Weekly Seminars

The AMSC program is excited to introduce a weekly seminar series starting this Spring. The seminars aim to foster collaboration between faculty and students, showcase research, and encourage student recruitment. Held every Monday at 4:00 PM in MATH 3206 (or virtually via Zoom), the series offers both synchronous and asynchronous presentation options. Join us for the first seminar on February 24 and stay tuned for ongoing weekly sessions. Recordings of the seminars can be accessed by the UMD community here

This Week

Date: Monday, April 7, 2025

Time: 4:15 PM

Place: MATH 3206 (Colloquium Room)

Speaker: Bill Fagan (Biology)

Title: Finite Expression Method: A Symbolic Approach for Scientific Machine Learning 

Abstract: This seminar will provide an overview of how continuous stochastic processes have been applied to the study of animal movement ecology using data from GPS tracking devices. I will present the mathematical foundations of these applications and discuss how we statistically fit the stochastic process models to diverse biological datasets. I will then give an overview of the wide range of applications that my colleagues and I have found for these approaches, including such biological topics as:
1) animal home ranges, migration, and space use
2) behavioral evidence for learning and disease states
3) route-based movement by carnivores
4) consumer-resource interactions

Movement data from GPS tracking devices typically feature a high degree of temporal autocorrelation, often at multiple scales. Over the years, our work has dealt with such data in a variety of statistical contexts, including:
1) timeseries analysis
2) kernel density estimation
3) path estimation via kriging
4) estimation of probability ridges
5) comparative (i.e., phylogenetically controlled) analyses
The talk will present results from joint work with mathematicians Leonid Koralov and Mark Lewis; past-postdocs Christen Fleming, Eliezer Gurarie, and Michael Noonan; past-PhD students Justin Calabrese and Nicole Barbour; current PhD students Frank McBride, Marron McConnell, Gayatri Anand, Stephanie Chia, Qianru Liao, and Phillip Koshute; current undergraduate Zachary Tomares; and hundreds of biologists. Open questions abound and span a wide range of difficulty. I have access to mountains of animal movement data and am eager for collaborators.

Spring Semester Schedule

  • February 24: Maria Cameron (Mathematics)
  • March 3: Steven Gabriel (Mechanical Engineering)
  • March 10: Elana Fertig (School of Medicine)
  • March 17: Spring break - No Seminar
  • March 24: AMSC Open House - No Seminar
  • March 31: Haizhao Yang (Mathematics)
  • April 7: Bill Fagan (Biology)
  • April 14: Antony Jose (Cell Biology & Molecular Genetics)
  • April 21: Harry Dankowicz (Mechanical Engineering)
  • April 28: Ricardo Nochetto (Mathematics)
  • May 5: Alexander Estes (School of Business)

Past Seminar Details