BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:icalendar-ruby CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/Vienna BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20290325T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=3 TZNAME:CEST END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20281029T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=10 TZNAME:CET END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1786546800@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260812T170000 DTEND:20260812T230000 DESCRIPTION:Abstract: On 12 August\, the VISTA Science Experience Center in vites you to From Eclipse to Starlight\, a cosmic summer evening at the I STA campus in Klosterneuburg.Starting at 6:00 pm\, visitors can enjoy a va ried program combining science and music. The ISTA Astro Club opens the ev ening with an interactive astronomy talk and quiz. Afterwards\, the total solar eclipse will be shown live on the big screen through a broadcast pro vided by the European Space Agency. At 8:30 pm\, Viennese singer songwrite r Oskar Haag takes the stage\, while FM4 DJ Phekt provides the musical bac kdrop throughout the evening. After dark\, visitors can join the ISTA Astr o Club to observe the Perseid meteor shower.Until 8:00 pm\, guests can als o visit the Science in the Making exhibition or watch Encounters in the Milky Way. Street food and drinks complete the festival atmosphere. LOCATION:VISTA Science Experience Center\, Klosterneuburg\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:From Eclipse to Starlight URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6565 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1786606200@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260813T093000 DTEND:20260813T103000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Manjunath Javoor\nhosted by Rafal Klajn\nAbstract: Cel l motility depends on the protrusive force generated by the actin cytoskel eton at the leading edge of cells. In lamellipodia\, thin protrusions at t he front of migrating cells\, actin forms higher-order networks with versa tile physical properties. Previous studies have hinted at the presence of different sub-populations of filaments and their spatial organization with in actin filament networks at the leading edge of migrating cells. Due to limitations of existing experimental methods\, it has not been possible to fully describe the complexity of the actin filament populations involved in protrusions at the leading edge.Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) has been used to describe the actin networks in cellular protrusions at single filament resolution in 3D. However\, these descriptions have been limited to 1-2 μm2 area of the protrusions\, providing merely snapshots of much larger assemblies that span serval tens to hundreds of square microns area . Consequently\, they have not provided a holistic overview of the existin g variability within actin networks. We therefore lack a comprehensive und erstanding of how actin network geometries orchestrate cell migration.To a ddress these challenges\, I developed a montage cryo-electron tomography w orkflow to obtain three-dimensional views of lamellipodial regions coverin g areas of up to 100 μm2 at single-filament resolution. Seamless three-di mensional tomogram stitching is achieved by combining neural-network-based denoising strategies with novel optical-flow-based algorithms\, thereby p reserving filament continuity across large reconstructed volumes. Our comp utational analysis pipeline enabled us to vectorize all filaments within t hese volumes\, including filaments reaching lengths of up to 4 μm. The da ta generated here represent a valuable resource for the actin community\, as they provide one of the most detailed and extensive three-dimensional d escriptions of actin filament architecture in the lamellipodium. Specifica lly\, they reveal accurate F-actin concentrations\, filament length distri butions\, connectivity\, and the spatial organization of filament sub-popu lations. These datasets can be used to support and constrain biophysical a nd theoretical models of actin network organization\, dynamics\, and force generation. LOCATION:Sunstone Bldg / Ground floor / Big Seminar Room B / 63 seats (I23. EG.102) and Zoom\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Manjunath Javoor: Thesis Defense: Large-scale imaging of cellular a ctin networks at single-filament resolution using montage cryo-electron to mography URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6576 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1786623300@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260813T141500 DTEND:20260813T151500 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Vicente Luis Diaz Melian\nhosted by Kimberly Modic \nA bstract: When a Leidenfrost droplet floats on its own vapor layer\, the in terplay between vapor pressure\, surface tension\, and gravity determines its shape\, and in the stable regime the underside of the droplet exhibits curvature inversion. Using interferometric imaging\, we observe a differe nt behavior for a levitated hydrogel sphere. Curvature inversion appears b riefly after deposition\, but the continuous vaporization process removes this feature\, leading first to an oscillatory regime and eventually to a steady state without curvature inversion. We demonstrate the essential rol e of vaporization in shaping the hydrogel underbelly\, where direct mass l oss has a stronger influence than the balance between vapor pressure and e lastic forces. LOCATION:Central Bldg / O1 / Lecture Hall (I02.O1.014) and Zoom\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Vicente Luis Diaz Melian: Thesis Defense: The morphology underneath a levitated hydrogel sphere URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6561 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1786629600@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260813T160000 DTEND:20260813T170000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Klemens Rottner\nhosted by Florian Schur\nAbstract: Ce ll migration and proliferation as well as communication and trafficking\, all depend on the fine-tuned and continuous remodeling of actin filaments\ , which are nucleated and elongated by addition of monomers\, regulated in turn by several monomer-binding factors. The most prominent of those cert ainly constitute profilin 1\, the largely ubiquitous family member in mamm als\, and profilin 2 more enriched in the nervous system. Profilins are we ll established as both inhibiting spontaneous actin filament nucleation an d promoting formin-dependent actin filament elongation\, but their precise cell biological roles are less clear.In this seminar\, I will provide evi dence establishing that the presence of any profilin is obligatory for cel l growth in both mammals and amoeba\, although minute amounts of the prote in are sufficient for mediating migration and actin turnover. I will also show that aside from being essential for formin-dependent filopodia and mi crospike formation\, profilin is also crucial for Arp2/3 complex-dependent processes. Mathematical modeling reveals how this can be explained. Our d ata thus also refute previous suggestions of antagonistic connections betw een profilin and Arp2/3 complex. Instead\, profilin emerges as master regu lator of both formin- and Arp2/3 complex-dependent actin assembly pathways operating directly and indirectly\, respectively. LOCATION:Office Bldg West / Ground floor / Heinzel Seminar Room (I21.EG.101 )\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Klemens Rottner: Defining profilin function in mammalian actin dyna mics and cell behaviour URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6583 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1786975200@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260817T160000 DTEND:20260817T170000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Kevin Kögler\nhosted by Krzysztof Pietrzak\nAbstract: Modern datasets often contain as many variables as observations\, or many more\, making classical statistical tools difficult to apply and standard machine-learning models hard to understand. To address this problem\, thi s thesis develops methods for inference and compression in this high-dimen sional regime\, centered on approximate message passing (AMP)\, a family o f iterative inference algorithms which are conjecture to be optimal for ma ny of these problems.First\, we introduce rotationally invariant generaliz ed AMP (RI-GAMP)\, extending AMP beyond independent Gaussian design matric es to a broad class of matrices with complex correlations and arbitrary li miting spectra. We characterize its performance rigorously through state e volution and show that it approaches the performance of Vector AMP while a voiding its computationally expensive singular-value decomposition.We then study nonlinear autoencoders when the input and compressed dimensions gro w proportionally. For Gaussian data\, we derive fundamental limits for one -bit compression by shallow two-layer autoencoders\, characterize their op timal solutions\, and prove that gradient methods reach them. For structur ed data\, however\, a shallow linear decoder may ignore information such a s sparsity and behave exactly as it does for Gaussian inputs. Adding nonli nearities or depth overcomes this limitation: deeper decoders can learn co mputations closely related to AMP and approach optimal reconstruction for a fixed encoder.Finally\, we apply these ideas to predict plasma-protein a bundance from UK Biobank individual-level genetic data\, using approximate ly 8.4 million genetic variants from roughly 40\,000 individuals. A two-st age genetic Vector AMP pipeline first selects a small set of predictive ge nomic regions and then fits more detailed linear or tree-based models. Com bined with a one-hot representation of the genotype data\, this procedure closes the previously reported average gap between linear and deep-learnin g prediction and improves prediction for many proteins in a proteome-wide comparison.  