Welcome back to Science Fair, Bwog’s weekly roundup of science events happening around campus. As always, email science@bwog.com if you want your event featured.

Joint Physics and Astronomy Colloquia in Honor of the Retirement of Professor Mal Ruderman: Cole Miller

  • Monday, October 31, 2022. 12:30 to 1:30 pm, lunch at 12 pm.
  • Center for Theoretical Physics (Pupin Floor 8).
  • “The astrophysical contributions of Mal Ruderman are broad and deep. Still, it is fair to say that he has a special affinity for neutron stars. In that spirit, I will discuss the efforts that the community has put into measuring the sizes of neutron stars in support of the program to learn about the dense matter in their cores. Along the way I will show that we have also discovered intriguing information about the magnetic field patterns on the surface of at least one millisecond pulsar, which is consistent with one of Mal’s many creative ideas.” More information here.

Viral Justice: Pandemics, Policing, and Public Bioethics

  • Tuesday, Nov 1, 2022. 4:30 pm.
  • Virtual (register here).
  • “Join us for our first 2022-23 Ethics Grand Rounds 2022/23 ‘Viral Justice: Pandemics, Policing, and Public Bioethics’ by Ruha Benjamin, PhD, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and Founding Director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin examines the twin crises of COVID-19 and police violence, mapping the multiple vectors through which racism gets under the skin, into the bloodstream, attacking our bodies and body politic. She offers a vision of change, viral justice – as a practical and principled approach to transmuting a hostile racial climate into one that is more habitable, hopeful, and just.” More information here.

High Energy Particle Seminar: Zahra Tabrizi

  • Wednesday, November 2, 2022. 1 to 2 pm, lunch at 12:30 pm.
  • Pupin Hall, Room 705.
  • “Neutrinos were discovered more than 60 years ago, yet they are the most mysterious particles of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. Some of neutrino properties can be explained through the current rich data of the neutrino experiments; however, there are still important unanswered questions which need to be clarified. In order to further explore the neutrino sector and answer these Questions, Next-generation, ong-baseline. Neutrino oscillation experiments are being built, including the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) in the United States. Given the intense neutrino beam, the massive far detector, and the envisaged scale of the near detector, DUNE will certainly offer a rich physics program. In this talk, I will first discuss how we can “directly” search for physics beyond the SM by directly producing the new particles at the neutrino experiments, and how we can use the potential of the DUNE-like experiments to explore the connections between neutrinos and other open questions of particle physics, including light dark matter, axion-like particles, etc. Secondly, I will demonstrate how to probe new physics at neutrino experiments “indirectly’, within the Effective Field Theory framework. In this way, the analysis of the data can capture large classes of models, where the new degrees of freedom have masses well above the relevant energy for the experiment. Moreover, it allows us to compare several experiments in a unified framework and in a systematic way, where in this way the results from neutrino experiments can be connected with the results of other experiments, such as LHC.” More information here.

Columbia Climate School – Exploring Broader Impacts

  • Thursday, November 3, 2022. 9 to 10 am.
  • Virtual (register here).
  • “Broader impacts, according to the National Science Foundation (NSF), are the ‘potential [for your research] to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of desired society outcomes.’ But what does this actually mean, and beyond NSF proposals, how might you incorporate these activities into proposals for other federal/state agencies, private foundations, or corporate partners? In this session, we will briefly introduce the goals of broader impacts, tips and best practices for achieving broader impacts, and provide concrete examples for how this has been achieved, with an emphasis on K-16 partners. Identifying a plan for broader impacts can be intimidating, especially because the guidance is so vague. But if you plan on working in an NSF-funded field, having an understanding of outreach and public engagement will be important for your future research efforts, and this session will help you get started on thinking about and planning out a long-term plan for this type of engagement and how to start building important connections now. There’s lot of room for creativity for broader impacts, and to get the most out of the session, we encourage you to share any questions you might have in advance or better yet, come to the session with an idea for an upcoming proposal and we will work through this as a case study in a group.” More information here.

Olivia Erdélyi – Regulating Artificial Intelligence: A True Team Effort

  • Friday, November 4, 2022. 10 am to 12 pm.
  • Virtual. Email Tanja Mlinski at mlinski@uni-bonn.de to register.
  • “Artificial intelligence increasingly determines our everyday life. In order to do justice to AI technologies and their regulation, it is necessary to look at legal, economic, social, and anthropological contexts in equal measure. Olivia Erdélyi will address the question of importance of interdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder cooperation in AI regulation.” More information here.

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