Speaker: Lidija ZdravkovicVenue: Anzhong Lecture Hall, Anzhong Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Professor Lidija Zdravkovic is a Professor of Computational Geomechanics at Imperial College London. She served as Head of the Geotechnics Section from 2014 to 2024, and currently holds the positions of Admissions Tutor for the MSc in Geotechnical Engineering and Co-Director of the Nuclear Engineering Centre at the same institution. She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the internationally renowned journal Géotechnique. Her research focuses on the development and application of numerical methods in geotechnical engineering, as well as the experimental characterization of soils under mechanical and thermal disturbances. Her major contributions include the development of computational algorithms and constitutive models for coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical analysis of saturated and unsaturated soils under static and dynamic conditions, and their successful application to complex soil-structure interaction problems. These applications span offshore foundations, life-cycle assessment of climate change-affected infrastructure (such as embankments, earth dams, and slopes), flood defense works, rapid landslides, tunnels and deep excavations, as well as geological disposal of nuclear waste. Her core research philosophy is to provide reliable computational predictive tools for geotechnical engineering design through the deep integration of laboratory/field soil characterization and advanced numerical simulation. To date, Professor Zdravkovic has supervised over 40 doctoral students. In 2019, she was awarded the Imperial College President’s Medal for Excellence in Teaching and Research Supervision. She has published over 250 scientific papers and co-authored the classic textbook Finite Element Analysis in Geotechnical Engineering (two volumes), the Chinese edition of which was introduced by Science Press in 2010. Her research achievements have received numerous accolades, including the Telford Gold Medal from the Institution of Civil Engineers (2002), and the British Geotechnical Association Medal (2008/2010/2012/2020). She was also invited to deliver the Géotechnique Lecture in 2013 and the Rankine Lecture in 2024, one of the highest honors in the field of geotechnical engineering.

Speaker: Kumushoy AbduraimovaVenue: Room 530, Chengjun Building 7, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Prices of cryptocurrencies can differ across various trading venues, and those differences can persist over extended periods of time. Arbitrageurs aim to take advantage of the price differences (spreads) and, by doing so, can affect the market liquidity on those venues. Understanding the dynamics of cross-market liquidity is very important for the market participants, as the trading of cryptocurrencies is highly fragmented. Network approaches are applied to study the propagation of liquidity shocks in relation to the changes in spreads on different venues. Specifically, high-frequency network snapshots of spreads and liquidity contagion metrics are constructed for bitcoin prices on over 20 largest exchanges. The findings indicate a significant relationship between spreads and liquidity across the network. Moreover, it is found that the network centrality is related to the price discovery of a particular trading venue as measured by its information share.

Speaker: Valerie LaturnusVenue: Room 530, Chengjun Building 7, Zijingang CampusAbstract: On digital platforms, investors often extract profits at the expense of users, while users can do little about it. We study what happens when this structure is reversed and users themselves control the platform. Using detailed user-transaction data from 10 online lending platforms where users both borrow funds and control platform rules, we show that borrowers are generally less likely to participate in governance unless their money is at risk. Participation in governance then increases substantially, but mostly to benefit themselves at the expense of the broader user community. Governance decisions become more short-term oriented, and after liquidation, participation drops significantly and many affected users disengage from governance. Overall, our results show that giving users formal control can reduce the traditional conflict between investors and users. At the same time, when control is closely linked to platform use, platform stability declines.

Speaker: Dongwoo SheenVenue: 210 Haina Complex Building 2Abstract: High dimensional problems (of dimension >> 4) occur in many fields.Typical examples include(1) String theory (10D, 11D), Kaluza-Klein theories (5D),(2) Financial Mathematics: Multi-asset options pricing (high-dimensional PDEs)(3) Parametric Studies: Physical space + parameter space dimensions(4) Uncertainty Quantification: 3D space + 1D time + N stochastic dimensions(5) Machine Learning: Feature spaces with hundreds of dimensionsSome high dimensional problems can be reduced to lower dimension, by using suitable dimension reduction techniques. However, some other challenging problems should be solved as accurate as possible without dimension reduction.In this talk, we review several dimension reduction strategies briefly. Then we move to discuss several issues in essentially high dimensional problems, with the aim of accurate computing. In order to challenge the curse of dimensionality, sometimes we need to break our common senses, looking at problems from a completely different directions. Some examples from the finite element methods will be given.

