Category: Research

On Thursday, November 7, at 12:25 p.m. Dragan Radulovic, Ph.D. will present his lecture entitled, “How good are standard copulas anyway?” in Parker Building Room 338. Dr. Radulovic is a professor at Florida Atlantic University.

His lecture will raise a question: How good are standard copulas in capturing the dependency structure? To this end we will offer a series of simulated/numerical examples demonstrating that, more often than not, standard model copulas do not capture the underlying dependency structure. We believe that copula models, unlike other statistical tools, are too readily accepted by practitioners. Rigorous, goodness-of-fit tests are commonly replaced by off-hand statements like: “it works well”. To this end, the second part of the talk offers a theoretical result, an umbrella type theorem tailored for creating numerous Goodness of Fit tests for copulas.

Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography department of mathematics hosts the mathematics colloquium series in Parker Building, Room 338. For more information about the math colloquium series, please contact mathematics faculty member Jing Chen, Ph.D. (jchen1@nova.edu) or Evan Haskell, Ph.D. (haskell@nova.edu).

On Friday, November 1st from 3-4 p.m., Andrew Gallup, Ph.D. presented his lecture, “The Surprising Science of Yawning” in Mailman Auditorium, Mailman-Hollywood Building.

Dr. Gallup presented on his brain-cooling hypothesis of yawning along with supporting research on humans and other animals.  Dr. Gallup is an evolutionary cognitive neuroscientist. His research spans a variety of topics, including contagious behavior and comparative neuroanatomy, brain thermoregulation and vigilance, collective behavior and social cognition, aggression and sexual conflict, the evolution of cooperation, winner and loser effects, biomarkers of Darwinian fitness, and the effects of neuromodulation on adaptive responses.

Dr. Gallup received his bachelor’s in Psychology from The State University of New York at Albany. He received his PhD in Biological Sciences from Binghamton University under the mentorship of Dr. David Sloan Wilson. He went on to complete a postdoc at Princeton University in the collective behavior lab lead by Iain Couzin (now Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Department of Collective Behaviour). Dr. Gallup is currently a professor of Psychology at The State University of New York Polytechnic Institute. He also serves as the director of the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) Lab at SUNY Poly. Dr. Gallup is a Fellow of The Psychonomic Society, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences at Nova Southeastern University. Dr. Gallup is a rising star having already published over 75 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. His research has been of broad general interest, covered by large media outlets including National Geographic, Scientific American, and The New York Times.

On Friday, November 1, at 12:05pm in Parker 338, Florida Atlantic University Instructor Papiya Bhattacharjee, Ph.D. presented her lecture on Algebraic Frames and Ultrafilters. A frame, also known as pointfree topology, is a complete lattice that satisfies a strong distributive property, known as the ‘frame law’.  Originally, the study of frames began as studying topological spaces without points, hence the name pointfree topology.

Due to this connection, different topological concepts can be generalized to frames, for example, compactness. In the first part of the talk she will explain the basic notions of frames and their connection with topology.

It turns out that we can find frame structure in other categories than topological spaces. For example, given a commutative ring R with identity, the lattice of radical ideals of R, Rad(R), is a frame.  As a result, concepts from ring structure can also be generalized to frames, for example, primes and minimal primes, annihilators, etc.  She discussed some of these concepts in the language of frame theory.

Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography department of mathematics hosts the mathematics colloquium series in Parker Building, Room 301. For more information about the math colloquium series, please contact mathematics faculty member Jing Chen, Ph.D. (jchen1@nova.edu) or Evan Haskell, Ph.D. (haskell@nova.edu).