LOCATION:Office Bldg West / Ground floor / Heinzel Seminar Room (I21.EG.101 ) and Zoom\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Kevin Kögler: Thesis Defense: Compression and Inference in High Di mensions: An Approximate Message Passing Perspective URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6577 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:6a85953fddda5101667480@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260824T140000 DTEND:20260824T150000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Farzan Farnia\nhosted by Marco Mondelli\nAbstract: Dee p generative models have achieved remarkable success by learning to imitat e complex data distributions\, yet distributional fidelity alone does not explicitly promote properties such as diversity\, novelty\, or imagination . In this talk\, I will explore how entropy can provide a principled way t o extend the conventional objective of generative modeling beyond imitatio n. Utilizing pretrained neural network representations\, we introduce a sp ectral notion of entropy that captures semantic diversity through the eige nvalues of a kernel covariance operator. I will discuss that the concavity of this entropy has two important consequences. First\, finite samples sy stematically underestimate the entropy of the underlying population\, moti vating our study of whether this diversity loss persists in trained genera tive models. Our experiments then reveal a consistent entropy gap between standard generative models and their training distributions. Second\, conc avity makes entropy superlevel sets convex\, allowing us to show that proj ecting a low-diversity model onto a sufficiently high-entropy set can move it closer to the true data distribution. Building on these insights\, I w ill introduce Imaginative Generative AI (IGA)\, an entropy-regularized fra mework that provides a path from diversity correction to deliberate extrap olation\, with the entropy of the data defining an Entropy Wall that separ ates faithful imitation from the generation of more diverse worlds beyond the observed distribution. LOCATION:Office Bldg West / Ground floor / Heinzel Seminar Room (I21.EG.101 )\, ISTA ORGANIZER:swiddman@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:Farzan Farnia: Entropy in Generative AI Models: From Imitation to I magination URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6592 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1788163200@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260831T100000 DTEND:20260831T110000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Anastasiia Teplova\nhosted by Martin Loose\nAbstract: This thesis comprises two parts addressing distinct questions in plant sig nalling. Part I examines the proposed nucleotide-cyclase activities of pro teins involved in plant hormone signalling. Part II investigates how plant s sense gravity and how this information is translated into a directional growth response.In this thesis defense talk\, I will focus on the second p art and present my research on the molecular mechanisms underlying root gr avitropism. Gravity is perceived in specialized cells called statocytes\, where starch-filled amyloplasts sediment according to the direction of gra vity. This leads to auxin redistribution\, which drives differential growt h and allows the root to bend towards gravity. LZY proteins provide an imp ortant molecular link between statolith sedimentation and the establishmen t of cell polarity. However\, how LZY polarity is connected to the downstr eam regulation of auxin transport remains incompletely understood.My work investigates this connection\, focusing on the dynamic localization and po larization of proteins in root statocytes following root reorientation. In particular\, I examine the relationship between LZY proteins and two pote ntially interconnected systems: AGC kinases involved in regulating PIN aux in transporter activity\, and the RLD–GNOM machinery involved in membran e trafficking and PIN polarity. I show that components of both systems dyn amically redistribute during the gravitropic response and investigate thei r connections with LZY proteins and with each other. Together\, these resu lts contribute to understanding how gravity-induced cell polarity is conne cted to the regulation of auxin transport during root gravitropism. LOCATION:Sunstone Bldg / Ground floor / Big Seminar Room B (I23.EG.102) and Zoom\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Anastasiia Teplova: Thesis Defense: Chasing the elusive: Investigat ing nucleotide cyclase activity in gibberellin and strigolactone signallin g\; Cellular mechanisms of gravity sensing and response in roots URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6593 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1788253200@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260901T110000 DTEND:20260901T120000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Stepan Ovchinnikov\nhosted by Johannes Fink\nAbstract: Bacterial adaptation depends not only on the selective environment but al so on the genetic background that determines which variants can arise and how they affect fitness. This thesis investigates how genetic background a ffects bacterial adaptive capacity by experimentally examining the effect of insertion sequence (IS) elements activity and establishing a strain sys tem for future experiments to reveal the role of natural competence.The ma in experimental study compared Escherichia coli MG1655 with a derivative l acking all 45 chromosomal IS elements\, together with additional strains d esigned to separate the effects of IS removal from restoration of the IS-d isrupted gene wbbL. Replicate populations were adapted to increasing conce ntrations of a five-antibiotic mixture and to each antibiotic individually \, and their adaptive responses and evolutionary routes were compared. Und er mixture selection\, IS-containing and IS-free populations reached simil ar endpoint resistance and acquired similar numbers of mutations\, althoug h their mutation spectra differed significantly. IS-driven mutations were rare\, indicating that IS activity contributed little to adaptation under this condition. Adaptation to individual antibiotics produced larger treat ment-specific resistance gains and more recurrent mutations in the same lo ci across independently evolved populations than adaptation to the antibio tic mixture. The contribution of IS-driven mutations varied among antibiot ics and was highest under tetracycline selection. Under tetracycline treat ment\, IS-containing populations adapted faster and reached higher selecti on concentrations than IS-free populations. Inactivation of wbbL partially restored the adaptive capacity of the IS-free strain but did not fully el iminate the difference\, while IS-containing populations repeatedly access ed IS-mediated mutations unavailable to the IS-free strains.Earlier experi ments examining adaptation to ethanol\, sodium chloride\, and butanol did not provide reliable evidence for differences between the IS backgrounds. Growth observed at high sodium chloride and butanol concentrations during selection was not retained after stress-free recovery\, whereas turbidosta t-based ethanol experiments revealed technical limitations of using the de vice for parallel long-term evolution. These results motivated the more ro bust antibiotic-selection design. Finally\, an experimental framework was developed to test whether natural competence contributes to the adaptive c apacity of Bacillus subtilis. As a first step toward the proposed experime nts\, a genotypically verified ΔcomEC strain and characterized fluorescen t strains were constructed\, but the evolution experiments remain to be in itiated.Together\, these results show that IS elements can expand the repe rtoire of accessible mutations without conferring a universal adaptive adv antage. Whether IS activity improves adaptation depends on the selective e nvironment\, the wider genetic background\, and whether IS-mediated mutati ons provide particularly beneficial adaptive routes. LOCATION:Central Bldg / O1 / Ballroom (I01.O1.006) and Zoom\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Stepan Ovchinnikov: Thesis Defense: The Role of Genetic Background in Bacterial Adaptation URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6601 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1788267600@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260901T150000 DTEND:20260901T160000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Jonas Ingmanns\nhosted by Monika Henzinger\nAbstract: Precise microscopic models of physical processes are often too complex to be useful for understanding or simulating phenomena on a macroscopic scale . The complexity can be drastically reduced if there is a suitable approxi mation which still accurately captures the effective large-scale behavior of the underlying model. This thesis contains contributions to the rigorou s justification of such large-scale approximations  or three different mo dels. Chapter 2 presents joint work with Federico Cornalba\, Julian Fisch er\, and Claudia Raithel. We consider a large system of weakly interacting particles\, driven by independent Brownian motions. The physicists Dean a nd Kawasaki proposed a strongly singular SPDE to describe fluctuations of the particle density. However\, without a suitable regularization\, the De an–Kawasaki equation has been shown to be ill-posed in the sense that it does not admit martingale solutions for any continuous initial data. We s how that a structure-preserving discretization of the Dean–Kawasaki equa tion – acting as a suitable regularization – captures the density fluc tuations of the particle system up to arbitrary order in the inverse numbe r of particles and a discretization error. Chapter 3 presents joint work with Elisa Davoli and Lorenza D’Elia. We consider a magnetic body consis ting of a composite material with a random microstructure. The oscillating magnetic properties are encoded in the micromagnetic energy functional wh ich is restricted to functions taking values on the sphere\, governing the observable states of magnetization. We obtain a qualitative stochastic ho mogenization result in the form of Γ-convergence. The Γ-limit is a micro magnetic energy functional with constant\, deterministic coefficients\, me aning that the magnetic body can be treated as if consisting of a single m aterial when the microstructure is small enough. On a technical level\, we obtain an analogous result replacing the sphere with other sufficiently re gular manifolds.Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 present joint work with Julian Fis cher. We consider interface motions driven by curvature and a uniform forc ing through a stationary field of possibly impenetrable random obstacles s atisfying a finite range of dependence assumption. This process models\, e .g.\, the motion of dislocation lines or magnetic domain boundaries in mat erials with inhibiting impurities. In Chapter 5\, for dimension = 2\, we introduce an easy-to-check criterion for general obstacle fields which imp lies ballistic behavior. More precisely\, this criterion yields an almost guaranteed effective minimum speed on large scales for the interface motio n \, with ‘effective’ meaning that enclosures left behind a main front can be ignored. In Chapter 4\, for any dimension ≥ 2\, assuming such a n almost guaranteed effective minimum speed\, we obtain a quantitative sto chastic homogenization result in any dimension\, proving that the main fro nt can be approximated with a constant-speed motion on large scales. LOCATION:Office Bldg West / Ground floor / Heinzel Seminar Room (I21.EG.101 ) and Zoom\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Jonas Ingmanns: Thesis Defense: On the large-scale behavior of inte racting particle systems\, composite magnetic materials\, and interface mo tions through random obstacle fields URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6560 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1788433200@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260903T130000 DTEND:20260903T140000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Nathalie Gruber\nhosted by Jérémie Palacci\nAbstract : Bacteria inhabit an extraordinary range of environments\, each shaped by its own selective pressures that can fluctuate within seconds to seasons. A persistent selective pressure across these environments is imposed by v iruses that infect bacteria\, called phages. This ongoing coevolution betw een bacteria and phages has led to multiple defense strategies on both sid es. Bacteria have defense strategies at multiple levels: at the cell surfa ce\, physical barriers such as capsules\, exopolysaccharides\, and recepto r modifications limit phage adsorption\, while intracellularly\, molecular defense systems degrade or restrict invading genomes. However\, how these spatially distinct layers are coordinated during infection remains largel y unexplored.To address this\, we investigated the genome-clustered anti-p hage defense island of Escherichia coli K-12\, which encodes four anti-pha ge systems. We found that a single system dominated intracellular defense across diverse phages. Strikingly\, under sustained phage pressure\, a sec ond extracellular layer of defense emerges: phage-induced mucoidy. This is a regulator of capsule synthesis (Rcs)-dependent and quorum-sensing-indep endent response that generates protective extracellular matrix. This mucoi d matrix confers broad resistance\, protecting against 29 of the 31 phages tested. Critically\, the two layers are not independent\; the strength of the defense system-mediated restriction directly sets the phage dose thre shold at which mucoidy is induced. Therefore\, intracellular and extracell ular defenses do not operate in isolation but as a single\, quantitatively coupled immune response.By revealing a direct mechanistic link between in tracellular anti-phage systems and phenotypic switching to mucoidy\, this work reframes bacterial immunity as an integrated\, multi-layered process\ , with broad implications for phage–host coevolution and for the design of phage therapies against mucoid variants\, which are associated with inc reased patient mortality. LOCATION:Central Bldg / O1 / Ballroom (I01.O1.006) and Zoom\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Nathalie Gruber: Thesis Defense: Genetic Strategies Enabling Bacter ial Adaptation to Selective Pressures URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6591 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:6a6718ef86935830306549@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260903T134500 DTEND:20260903T150000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Eduardo Fernández Ortuño\nhosted by Lora Sweeney\nAb stract: The phenomenal size and cellular diversity of the human cerebral c ortex is the outcome of an elaborate developmental program sculpted by evo lutionary forces during millions of years. This evolution involved changes in neural progenitor cells\, which compared to reptiles and birds acquire d the capacity to generate larger numbers of neurons and in greater divers ity. Genetic causes of increased progenitor cell proliferation during evol ution have been identified\, but mechanisms involved in the diversificatio n of neural progenitor cells remain unknown. To address this question\, we performed the first integrated\, multi-level\, comparative study of neura l progenitor cells and lineages in the embryonic cortex across amniotes. T he analysis was focused on four strategic species that cover the spectrum of cortical phenotypes: house snake\, chick\, mouse and ferret. Our result s revealed an unsuspected diversity of basal progenitor cell types in chic k\, superior to mouse and with similarities to the more complex ferret cor tex. Chick dorsal pallial progenitors included subapical and basal Radial Glia\, and co-expressed Pax6 and Tbr2\, similar to ferret but unlike mouse \, where these are largely absent. Our findings challenge current concepts on the evolutionary trajectory of the cerebral cortex\, revealing a very early diversification of cortical progenitor cell types in amniotes that p redated the last common ancestor of mammals and birds. LOCATION:Sunstone Bldg / Ground floor / Big Seminar Room B / 63 seats (I23. EG.102)\, ISTA ORGANIZER:jgazsi@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:Eduardo Fernández Ortuño: Don't Put All Your Eggs in the Neocorte x: How the small chick dorsal pallium challenges mammalian-centric views o n brain cortex evolution URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6573 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1788508800@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260904T100000 DTEND:20260904T110000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Andreas Ehrmann\nhosted by Paul Schanda\nAbstract: Bio logy is overwhelmingly good at designing building blocks that are orchestr ated in remarkable processes to enable the functioning of complex organism s. Is it possible to achieve similar complexity in nanotechnology? The fie ld of self-assembly offers a promising route towards bio-inspired function ality. While significant progress has been made in the inverse design of c omplex structures\, little is currently known about embedding these struct ures with dynamics and functional behavior at levels found in biology. Unl ike biology\, we do not have million years of evolution to result in optim al behavior. We aspire to discover fundamental design principles in simple physical systems by taking an optimization approach that builds up on met hods developed by the Machine Learning community to achieve a desired func tion. Many future nanotechnologies will need to do more than hold a desig ned shape: they will need to move\, switch states\, and interact with othe r objects in controlled ways. Is it possible to replicate the precise\, ta rgeted energy delivery of ATP hydrolysis in synthetic systems\, where we c annot rely on biochemical interactions\, to power synthetic nanomachines? In this thesis\, we develop a mechanical model for a controlled energy-del ivery mechanism between bistable nanostructures\, and discover key design features necessary to generate a pathway for efficient energy transduction . Inspired by the universality of ATP hydrolysis\, this achievement could serve as a scheme for powering more and more complex tasks. We show how bi stable nanostructures can be designed so that their conformational changes produce a prescribed behavior. By separating the energetic control of a n anoscale switch from the geometric placement of its binding sites\, we ide ntify which aspects of its energy landscape can be programmed under realis tic constraints. The results provide design principles for turning synthet ic nanostructures into functional\, machine-like objects. By demonstrating how we can translate the scheme for energy delivery to three-state molecu lar machines walking along a track at a very basic level\, we take a first step towards performing a task. We reveal a fundamental speed-efficiency tradeoff and important design considerations. This research contributes to wards designing nanomachines that might eventually be able to contest with the levels of complexity and functionality found in biology. LOCATION:Central Bldg / O1 / Mondi 2a (I01.O1.008)\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Andreas Ehrmann: Thesis Defense: Biological functionality without b iochemistry: designing nanomachines for target behavior URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6578 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1788951600@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260909T130000 DTEND:20260909T140000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Andrea Stöllner\nhosted by Jorryt Matthee\nAbstract: Charge accumulation on aerosol particles plays an important role in a vari ety of natural and industrial processes. An example is cloud electrificati on\, in which collisions between ice crystals and graupel cause large amou nts of charge to be exchanged between airborne particles. Optical tweezers are a highly specialized tool that can hold a single micrometer-sized air borne particle stably in the same position over weeks while measuring its electric charge with elementary-charge resolution. In this work\, we show that the trapping laser can also be used to give charge to the micropartic le. Via a two-photon process the particle acquires more and more positive charge\, enabling us to study its electrical behavior from uncharged up to multiple hundred elementary charges. By studying the dynamics of such hig hly charged particles over days and weeks we