Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are powerful tools for creating new content, but they face challenges such as sensitivity to starting conditions and mode collapse. To address these issues, we propose a deep generative model that utilizes the Gromov-Monge embedding (GME). It helps identify the low-dimensional structure of the underlying measure of the data and then map it, while preserving its geometry, into a measure in a low-dimensional latent space, which is then optimally transported to the reference measure. We guarantee the preservation of the underlying geometry by the GME and c-cyclical monotonicity of the generative map, where c is an intrinsic embedding cost employed by the GME. The latter property is a first step in guaranteeing better robustness to initialization of parameters and mode collapse. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating high-quality images, avoiding mode collapse, and exhibiting robustness to different starting conditions.

In 1989, Eremenko investigated the set of points that escape to infinity under iteration of a transcendental entire function, the so-called escaping set. He proved that every component of the closure of the escaping set is unbounded and conjectured that all the components of the escaping set are unbounded. Much of the recent work on the iteration of entire functions is involved in investigating properties of the escaping set, motivated by Eremenko's conjecture. We will begin by introducing many of the basic dynamical properties of iterates of an analytic function, and finally discuss constructing a transcendental entire function with a point connected component of the escaping set, providing a counterexample to Eremenko's conjecture. This is joint work with David Martí-Pete and Lasse Rempe.

This series of talks will discuss connections between Riemannian geometry and contact topology. Both structures have deep connections to the topology of 3-manifolds, but there has been little study of the interactions between them (at least the implications in contact topology). We will see that there are interesting connections between curvature and properties of contact structures. The talks will give a brief review of both Riemannian geometry and contact topology and then discuss various was one might try to connect them. There will be many open problems discussed (probably later in the series).