Speaker: Shan ZhaVenue: Meeting Room 705, School of Medical Complex Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Professor Shan Zha is the James A. Wolff Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center, an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), and an internationally renowned scholar in the interdisciplinary field of DNA damage repair and immunology. Her research has long focused on DNA double-strand breaks and genomic instability. Using transgenic mouse models and cell biology techniques, she has systematically elucidated the central roles of key repair factors such as ATM, DNA-PKcs, and PARP in maintaining genomic stability, regulating immune system development, and suppressing lymphomagenesis. In recent years, she pioneered the discovery of novel roles for the DNA repair proteins Ku and DNA-PKcs in RNA metabolism and innate immune regulation, opening new directions in the intersection of genome integrity and immune response.Professor Zha has an extensive publication record, with over 70 papers in top international journals such as Nature, Molecular Cell, and PNAS. As an independent principal investigator, she has led eight NIH R01 grants and one NIH P01 multidisciplinary program project. She has long served on the editorial boards of journals including Nucleic Acids Research and JCB, and is a reviewer for leading journals such as Nature and Science. In 2020, she launched and organized the international online seminar series “SocialDNAling,” bringing together scholars from around the world. She has also served as chair multiple times for Gordon Research Conferences (GRC) and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) meetings, making significant contributions to advancing the field and promoting international collaboration.

Speaker: Sami UllahVenue: Meeting Room 123, College of Life Sciences, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Land ecosystems including forests absorb ~25% of the total CO2 emissions from anthropogenic sources. This sink is predicted to increase under increasing CO2 concentration. However, carbon capture in forests is also controlled by nutrient availability including nitrogen and these interactions are poorly understood to support and validate when modelling the role of forests in climate change mitigation.To elucidate the feedbacks between elevated CO2, C capture and nutrient availability, the University of Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) established a Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) facility exposing patches of temperate forests to +150 ppm CO2 above the ambient since 2017. In this seminar, the carbon capture and nitrogen cycling responses to nine year of CO2 enrichment will be highlighted to show the tight coupling of nitrogen cycling with carbon capture in mature temperate forests under future climates.

Speaker: Peter JimackVenue: Lecture Hall 210, Haina Complex Building 3, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and hardware are having a major impact on Computational Science. The traditional paradigm in Scientific Computing (SC), typically based upon mathematical models of the underlying phenomena followed by discrete approximation and a numerical solution, are being complemented and challenged by machine learning (ML) and other AI capabilities. In this presentation, I will consider a range of examples in which we have used ML techniques to enhance the traditional SC workflow, taking mesh generation and preconditioning as examples, followed by a discussion of ways in which physics-aware ML techniques may be applied in place of numerical schemes in applications such as fluid dynamics and nonlinear elasticity.

Speaker: Steven LaureysVenue: Meeting Room 313, Haina Complex Building 3, Zijingang CampusAbstract: How does the brain generate conscious experience, and how can it recover when severely injured? Advances in neuroimaging reveal the dynamic brain networks underlying awareness, offering new insights into both pathology and human potential.In this keynote, Prof. Steven Laureys will synthesize three decades of research on disorders of consciousness, including coma, unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, minimally conscious state and locked-in syndrome. Multimodal imaging shows how large-scale brain networks supporting sensory awareness and self-related processing can be disrupted by injury, yet retain remarkable capacity for recovery through neuroplasticity.Beyond clinical neurology, altered states such as dreaming, psychedelic states and meditation provide complementary windows into the mechanisms shaping conscious experience. Studies of long-term meditators show how structured mental training can induce measurable changes in brain connectivity related to attention, emotion regulation and cognitive flexibility.

Speaker: SHEN ZhongweiVenue: Lecture Hall 210, Haina Complex Building 2, Zijingang CampusAbstract: The resolvent estimates for the Stokes operator play an essential role in the functional analytic approach of Fujita and Kato to the Navier-Stokes equations. This talk is concerned with the study of resolvent estimates and the analyticity of the semigroup in LP for the Stokes operator in domains with rough boundaries. In the case of smooth domains (C2), the resolvent estimates are known to hold for all 1< p ≤ ∞. If the domain is Lipschitz, the estimates were established or a limited range of p,depending on the dimension. In this talk, I will present some recent work, joint with Jun Geng, or the case of C1 domains. In particular, I will discuss a key step in the case p=∞, which involves some new estimates that connect the pressure to the gradient of the velocity in the Lq average, but only on scales above certain level.