find that they spontaneously undergo microdischarges which range from just a few to several hundred ele mentary charges. We show that these discharges are triggered by cosmic-ray muons which pass through the air close to the particle and supply the ion s needed to cause charge loss. Our findings highlight the potential of aer osol optical tweezers to provide new insights into microscale charging and discharging phenomena\, with implications for both fundamental studies an d atmospheric electrification processes. LOCATION:Central Bldg / O1 / Mondi 3 (I01.O1.010)\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Andrea Stöllner: Thesis Defense: Microscale Electrical Behavior of Highly Charged Individual Aerosol Particles Using Optical Tweezers URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6572 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1789635600@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260917T110000 DTEND:20260917T120000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Krishna Shrinivas\nhosted by Carl Goodrich\nAbstract: Living cells perform remarkable functions that are powered through biomole cular networks that interact and react in crowded cellular environments. M any biomolecules are highly dynamic\, fluctuating among diverse conformati onal ensembles and spatially self-organizing through phase transitions. Ho w can cells harness the physics of these dynamic assemblies to sense\, com pute\, and respond to their environment? Using design as a lens\, I will e xplore how physical principles connect molecular-scale dynamics and self-o rganization to enable and constrain biomolecular information processing. LOCATION:Ballroom / Central Bldg / O1\, ISTA ORGANIZER:caroline.ernst-petz@ista.ac.at SUMMARY:Krishna Shrinivas: Cellular computations and decision-making by dyn amic biomolecular ensembles URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6607 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1789736400@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260918T150000 DTEND:20260918T173000 DESCRIPTION:hosted by Samarth Hawaldar\; Edward-Fulbright Gheorghita\nAbstr act: Labs Visited: Fink\, Katsaros\, Modic\, Leonard\, and Hosten LOCATION:Lab and Office Building West\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Quantum Experimentalist Lab Tours URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6617 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1789983000@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260921T113000 DTEND:20260921T123000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Lena Schwarz & Jiawei Bao\nhosted by Jorryt Matthee & Martin Hetzer\nAbstract: Lena Schwarz | Mapping Developmental Dynamics of Autism Spectrum DisorderMouse Models at Single-Cell ResolutionAutism spect rum disorder (ASD) is associated with a wide range of risk genes\, yet how distinct mutations lead to overlapping clinical features remains poorly u nderstood. ASD is also diagnosed more often in males than females\, but th e molecular basis of this sex disparity remains unclear.We used single-nuc leus multi-omics sequencing to simultaneously examine gene expression and chromatin accessibility in 251 samples from eleven monogenic ASD mouse mod els. The dataset included both sexes\, two brain regions\, and three devel opmental stages. Across models\, ASD-associated mutations delayed radial g lial cell progression and transiently affected neural lineage specificatio n. The strongest transcriptional alterations occurred during the perinatal period\, particularly in excitatory and inhibitory neurons. These changes included reduced expression of synaptic and ion-channel-related genes\, p otentially reflecting homeostatic adaptations. Although several molecular alterations were shared across models\, each mutation also produced a dist inct molecular signature.Convergence was most pronounced at the early post natal stage\, a putatively critical period of cortical maturation and refi nement. At later developmental stages\, the shared molecular processes  i ncreasingly diverged\, identifying the early postnatal period as a key win dow of ASD-related molecular vulnerability. We also observed marked sex-sp ecific effects\, with females frequently displaying broader transcriptiona l dysregulation and larger effect sizes than males.Overall\, our findings reveal dynamic\, developmentally regulated molecular consequences of genet ically diverse ASD-associated mutations. They identify both convergent and mutationspecific mechanisms\, emphasize the importance of sex-dependent e ffects\, and provide a comprehensive view of developmental cellular and mo lecular dynamics across models of ASD.____________________________________ ___________________________________________Jiawei Bao | The Pulsing of th e Tropical Climate SystemWeather forecasts keep us prepared for the week a head\, while climate projections warn us of long-term changes over coming decades. But what about the weeks and months in between? This middle groun d\, known as the subseasonal-to-seasonal timescale\, remains one of the mo st challenging frontiers in atmospheric science\, yet it is precisely the timescale that matters most for managing floods\, droughts\, and food secu rity. In this talk\, I will walk through how scientists predict weather a nd climate\, the tools and models involved\, and why the gap in between ha s proven so difficult to bridge. I will then introduce a newly discovered phenomenon in the tropics — the Tropics-Wide Intraseasonal Oscillation ( TWISO) — a coherent pulse that links tropical weather phenomena across t he globe\, not just within one region or system\, on timescales of weeks t o months. It looks as if the tropical climate system is pulsing together. By capturing signals that existing frameworks miss\, TWISO offers a promis ing new avenue for improving predictability in the tropics\, with potentia l benefits for communities most vulnerable to extreme weather. LOCATION:ISTA | Central Building | Raiffeisen Lecture Hall\, ISTA ORGANIZER:diana.zubcevic@ista.ac.at SUMMARY:Lena Schwarz & Jiawei Bao: ISTA PostDoc Award URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6386 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1790074800@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260922T130000 DTEND:20260922T180000 DESCRIPTION:Abstract: We are excited to announce the 2nd annual Neuroscienc e Faculty Symposium organized by your student neuroscience track represent atives!Every neuroscience PI will hold a brief talk discussing their lab' s current research. The symposium will include catered breaks! Please als o join us for the Pizza Reception following the talks.We look forward to seeing you all there! LOCATION:Raiffeisen Lecture Hall\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Neuroscience Faculty Symposium URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6589 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:6a1e9cbf72e58407814214@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260922T150000 DTEND:20260922T160000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Domenico Cafiero\nhosted by Robert Seiringer\nAbstract : Anyons are 2d identical quantum particles with an intermediate exchange symmetry characterized by representations of the braid group. In the abeli an case\, they can be modelled through the so-called magnetic representati on\, namely as a system of bosons with an Aharonov-Bohm flux attached to e ach particle.In this talk\, I will discuss the construction of self-adjoin t Hamiltonians\, different from the Friedrichs realization\, for a system of three abelian anyons. I will focus in particular on the Ter-Martirosyan -Skornyakov extensions. This family of Hamiltonians turns out to be parame trized by a suitable boundary operator\; I will present a complete classif ication of its self-adjoint realizations and compute the negative spectrum for the specific case of interest. These results shed light on the possib le occurrence of Thomas instability in the three-anyon model. Joint work w ith Michele Correggi (PoliMi) and Davide Fermi (PoliMi). LOCATION:Office Bldg West / Ground floor / Heinzel Seminar Room (I21.EG.101 )\, ISTA ORGANIZER:boosthui@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:Domenico Cafiero: On the three-body Hamiltonian for abelian anyons URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6566 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1790092800@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260922T180000 DTEND:20260922T190000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Klaus-Robert Müller\nhosted by ÖAW\nAbstract: Abstra ctIn recent years\, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) methods have begun to play a more and more enabling role in the sciences and in industry. In particular\, the advent of large and/or complex data c orpora has given rise to new technological challenges and possibilities. I n his talk\, Müller will touch upon the topic of ML applications in the s ciences\, in particular in medicine and if time permits also in chemistry. He will also discuss possibilities for extracting information from machin e learning models to further our understanding by explaining nonlinear ML models. Finally\, Müller will briefly discuss perspectives and limitation s.BioKlaus-Robert Müller is Professor for Machine Learning at TU Berlin a nd at Korea University\, Seoul. He is director of BIFOLD – one of 5 perm anently funded German national AI centers. He is a member of Leopoldina\ , BBAW and Acatech and an external scientific member of the Max-Planck S ociety. Among others he received the Berlin Science prize\, the Vodafone I nnovation Award\, the Hector Science award\, the Feynman award\, the IEEE CIS Neural Network Pioneer Award and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz prize. Consecutively from 2019 on he became ISI Highly Cited Researcher. His rese arch interests are in AI for the sciences and in the foundations of AI.Pho to: © Bifold LOCATION:Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2\, 1010 Vienna\, Austria\, ISTA ORGANIZER:events@ista.ac.at SUMMARY:Klaus-Robert Müller: AI for the Sciences: towards Understanding URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6288 