General Information

Potsdam SIAM & GAMM Student Chapter

We are happy to announce that we founded a SIAM Student Chapter in Potsdam in February 2021. See here for general information about SIAM student chapters.
We are also very happy to announce that, as of September 2024, we are now a GAMM Nachwuchsgruppe as well! Learn here more about GAMM Nachwuchsgruppen.

The Student Chapter is an association of students at the University of Potsdam.

What are the benefits of being organised as a SIAM Student Chapter?

  • student members of the Chapter can get free SIAM membership
  • networking and collaboration opportunities with other Chapters
  • funded participation in SIAM Annual Meetings
  • funding for local activities like lunch discussions or lectures by guest speakers

Who can become a member?

  • the chapter is open to everyone who is interested
  • we especially encourage Master's students and PhD students to join

How to become a member?

  • subscribe to our mailing list here: subscribe to our mailing list here or join one of our meetings
  • there are no costs or duties for members.

General information:

  • President: Giuseppe
  • Vice-President: Martin
  • Treasurer: Giuseppe
  • Secretary: Paula
  • EMail addresse: siamchapter[at]uni-potsdam[dot]de
  • You want to stay up to date? Then subscribe to our mailing list here.

If you have any questions feel free to ask the PhD representatives Giuseppe and Martin. The faculty advisor of this Chapter is Prof. Dr. Melina Freitag.

Next Events

SIAM & GAMM Chapter Seminar - March 2025

Open to all early career researchers. Get to know what your fellow Ph.D. students are working on!
Time: 20.03.2025 at 4:00 pm
Place: Room 2.22 in house 9.

Details are announced via mailing list "SIAM-chapter-list", or ask Giuseppe or Martin.

Speaker: Maria Mannone
Title: Brain-Network Alteration in Disease: A Physical Journey
Abstract:
The damage caused by a neurological disease to the brain connectome can be formalized through the action of a suitable operator, the “Krankheit-Operator” (in short, K-operator). K acts on the connectivity matrix of the time-series correlations of a healthy brain and yields a diseased brain, or, acting on an already-diseased brain, gives the time evolution of the disease. Thus, the idea of an operator acting on an observable, derived from physics, can help model damage occurring in some neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases.

The presented specific forms of the K-operator concern Alzheimer-Perusini’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, schizophrenia, and long Covid. The visual inspection of the most prominent values of the K-operator can help identify those pairs of brain regions where to focus attention, deepening the analysis with recurrence plots. While the examples focus on functional connectivity, some research developments can also include structural connectivity, which is investigated with tractography.

Events earlier this year

SIAM & GAMM Chapter Seminar - January 2025

Open to all early career researchers. Get to know what your fellow Ph.D. students are working on!
Time: 29.01.2025 at 4:00 pm
Place: Room 1.22 in house 9.

Details are announced via mailing list "SIAM-chapter-list", or ask Franziska or Martin.

Speaker: Chloé Rouyer
Title: Introduction to Reinforcement Learning
Abstract:
Reinforcement Learning is the science of sequential decision-making and can be used to dynamically learn complex tasks for example in robotics or with self-driving cars. Instead of hard-coding the learner's behaviours, which can be too complex to formulate, the learner is placed in an environment, has to interact with it and is given rewards when performing good actions. These rewards are then used to shape future behaviours. The key challenge of reinforcement learning is to choose a behaviour-learning strategy that adapts to the uncertainty of the environment and the rewards.
In this talk, we consider a simple reinforcement learning framework and discuss strategies to optimize decision-making with noisy reward sequences.

Previous Highlights

MESIGA25: Numerical Methods in Applied Mathematics

Dear fellow Studis,

to honor and further revitalise the valuable tradition of bi-annually student chapter conferences, MESIGA, the hosting SIAM and GAMM student chapters at Uni Potsdam and the Berlin Universities are happy to invite you to the next iteration of this wonderful event from 11.03. to 13.03.2025. After an excellent event at Uni Trier in 2023, we want to match their spirit of hospitality for another great event. We hereby invite all Uni Potsdam students with a keen interest in the very broad topic to join us.

All required information can be found here: Information and Registration

 

SIAM SLAM

Can you summarize the content of your research in 3 minutes? Can you do it in an entertaining way? Then our SIAM Slam might be for you!

As a joint initiative of our SIAM Chapter and the SIAM Chapters of Aachen, Heidelberg and Magdeburg, we would like to invite you to SIAM Slam. There, different participants will present their theses or other scientific findings in a very short amount of time. The audience will choose the most entertaining and informative presentation.

The event will take place via zoom on the 10th of June at 18:00. Feel free to ask Florian for the login data.

Each participant will have exactly 3 minutes for their presentation. A slideshow is allowed, however, we advise reducing the number of slides. There will be a prize for the best presentation.

If you just want to be a spectator, you are welcome to join as well. Then, no registration is needed. In the second part of the event, we will run a short quiz based on the presentations. Here, the winner will also get a small prize. We plan to close the event with an opportunity to together play games online.

If you always wanted to try your hand at being a science communicator, this is your time. Who knows, maybe you are the next Richard Feynman or Stephen Hawking? :)

Archive of past events

We have compiled a list of past events here