!

Seminar on Current Thoughts in Physics

Sometime ago, the Malaysian Academy of Islamic Science contacted me for a possible talk in one of their seminars for which I agreed. Well the announcement is out:

Seminar Pemikiran Fizik Semasa

Date: Saturday, 18 April 2009

Time: 8.30 am - 5.00 pm

Venue: Bilik Mesyuarat FST, Dewan Anuwar Mahmud, UKM

Registration: Free

The talk will be something on my understanding of Kochen-Specker Theorem. I hope that I can do justice to the topic. Interestingly another colleague (Dr. Alinor) will be speaking on "Topos and Physics"; this may or may not overlap with my talk. Please note that the talks will be delivered in Malay. Here's the poster:

Delayed Report on HPSC4

I've been wanting to do this report on the talks that I've attended at HPSC4 for some time now but it was put off by other duties and problems. Since I'm not in the mood of doing the backlog pile of work, I thought I should do it now albeit a brief one.

Monday, March 2, 2009:
After arriving in the afternoon, the first talk I attended was by George Nemhauser on "Scheduling On Demand Passenger Air Service". Like the title says it is regarding a small plane on demand business problem where planes for not more than 3 persons are supposed to be scheduled according to spatial (destination) and time (arrival/departure) constraints, employing network theory and optimization. Next, was Nguyen Viet Hung on "A Benders Decomposition Method for the Signal-Optimization Problem in Traffic Light", attacking problem on traffic light signal cycle with minimization of traffic delay.

Tuesday morning, March 3, 2009:
The day begins with the plenary lecture of Alfio Quarteroni who had his title of talk changed to "Numerical Models for PDEs in Multiphysics". Initially I thought it was a talk on a software of a similar name but I was rather unaware that the term multiphysics refers to modelling of multiple physical phenomena simultaneously and in this case referring to geometric multiscaling (e.g. 3D-1D-0D). He gave various examples and most particularly in the design of cup-winning yacht. The next plenary talk was by Roland Eils on "Optimal Experimental Design in Computational Systems Biology", introducing systems biology with OED, which I do not quite follow the details. After the coffee break, there were parallel sessions - I continued to sit in the lecture hall where the plenary session is; most of the topics are not quite the sort of materials that I'm used to - so it does not really matter which parallel session I go to. The talks I attended then were Rolf Jeltsch on "Numerical Simulation of Compressible Magnetohydrodynamic Plasma Flow in a Circuit Breaker"; Guy Bayada on "Free Boundary Problems in Thin Film Hydrodynamic Lubrication Problems"; and Hai Yen Nguyen on "Numerical Study of Solitary Wave Solution to the BBM Equation".

Tuesday afternoon, March 3, 2009:
The afternoon sessions are all parallel sessions. I will simply list the talks I've attended.

• Peter Deuflhard, "Conformation Dynamics in Computational Drug Design"
• Alina Chertock, "A Second-Order Positivity Preserving Central-Upwind Scheme for Chemotaxis & Haptotaxis Models"
• Tuong Ha-Duong, "An Inverse Conductivity Problem with a Single Measurement"
• Karl-Heinz Hoffmann, "Can Mathematics Help to Drive a Car Safer?" (In case if someone is wondering what is the talk on, it is on modelling for sensors in tyres)
• Nikolay Botkin, "Modelling & Optimization in Cryopreservation Using Phase Field Models"
• Varvara Turova, "Simulation of Cell Shrinkage Caused by Osmotic Cellular Dehydration During Freezing"

Wednesday, March 4, 2009:
The day's talks is only for half a day since after lunch, the participants will have the chance to go for a city tour. The day kicked off with Ya-Xiang Yuan's talk on "A Parallel Decomposition Training Algorithm for Multi-Class Kernel-Based Vector Machines", one I didn't really follow. But the next plenary talk was quite general and enjoyed it. It is Horst Simon speaking on "Future Drections in High Performance Computing 2009-2018". He predicts the future use of multi-processor machines in clusters and a few other things. After the coffee break, there was only onetalk in the same room namely Pham Ky Anh on "A Parallel Iterative Regularization Method for Solving Systems of Operator Equations".

Thursday, March 5, 2009:
It's our final day there and I attended only the plenary talks since we were flying back home in the afternoon. The first talk is Peter Markowich speaking on "On Nonlinear Dispersive Euation in Periodic Structures: Semiclassical Limits and Numerical Schemes" and the second is "Optimal Control of Descriptor Systems" by Volker Mehrmann.

It is a pity that much of the talks are most probably stayed incomprehensible for me - much due to I'm trained in a different area of mathmetical physics. I was rather on a different duty that I had to do in preparing for ICREM4.

HPSC2009@Hanoi

Next week, I will be attending a conference on a subject which is not my specialization namely the 4th International Conference on High Performance Scientific Computing (HPSC2009) in Hanoi, Vietnam. I will however be going with another colleague who specializes in this subject. My presence there is mainly for administrative matters. Nevertheless, I will enjoy learning new things in HPSC during the conference, particularly what is considered the state of the art or frontier research in this area. Perhaps my closest encounter in (HP)SC (perhaps without the HP part) is in my student's work on the computing of Maass cusp forms. Another relation would be the fact that I'm heading this Computational Sciences & Informatics lab (I often jokingly called CSI Serdang). The lab has one program named HPC, Networks, Scientific Computing & Applications -formerly headed by my colleague.