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:6a8ec4a176df3637528802@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260923T130000 DTEND:20260923T140000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Fabian Gundlach\nhosted by Tim Browning\nAbstract: We give asymptotics for the total number of interlaced simultaneous ordered factorizations of integers n_1 <= X_1 and n_2 <= X_2. The answer is surpri sing. LOCATION:Central Bldg / O1 / Mondi 4 (01.01.011 (Mondi4 is next to Mondi Th ree))\, ISTA ORGANIZER:boosthui@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:Fabian Gundlach: Counting interlaced factorizations URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6639 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1790240400@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260924T110000 DTEND:20260924T120000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Prof. Yves Geerts\nhosted by Rafal Klajn\nAbstract: Lo uis Pasteur and Pierre Curie dreamed of directing chiral symmetry breaking using external magnetic and electric fields. [Chem. Rev. 1998\, 98\, 2391 ] Their attempts failed due to time-inversion symmetry\, theoretically exp lained by Laurence Barron. [JACS 1986\, 108\, 5539] Dissipative non-equili brium conditions break this symmetry and allow the separation of enantiome rs under the influence of erroneous chirality\, as recently demonstrated b y Ron Naaman and Francesco Tassinari. [Chem. Sci. 2019\, 10\, 5246. Cryst. Growth Des. [2021\, 21\, 2925] With my team\, we have undertaken a resear ch project to further our understanding by directing deracemization toward s R or S enantiomers using chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS). [Acc . Chem. Res.] [2020\, 53\, 2659] I will report on our latest results and t he prospects for realizing Pasteur and Curie's long-held dream. LOCATION:Seminar Room C | Moonstone\, ISTA ORGANIZER:hcai@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:Prof. Yves Geerts: Spin-directed Chiral Symmetry Breaking URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6579 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:6aa7cc7f86cf5144155787@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260924T140000 DTEND:20260924T150000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Pavel Arkhipov\nAbstract: Continual counting under pur e differential privacy is one of the simplest and most well-studied proble ms in the continual observation model. Given a binary stream $x_1\, \\ldot s\, x_n \\in \\{0\,1\\}$\, the goal is to release\, at each time $t$\, an approximation to the prefix sum $\\sum_{i=1}^t x_i$. The entire output seq uence must satisfy $\\epsilon$-differential privacy\, while making the acc uracy as good as possible. We consider the maximum expected squared error over all times $t$ as our accuracy score. Very recently\, it was shown tha t the correct asymptotics for this error is $\\Theta(\\epsilon^{-2} \\log^ 3 n)$ for factorization-based mechanisms.We give a construction using a ge neral matrix factorization mechanism\, improving the leading constant for the mean squared error. The mechanism starts from a good-quality low-dimen sional factorization and lifts this factorization to arbitrarily large dim ensions.On the lower-bound side\, we show a very simple $\\Omega(\\epsilon ^{-2}\\log^3 n)$ lower bound for the special case of factorizations whose matrices have entries in {0\, 1}.This talk covers a subset of our paper wi th Nikita Kalinin (https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08963) LOCATION:Mondi Seminar Room 3\, Central Building\, ISTA ORGANIZER:joanders@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:Pavel Arkhipov: TCS Seminar - Differentially Private Continual Coun ting via Matrix Factorization: Constructions and Lower Bounds URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6619 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:6ab3a838b3318701999875@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260925T100000 DTEND:20260925T110000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: John Martinis\nhosted by Johannes Fink\nAbstract: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 to John Clarke\, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis for t he discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quant isation in an electric circuit.John Martinis' presentation traces the evol ution of superconducting quantum computing from its foundational physics e xperiments in the 1980s to the 2019 demonstration of quantum supremacy wit h Googles Sycamore processor. Scaling current noisy quantum systems into f ault-tolerant commercial computers requires transitioning from bespoke aca demic fabrication to standardized 300mm semiconductor manufacturing lines and horizontal industry partnerships. LOCATION:Raiffeisen Lecture Hall\, Central Building\, ISTA ORGANIZER:jdeanton@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:John Martinis: From prehistoric qubits to building a useful quantum computer URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6653 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1790341200@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260925T150000 DTEND:20260925T180000 DESCRIPTION:hosted by ISTA\nAbstract: Join a lively peertopeer event design ed for postdocs navigating the job search.Share practical tips\, vent comm on frustrations\, celebrate successes\, and exchange honest advice — all in a relaxed speednetworking format that reminds you: you’re not alone in this process!Food\, fun\, facilitation\, and meaningful connections inc luded.The Maria Gugging hills are waiting for you! LOCATION:Moonstone Seminar Room F+G\, ISTA ORGANIZER:boris.cesnik@ista.ac.at SUMMARY:PAW Closure Networking Event URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6495 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1790587800@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260928T113000 DTEND:20260928T123000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Francesco Locatello\nhosted by Christoph Lampert\nAbst ract: Causality at Machine Learning Scale and ComplexityDistinguishing coi ncidence from cause-and-effect relationships is a central challenge in AI (and science): which patterns just co-occur\, and which signal causality? Statistical causality offers a rigorous framework for this question\, but it assumes clean\, low-dimensional\, structured data\, which clashes with the raw\, high-dimensional observations of machine learning applications\, including in science. In this talk\, I will present how we can now learn causal structure directly from unstructured data using deep learning\, bri dging between the modeling power of causality and the scalability properti es of machine learning. I will also highlight some cross-disciplinary coll aborations my group has built\, uniquely enabled by ISTA.  LOCATION:Raiffeisen Lecture Hall\, ISTA ORGANIZER:diana.zubcevic@ista.ac.at SUMMARY:Francesco Locatello: Tenure Talk URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6548 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:6aab9d24089c1483964014@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20260930T160000 DTEND:20260930T170000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Wun Kwan Yam\nhosted by Johannes Fink\nAbstract: Quant um communication in the microwave frequency regime is set to play an impor tant role in distributed quantum computing and hybrid quantum networks. In a step towards practical quantum networks\, we demonstrate quantum telepo rtation of coherent states over a thermal quantum network composed of two spatially-separated dilution refrigerators\, operating at channel temperat ures up to 4 K. Furthermore\, we investigate a quantum secret sharing prot ocol in a tripartite superconducting network\, reconstructing microwave co herent states with fidelities above the no-cloning threshold and realizing unconditionally secure communication. We explore inherent connections bet ween quantum secret sharing and other important quantum information proces sing tasks\, such as quantum dense coding and elementary quantum error cor rection of channel erasures. Our results show the experimental feasibility of distributed superconducting architectures and motivate further investi gations of practical quantum networks in various frequency regimes. LOCATION:Office Bldg West / Ground floor / Heinzel Seminar Room (I21.EG.101 )\, ISTA ORGANIZER:sandra.widdmann@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:Wun Kwan Yam: Microwave quantum communication in superconducting ne tworks URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6665 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1790928000@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261002T100000 DTEND:20261002T110000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Elisa De Ranieri\nhosted by Charles Roques-Carmes\nAbs tract: Ever wondered how high-impact journals select content for publicati on and how peer review works? In this talk\, I will discuss the editorial process at these journals\, which typically rely on professional editors\, focusing in particular on the Cell Press portfolio and introducing Newto n\, our flagship physics journal. I will also share my views on current tr ends in scientific publishing\, and provide tips on how to maximise the fi t of your manuscript for high-impact journals and on how to deliver an app ropriate reviewer report if you are invited to review a manuscript.  