Speaker: Prof. ZHANG XuegongVenue: Seminar, A203-1, ZJE BuildingAbstract: Large language models (LLMs) pretrained on massive data have shown their power as foundation models for pervasive tasks in natural language understanding and beyond.This inspired us to develop large cellular models (LCMs) to decipher the transcriptomic language of cells.We have developed LCMs for single-cell transcriptomics toward this goal using two approaches, which produced the two large models scFoundation and scMulan. With pretraining on tens of millions of human scRNA-seq data covering almost all known cell types and states, the models have shown ability of capturing complex context relations among gene expressions and meta-attributes of cells. Experiments showed that the pretrained model can achieve state-of-the-art performances in zero-shot manner or with light fine-tuning on a diverse array of single-cell analysis tasks such as data enhancement, drug-response prediction at tissue and single-cell levels, single-cell perturbation prediction, cell type annotation, gene module inference and conditional cell generation.

Speakers: Prof.ZHU Jian, Prof.ZHAO Chengtian, Prof.PAN Weijun, Prof.XU ChengranHost: XU SuhongVenue: 2A-203, ZJE Building, Haining Campus ·Prof. ZHU Jian Vice Dean of the School of Life Sciences, Peking University; Boya Distinguished Professor, Peking University·Prof. ZHAO Chengtian Deputy Director, Institute of Marine Biodiversity and Evolution, Ocean University of China; Zhufeng Distinguished Professor, Ocean University of China·Prof. PAN Weijun Professor and Ph.D. Supervisor; Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences·Prof. XU Chengran Boya Distinguished Professor, Peking University; Principal Investigator, Peking University-Tsinghua University Joint Center for Life Sciences

Speaker: Alexander ZenchukVenue: Room 206, No.2 Haina Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: How to recover the quantum states sent remotely is an important research topic in quantum information theory. This report will introduce an important processing technique. Except possibly for the diagonal elements, the recovered quantum states are proportional to the corresponding elements of the initial states, and these elements satisfy the normalization condition. This method has important applications in the theory of quantum computing.

Speaker: Terry FlewVenue: 105,Building of School of Media and International Culture, Zijingang CampusAbstract: In this report, Professor Terry Flew will explore how the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) by consumers and industries will transform our understanding of communication studies in terms of social practice and academic research. He will focus on three key issues: the evolving status of machines as communication participants, rather than merely platforms that assist human communication; the impact of the increasing reliance on automated information and decision - making systems on trust; and how global communication, as a field of study, will be challenged by the changing relationship between data and geopolitics.

Speaker: YUAN PingzhiVenue: 820 Haina Complex Building 2, Zijingang CampusAbstract: In this talk, we propose some new algebraic structures of permutation polynomials (PPs) over  finite fields. As two applications of these new algebraic structures, we give some classes of new PPs over  finite fields and answer an open problem raised by Charpin and Kyureghyan in their paper [Finite Fields Appl. 15 (2009), no. 5, 615-632], and we improve some results of Ding and Zieve. This talk is based on the results in [P. Yuan, Algebraic Structure of Permutational Polynomials over  finite fields, Commun Algebra, DOI: 10.1080/00927872.2025.2476727]

Speaker: Michael DevittHost: LI ZhongweiVenue: Room 429, Building 4, Chengjun Court, Zijingang CampusAbstract: The ostrich nominalism is a derogatory term coined by Armstrong (1978) for Quine's response to the ancient one over many problem. Different from realists and traditional nominalists, ostrich nominalists do not attempt to solve this problem but dismiss it as a pseudo-problem. This lecture will explore the early responses to Armstrong in the academic community. These responses target Armstrong's requirements for ontological commitment. And Armstrong's truthmaker requirement - this requirement has dominated the later discussions. Truthmaking is usually semantically understood as a version of the correspondence theory, but it can also be understood from a metaphysical perspective. From a semantic level, ostrich nominalists believe that Armstrong's requirement is an attempt to wrongly infer metaphysics from semantics. When considered as an appeal to grounding from a metaphysical level, ostrich nominalists reject it again, arguing that this is another non-natural metaphysical appeal. This lecture will defend this rejection stance through the discussions by Rodriguez-Pereyra (2000, 2005). This lecture will also examine the priority nominalism proposed by Imaguire (2018).

Speaker: Dónal O'CarrollVenue: Lecture Hall 205, Comprehensive Building of the School of Medicine, Zijingang CampusAbstract: The germline is the immortal lineage,the cells that transcend generations and initiate the cycle of life.The mammalian germline is subject to major and essential epigenetic reprogramming.Processes that ensure germ cell development,epigenetic integrity, genomic stability and reproductive lifespan are essential for the long-term health and success of a species, or society in a human context. Our research helps understand the basis of infertility and diseases that arise by germline mutation or epimutation.

Speaker: James KungVenue: The Golden Hall, Building C, Chengzhang Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: A predominant feature of Chinese civilization is the widely-diffused respect for learning. We argue that this is due to the effect of China’s civil service examination system (keju), an incredibly long-lived institution in Chinese history. Using the variation in the density of jinshi across 278 Chinese prefectures in the Ming-Qing period (c. 1368-1905) to proxy for this effect, we provide evidence showing that a doubling of jinshi per 10, 000 population leads to an 8.5% increase in years of school ing in 2010. Our evidence thus suggests how in some cultures it is education rather than material wealth that is considered important as a transfer to the next generation. While the pers-istent effect of keju can be attributed to a multitude of factors including educational infrastructure, social capital, and so forth cultural transmission represents a key channel through which the widely-diffused respect for learning is transmitted across generations.

Speaker: Min-Chun HongVenue: 2-210, Haina Court, Zijingang CampusAbstract: In this talk, we establish a parabolic version of the gauge fixing theorem on the Yang-Mills flow and apply itto prove the maximal existence of weak solutions of the Yang-Mills flow in vector bundles over a compactn-dimensional manifold with initial value Ao having the curvature Fao in L2(M) for n 4. In particular, wegive new proofs on uniform estimates of α Fa by improving Moser's iterations and an idea of Hamilton onthe Ricci flow. Furthermore, we investigate the blow-up of the Yang-Mills flow at the maximal existence time. Finally, we improve an asymptotical result on the Yang-Mills flow in my early work with Tian.(This is a joint work with my PhD students Jared Casey and Chak Hoi Chan).