HKIAS News
HKIAS Rising Star Lecture - Mathematics
20 September 2021
Since its establishment, nurturing and supporting early career researchers has been a key part of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (HKIAS) mission. To inspire young academic leaders and promote diversity in academia, HKIAS launched a first-of-its-kind lecture series in this new semester – HKIAS Rising Star Lecture. Fifteen short-listed promising scholars at the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) will present their latest work in five HKIAS Rising Star Lectures, focusing on Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Materials Science, and Life Science, from 15 September to 24 November 2021.
Fifteen top researchers went through a rigorous selection process. Each of them will receive a certificate issued by HKIAS after giving the lecture. Furthermore, to assist them in beginning a rewarding career in academia, HKIAS will offer research grants to each rising star on hiring postdoc or Ph.D. students.
Mathematics underpins so much of the understanding of our world. The HKIAS Rising Star Lecture – Mathematics was held on 15 September 2021. The lecture enables anyone interested in the subject to see three promising mathematicians at CityU in action and share their latest research results.
Kicking off the lecture was Professor Junhui Wang, a Professor at the Department of Mathematics and School of Data Science at CityU. He delivered a talk titled "Latent Factor Model: Methodology, Theory, and Applications". He discussed several modern applications of the latent factor model, including recommender system and network embedding.
Before joining CityU in 2013, Professor Wang worked as an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He currently serves as Associate Editor for Statistica Sinica, Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, and Statistics and Its Interface.
Dr. Pierre Nolin, an Associate Professor of the Department of Mathematics at CityU, presented the second talk titled "Forest Fires and Self-Organized Criticality". Self-organized criticality is a fascinating phenomenon that can explain the emergence of "complexity" in nature. In his presentation, Dr. Nolin shared his recent research results on two lattice models: Forest fire processes, a model of excitable media, and Bernoulli percolation, a model of random media.
Dr. Pierre Nolin's research focuses on probability theory and stochastic processes, in connection with questions originating from statistical mechanics. Before joining CityU in 2017, Dr. Pierre worked as an Instructor and PIRE Fellow at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, USA, from 2008 to 2011, and as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, from 2011 to 2017.
Concluding the lecture was Dr. Xianpeng Hu, an Associate Professor of the Department of Mathematics in CityU. In his talk titled "Existence and Concentration of Weak Solutions for Compressible Navier-Stokes Equations, he updated the recent progress and the possible development of the concentration phenomenon of the kinetic energy associated with weak solutions of compressible Navier-Stokes equations.
Dr. Hu's research focuses on partial differential equations in fluid mechanics. He held the Courant Instructorship at NYU before joining CityU.
This lecture is supported in part by the Kwang Hua Educational Foundation.
More information about the lecture, please click here
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