Eli sa De Ranieri\, Editor-in-Chief\, NewtonElisa obtained her PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge and worked as a research scientist at th e Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory. Her experimental work on semiconductor spi ntronics included the design\, fabrication\, and characterization of devic es by magneto-transport and magneto-optical measurements. Elisa joined Cel l Press in 2021 as Head of Author Experience and Research Integrity after acquiring extensive editorial and publishing experience at the Nature port folio\, working amongst other roles as an editor for Nature Nanotechnolog y\, Nature Energy\, and as Editor-in-chief for Nature Communications. In 2023-24 she was the Director of Author Experience for Cell Press\, and be came the founding Editor-in-chief of Newton in 2024. LOCATION:Heinzel Seminar Room\, ISTA ORGANIZER:omerhalil.unal@ista.ac.at SUMMARY:Elisa De Ranieri: Publishing in influential journals URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6610 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1791192600@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261005T113000 DTEND:20261005T123000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Friedrich Stricker & Yuval Wigderson\nhosted by Björn Hof\nAbstract: Friedrich Stricker |Beyond On/Off: Multistate Molecules an d MaterialsA slime mold with no brain and no nervous system can still reme mber: Physarum polycephalum reinforces the tubes of its cytoplasmic networ k along paths that once carried nutrient flow\, so a stimulus encountered minutes ago changes how the organism responds to a stimulus now. History i s written directly into the material's structure. Synthetic materials have rarely matched this — not because they can't respond to a cue\, but bec ause most are built to give one answer\, not many\, and to forget the mome nt the stimulus is gone.At the root of that limitation is a simple fact ab out energy landscapes. In a binary switch\, a stimulus drives the system a long one path — on to off\, off to on — so the response is always the same regardless of how it got there. In a multistate system\, the same sti mulus can drive the system along different paths depending on kinetics\, l ocal environment\, and history: the landscape stops being a fixed two-well problem and becomes something the material can be routed through.Getting there means tracing a single design logic across three length scales. At t he molecular level\, multistate photoswitches give us control over kinetic s\, absorption\, and mechanistic pathways — the raw vocabulary of reacti vity. Organizing those switches within ordered\, multiphase materials – often liquid crystal elastomers – lets us govern how changes at the mole cular level propagate into changes in structural order. And by shaping how these material meet a stimulus — through its geometry — we convert mo lecular-scale reactivity into coordinated\, purposeful behavior at the mac roscale. Molecular design\, material organization\, and geometry aren't se parate levers\; each constrains and amplifies the next\, and it's this cha in that lets us engineer function rather than just response.This chain — molecule\, assembly\, geometry — is a first step toward a larger goal: materials in which a past stimulus leaves a physical trace that biases the path taken by future stimuli\, built not from external control but from m olecular architecture that intrinsically encodes state. Programming reacti vity\, assembly\, and geometry together is how we move from isolated switc hes to physically intelligent\, multifunctional matter.___________________ _____________________________________________________________Yuval Wigders on |Finding Structure in ChaosPareidolia refers to the human tendency to see patterns in unstructured chaos. Examples of pareidolia can range from the benign (seeing constellations in the night sky) to the destructive (g ambling one's savings on the imagined patterns of a roulette wheel's outc omes).However\, sometimes the patterns really are there! In fact\, in man y cases\, we can prove this mathematically: no matter how complex and chao tic a system may seem\, it must contain some given structure within it. In this talk\, I will give a gentle introduction to Ramsey theory\, the fasc inating area of mathematics that studies such theorems\, and discuss some of the major questions we still cannot answer. LOCATION:ISTA | Central Building | Raiffeisen Lecture Hall\, ISTA ORGANIZER:diana.zubcevic@ista.ac.at SUMMARY:Friedrich Stricker & Yuval Wigderson: Inaugural Lecture URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6357 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:68498ab73a3db369081593@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261006T110000 DTEND:20261006T120000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Morten Kjaergaard\nhosted by Johannes Fink\nAbstract: I will discuss recent results from our lab on developing a tight control-a nd-feedback loop between rapid FPGA-based advanced logic and superconducti ng qubit control\, which enables qubit characterization\, optimization\, g ate benchmarking\, and parameter estimation on millisecond wall-clock time scales. I will introduce our work on a suite of sparse-sampling and on-FPG A inference methods\, including efficient estimators for exponential and s inusoidal response functions as well as on-FPGA implementations of NelderM ead optimization\, golden-section search and an adaptive Bayesian updating algorithm. With this approach\, we estimate T1 in a few milliseconds and find highly surprising dynamics at these rapid timescales\, we optimize re adout parameters in roughly 100 ms\, we optimize pulse amplitudes in 1 ms\ , we perform Clifford randomized benchmarking in 107 ms\, and sustain more than 74\,000 consecutive recalibrations during a 6-hour closed-loop run. These approaches enable in situ recalibration that can track evolving qubi t dynamics and enable new approaches to maximizing superconducting qubit p rocessor performance and reveal new physics of state-of-the-art quantum pr ocessors. LOCATION:Office Bldg West / Ground floor / Heinzel Seminar Room (I21.EG.101 )\, ISTA ORGANIZER:swiddman@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:Morten Kjaergaard: Superconducting qubit control on millisecond tim escales: from rapid feedback to new qubit dynamics URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6555 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:6a35020e9b607174372145@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261007T130000 DTEND:20261007T140000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Jonathan Bober\nhosted by Tim Browning\nAbstract: The Z-function associated to an L-function is a rotated real-valued function defined so that |Z(t)| = |L(1/2 + it)|\, so that critical zeros of L(s) ar e real zeros\, and presumably sign changes\, of Z(t). For the zeta functio n\, the integral of Z(t) is well-understood. I'll discuss the integral for (mostly) Dirichlet L-functions\, and some phenomena in the spacings of ze ros of zeta and L-functions discovered along the way. These phenomena seem to be governed by the vanishing/non-vanishing of certain Gauss-type sums. This is joint work with Zhenchao Ge and Micah Milinovich. LOCATION:Central Bldg / O1 / Mondi 2a (I01.O1.008)\, ISTA ORGANIZER:boosthui@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:Jonathan Bober: Integrals of Z-functions URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6654 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1791797400@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261012T113000 DTEND:20261012T123000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Suvi Gezari\nhosted by Zoltan Haiman\nAbstract: Using Tidal Disruption Events as Probes of Massive Black Hole Formation and Grow th Over Cosmic TimeAbstract: The tidal disruption of a star that wanders too close to a central black hole is a unique probe of quiescent supermass ive black holes lurking in the nuclei of galaxies.  We have demonstrated the ability to discover and spectroscopically classify large samples of ti dal disruption events (TDEs) in the optical from the Zwicky Transient Faci lity (ZTF) Northern Sky Survey\, with systematic high-energy follow-up wit h Swift and XMM-Newton. From these efforts\, we now know the spectroscopic signatures\, multi-wavelength properties\, and host galaxy preferences of TDEs\, and can begin to use them as powerful probes of massive black hole demographics in quiescent galaxies.  One of the most exciting applicatio ns of TDEs is the ability to probe intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) t hat are expected to reside in dwarf galaxies\, with demographics that enco de the seeding mechanism of massive black holes in the early Universe.  I will outline our strategy in the next decade for searching for TDEs acros s the black hole mass function\, and over cosmic time\, by extending our s ensitivity to TDEs to lower central black hole masses and higher redshifts \, by exploiting the discovery power of the next generation of wide-field time domain surveys\, including Rubin\, Roman\, ULTRASAT\, and UVEX.  LOCATION:Raiffeisen Lecture Hall\, ISTA ORGANIZER:diana.zubcevic@ista.ac.at SUMMARY:Suvi Gezari: Institute Colloquium | Suvi Gezari URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6590 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1792065600@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261015T140000 DTEND:20261015T150000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Sylvain Gigan\nhosted by Charles Roques-Carmes\nAbstra ct: Multiple scattering of light in a disordered medium is usually seen as a nuisance to be corrected\, for instance in imaging. Yet a scattering me dium is also an extremely rich physical system: it mixes an enormous numbe r of optical modes in a fixed\, deterministic way\, and can therefore act as a very large random matrix multiplier for information encoded on the li ght field. In this talk\, I will show how this property can be harnessed t o perform computations at scale\, with applications ranging from random pr ojections for machine learning and optical reservoir computing to the acce leration of large-scale inference. Linear scattering alone\, however\, is not sufficient: non-linearity is the key ingredient of any expressive neur al computation. I will discuss several strategies to introduce non-lineari ty into scattering-based optical processors\, from the non-linearity of in tensity detection and data re-encoding\, to recurrent linear scattering\, to genuinely non-linear disordered materials. I will conclude with perspec tives on how such physical systems can be trained\, and what they could of fer in terms of energy efficiency and scalability. Sylvain Gigan has been a Professor of Physics at Sorbonne Université since 2014. He conducts hi s research at the Kastler Brossel Laboratory (Physics Department of the É cole Normale Supérieure)\, where he leads a research group dedicated to p hotonics and complex media.After earning his PhD in quantum optics at UPMC in 2004 under the supervision of Claude Fabre \, he joined the University of Vienna (Austria) as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Markus A spelmeyer and Anton Zeilinger\, working on quantum optomechanics. From 200 7 to 2014\, he was an Associate Professor at the Langevin Institute (ESPCI ParisTech)\, where he pioneered his research on controlling light in comp lex media. His current work focuses on wave propagation in highly scatteri ng media. Historically centered on deep imaging and mesoscopic physics\, h is research has now expanded to harnessing optical disorder for high-dimen sional quantum information and optical computing (hardware acceleration fo r artificial intelligence). In 2016\, his fundamental research led to the co-founding of the spin-off LightOn. LOCATION:Heinzel Seminar Room\, ISTA ORGANIZER:omerhalil.unal@ista.ac.at SUMMARY:Sylvain Gigan: Non-linear optical processing with random media URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6690 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1792393200@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261019T090000 DTEND:20261021T170000 DESCRIPTION:hosted by Jorryt Matthee\nAbstract: First light on the ELT is n ominally three years away. Time is ticking for us to start thinking about how to best use the ELT. The Austrian Academy of Science is financing a se ries of 5 yearly meetings leading up to first light. The main aim is to br ing together the future ELT community and to help build the science cases and proposals that will shape the ELT’s initial observing periods. A key goal of the meeting is to connect the instrument builders with the future users of the ELT\, in order to educate the community for how to best make use of these instruments once they are on-sky.This three-day meeting aims to cover numerous discussions on early ELT science topics across instrume nts\, as well as simulated observations that guide observing strategies. T he meeting will complement traditional scientific presentations with a sim ulation hackathons in the afternoons.For 2026\, the scientific focus is on science and simulations at the edge of the sensitivity limits enabled by the large collecting power of the ELT’s 40m mirror. LOCATION:Moonstone Building\, ISTA ORGANIZER:niels.eelman@ista.ac.at SUMMARY:Austrian ELT Workshop URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6616 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1792396800@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261019T100000 DTEND:20261019T110000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Adrijana Smoljan\nhosted by Andela Saric\nAbstract: Th e successful colonization of terrestrial environments by plants required t he evolution of developmental and signalling mechanisms that enabled adapt ation to increasingly heterogeneous environments. Among these innovations\ , environmental sensing and directional transport of the plant hormone aux in have played central roles in shaping plant morphology and adaptation to external cues. However\, the evolutionary origins of these regulatory sys tems remain incompletely understood. This thesis investigates two fundamen tal evolutionary questions: when auxin transport mediated by PIN auxin tra nsporters emerged during plant evolution and how MIZ1 proteins acquired th eir role in root hydrotropism.The first part of the thesis examines the ev olution of PIN-FORMED (PIN) auxin transporters using chlorophyte algae and other early-diverging eukaryotic lineages. Physiological analyses demonst rated that chlorophyte algae exhibit concentration-dependent responses to exogenous auxin and possess both passive and energy-dependent auxin transp ort systems\, indicating that fundamental aspects of auxin biology predate the emergence of land plants. Phylogenetic\, structural\, and functional analyses revealed that PIN homologs are broadly distributed across diverse eukaryotic lineages and retain the characteristic PIN protein fold and pr edicted auxin-binding residues. However\, heterologous expression assays i n Xenopus laevis oocytes\, tobacco BY-2 cells\, and Arabidopsis thaliana d emonstrated that these ancestral PIN homologs lack the directional auxin e xport activity characteristic of canonical land plant PIN proteins. Instea d\, they predominantly localize to the endoplasmic reticulum and display l imited or no auxin transport activity\, suggesting that ancestral PIN prot eins primarily functioned in intracellular auxin homeostasis before being recruited for polar auxin transport during land plant evolution.The second part of the thesis investigates the evolutionary diversification of MIZ1 proteins\, key regulators of root hydrotropism in Arabidopsis thaliana. Ph ylogenetic analyses showed that MIZ1 proteins are conserved throughout lan d plants but absent from green algae\, indicating that the protein family originated early during terrestrialization. Although MIZ1 homologs from Ma rchantia polymorpha\, Physcomitrium patens\, Selaginella moellendorffii\, and Amborella trichopoda displayed highly conserved predicted structures a nd endoplasmic reticulum localization\, none were able to complement the h ydrotropic or cytokinin-response defects of the Arabidopsis miz1 mutant. F unctional characterization of Marchantia revealed that MpMIZ1a regulates t hallus development\, cytokinin-dependent growth responses\, expression of cytokinin biosynthetic genes\, and normal sporophyte development\, indicat ing an ancestral role in cytokinin homeostasis and developmental regulatio n rather than hydrotropism. Furthermore\, protein docking predicted an int eraction between MpMIZ1a and its native cytokinin receptor MpCHK\, which w as supported experimentally by bimolecular fluorescence complementation (B iFC). BiFC revealed interactions between the cognate protein pairs MpMIZ1a –MpCHK and AtMIZ1–AtAHK4\, whereas little or no interaction was detect ed for the reciprocal cross-species combinations MpMIZ1a–AtAHK4 and AtMI Z1–MpCHK. This species-specific interaction compatibility provides a pot ential mechanistic explanation for the inability of MpMIZ1a to functionall y complement the Arabidopsis miz1 mutant. Together\, the findings present ed in this thesis demonstrate that both auxin transport and MIZ1 protein f unction evolved through the progressive modification and recruitment of an cestral molecular components. The results support a model in which early P IN proteins primarily regulated intracellular auxin homeostasis before evo lving into specialized plasma membrane auxin exporters\, while MIZ1 protei ns originated as endoplasmic reticulum-associated regulators of cytokinin- dependent development and were subsequently recruited into the hydrotropic signalling pathway of seed plants. By integrating comparative genomics\, structural biology\, molecular genetics\, live-cell imaging\, and physiolo gical analyses across diverse evolutionary lineages\, this work provides n ew insights into the molecular innovations that contributed to the success ful colonization of terrestrial environments and the evolution of developm ental plasticity in land plants. LOCATION:Central Bldg / O1 / Mondi 2a (I01.O1.008)\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Adrijana Smoljan: Thesis Defense: Evolution of auxin transport and MIZ1-mediated developmental responses during plant adaptation to terrestri al environments URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6666 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1792402200@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261019T113000 DTEND:20261019T123000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Wilfrid Jean Louis\nhosted by AURAS\nAbstract: Wilfrid Jean Louis | AURAS Survey 2026: The PhD and Postdoc Experience at ISTATh e AURAS 2026 survey gathered feedback from more than 220 PhD students and postdocs at ISTA\, 45% of the institute’s PhD students participated. The survey explored different aspects of the experience at ISTA\, including r esearch and working environments\, workload and well-being\, teaching and courses\, career development\, workplace safety\, institutional support\, representation\, and track communities. In this colloquium\, AURAS will p resent the main findings of the survey\, highlighting both positive aspect s of the institute experience and areas where students and postdocs see op portunities for improvement. The presentation will also discuss difference s across tracks and identify themes that emerged across the institute as a whole. LOCATION:Raiffeisen Lecture Hall\, ISTA ORGANIZER:diana.zubcevic@ista.ac.at SUMMARY:Wilfrid Jean Louis: AURAS | Wilfrid Jean Louis URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6614 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1792494000@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261020T130000 DTEND:20261020T140000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Yuri Ignatyev\nhosted by Beatriz Vicoso\nAbstract: The spinal cord plays a central role in sensorimotor behavior\, integrating s ensory input and descending commands from the brain to generate movement. Like the brain\, it is composed of diverse populations of excitatory and i nhibitory neurons. Over the course of evolution\, vertebrates have adapted to new environments and evolved distinct body plans\, yet it remains uncl ear how the neuronal architecture of the spinal cord has changed to suppor t these adaptations. Advances in single-cell genomics have made it possibl e to characterize neuronal diversity at single-cell resolution\, but in th e spinal cord such data are largely limited to mammals. To address this ga p and understand how spinal neuronal diversity has evolved\, this thesis c ompares spinal cell types across vertebrates\, including zebrafish\, frog\ , lizard\, mouse and human.First\, we generate a single-cell transcriptomi c atlas of the developing spinal cord of the amphibian Xenopus laevis and compare it with mouse developmental data. This reveals a highly conserved developmental framework across tetrapods\, including conservation of the m ajor cardinal classes\, their spatial distributions and temporal subdivisi ons.Second\, we extend this comparison to the adult spinal cord by generat ing a single-cell and spatial transcriptomic atlas of the frog spinal cord and comparing it with mouse and human data. In contrast to development\, we find marked divergence between amphibians and mammals\, largely restric ted to dorsal excitatory interneurons of the superficial dorsal horn\, inc luding several mammalian-specific populations. Adding zebrafish further su pports the dorsal excitatory compartment as a major site of species-specif ic diversification.Finally\, we characterize the adult spinal cord of the lizard Pogona vitticeps to test whether these populations are specific to mammals or shared across amniotes. This analysis further supports their ma mmalian specificity and links them to late-born dorsal lineages.Together\, these findings suggest that the spinal cord is built on a largely conserv ed developmental framework\, whereas adult neuronal diversity has diverged selectively in the dorsal spinal cord. The superficial dorsal spinal cord thus emerges as a recently evolved hub for sensory integration in mammals . LOCATION:Office Bldg West / Ground floor / Heinzel Seminar Room (I21.EG.101 ) and Zoom\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Yuri Ignatyev: Thesis Defense: Deciphering spinal interneuron heter ogeneity across vertebrate evolution URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6691 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:6a1e9cbf7410b628841470@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261020T150000 DTEND:20261020T170000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: David Spitzkopf\nhosted by Robert Seiringer\nAbstract: Soft quantum waveguides are quantum mechanical systems in which aparticle is confined by an attractive potential in the vicinity of a curve\,rather than by a hard boundary or singular interaction. I will discuss twogeomet ric perturbations of such systems. The first concerns an array ofpotential wells in dimensions two and higher\, where the axial symmetry isdiscrete. Shifting finitely many wells along the axis\, even a single one and byan arbitrarily small amount\, produces a bound state below the essentialspect rum. The second concerns a twisted soft waveguide in three dimensions\,for which I will present a Hardy inequality. It shows that the Hamiltonian is subcritical\, so that weak attractive perturbations do not bind. LOCATION:Office Bldg West / Ground floor / Heinzel Seminar Room (I21.EG.101 )\, ISTA ORGANIZER:boosthui@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:David Spitzkopf: Geometric perturbations of soft quantum waveguides URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6668 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:6a35020e9b79b600190016@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261021T130000 DTEND:20261021T140000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Vladimir Mitankin\nhosted by Tim Browning\nAbstract: In this talk I will explain a new method for counting instances of the Bra uer-Manin obstruction (BMO) to the Hasse principle (HP) in families\, wher e no uniform description of Brauer elements across the family is available . The method consists of three novel ingredients\, whose common goal is to produce an asymptotic formula for the number of BMOs to HP in the family\ , ordered with respect to a natural height function. This talk is based on several works in progress with Leo Schfer\, Damaris Schindler and Florian Wilsch and with Alexandros Konstantinou\, Margherita Pagano and Harry Cra wford Shaw. LOCATION:Central Bldg / O1 / Mondi 2a (I01.O1.008)\, ISTA ORGANIZER:boosthui@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:Vladimir Mitankin: Failures of the Hasse principle in families URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6692 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:68761c2b8bc7c420411241@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261022T103000 DTEND:20261022T120000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Guillaume Vives\nhosted by Latha Venkataraman\nAbstrac t: How can molecular motion be transformed into function? Molecular machin es offer unique opportunities to control motion at the molecular scale\, y et achieving the complexity and functionality of natural systems remains c hallenging. This lecture will present our approach to designing molecular machines that convert controlled mechanical motion into function. First\, switchable molecular tweezers will be presented as versatile platforms for controlling luminescence\, magnetism\, catalysis\, and even sol-gel trans itions. Our work on cyclodextrin-based rotaxanes will also be highlighted\ , exploiting the cone-shaped structure and selective functionalization of cyclodextrins to achieve unidirectional\, active motion through an informa tion-ratchet mechanism. LOCATION:Office Bldg West / Ground floor / Heinzel Seminar Room (I21.EG.101 )\, ISTA ORGANIZER:hcai@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:Guillaume Vives: Functional Molecular Machines: From Switchable Mol ecular Tweezers to Cyclodextrin-Based Information Ratchets URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/5938 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1792659600@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261022T110000 DTEND:20261022T120000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: William M. Jacobs\nhosted by Carl Goodrich\nAbstract: Biological and bio-inspired materials derive function from sequence-encode d interactions in multicomponent mixtures. Predicting how biomolecular seq uences determine thermodynamic behavior and material properties is therefo re a central challenge across biophysics and molecular engineering. In thi s talk\, I introduce a machine-learning framework that maps sequences dire ctly to context-dependent chemical potentials—without requiring direct f ree-energy calculations. The approach learns low-dimensional\, physically interpretable representations in which distances encode differences in the rmodynamic behavior across mixtures. Using intrinsically disordered protei ns as a model system\, I demonstrate how this framework enables quantitati ve prediction of partitioning and multicomponent phase diagrams\, while re vealing how sequence composition and patterning jointly control mixture th ermodynamics. More broadly\, this work outlines a path toward quantitative models of complex mixtures that bridge machine learning\, biophysics\, an d molecular engineering. LOCATION:ISTA | Central Building | Ballroom \, ISTA ORGANIZER:caroline.ernst-petz@ista.ac.at SUMMARY:William M. Jacobs: Learning Thermodynamics from Sequence: Predictin g and Designing Complex Biomolecular Mixtures URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6693 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:69a7ee41f27e0806927286@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261022T131500 DTEND:20261022T153000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Andras Juhasz\nhosted by Tamas Hausel\nAbstract: Links are disjoint unions of circles smoothly embedded in the 3-sphere. I will explain how we used reinforcement learning and Bayesian optimisation to ob tain new upper bounds on several link invariants that are not known to be algorithmically computable: the slice genus and the unknotting number for links\, and the strong slice genus for algebraically split links. I will a lso discuss lower bounds using known invariants. Combining the upper and l ower bounds\, we obtain new exact values in many cases. Our unknotting age nts can reproduce the non-additivity of the unknotting number for several counterexamples due to Brittenham and Hermiller\, in some cases finding ne w unknotting trajectories. This is joint work with Yutong Dai\, Oliver Hay man\, and Ludovico Morellato. LOCATION:Office Bldg West / Ground floor / Heinzel Seminar Room (I21.EG.101 )\, ISTA ORGANIZER:boosthui@ist.ac.at SUMMARY:Andras Juhasz: Computations of the slice genus and the unknotting n umber of links via machine learning URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6695 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1792670400@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261022T140000 DTEND:20261022T160000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Alisia Fadini\nhosted by Alexander Bronstein\nAbstract : Proteins are dynamic machines whose function arises from coordinated ato mic motions\, yet breakthroughs like AlphaFold remain limited in capturing biomolecular interactions and conformational flexibility due to scarce dy namic structural data. Meanwhile\, time-resolved experiments\, cryo-electr on microscopy and tomography\, and high-throughput crystallography generat e large datasets of protein motion that remain underused without scalable analysis of structural heterogeneity – limiting efforts to understand mu tation effects or design allosteric drugs.Unlocking these questions requir es treating experimental datasets not as sources of single structures\, bu t as samples from conformational distributions shaped by time\, ligand bin ding\, mutation\, and cellular context. To do this\, I will detail how we can leverage pre-learned structural understanding from deep learning model s to decode conformational dynamics directly from experiment. This vision builds on lessons from ROCKET\, an experimental augmentation of AlphaFold that captures biologically meaningful structural variation inaccessible to prediction alone or conventional automated modeling approaches\, particul arly in low signal-to-noise regimes. I will then explore the hypothesis th at\, when purposefully engineered\, such methods provide a general and sca lable framework for integrating experimental observables with biomolecular machine learning\, yielding low-dimensional\, interpretable representatio ns that reveal mechanistic drivers of protein dynamics. LOCATION:Central Bldg / Ballroom\, ISTA ORGANIZER: SUMMARY:Alisia Fadini: Protein Motion Beyond Snapshots: Learning from Many Structures to Decode Dynamics URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6694 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20261106T001317Z UID:1792674000@ist.ac.at DTSTART:20261022T150000 DTEND:20261022T160000 DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Mengdi Wang\nhosted by Matthew Kwan\nAbstract: Let f d enote either the Möbius function or the von Mangoldt function\, and let α ∈ [0\, 1]. I will discuss estimates for exponential sums of the form   ∑x