Talks

Within the AdS/CFT correspondence, two manifestations of the black hole information paradox are given by the nonisometric nature of the bulk-boundary map and by the factorisation puzzle. By considering timeshifted microstates of the eternal black hole, we demonstrate that both these puzzles may be simultaneously resolved by taking into account non-local quantum corrections that correspond to wormholes arising from state averaging. This is achieved by showing, using a resolvent technique, that the resulting Hilbert space for an eternal black hole in Anti-de Sitter space is finite-dimensional with a discrete energy spectrum. The latter gives rise to a transition to a type I von Neumann algebra. Talk based on 2411.09616.

The swampland is the space of those effective field theories that cannot be ultraviolet completed in quantum gravity. Understanding the swampland is relevant for phenomenological model-building and for observational tests of quantum gravity. This talk will have three parts: First, I will introduce the notion relative swamplands, to distinguish the swamplands of different quantum-gravity approaches. Their intersection forms the absolute swampland. Second, I will discuss a subset of swampland conjectures in the light of asymptotically safe gravity. Third, I will explain how asymptotic safety can provide a mechanism to generate universality, when it is realized within an intermediate regime between a non-quantum-field-theoretic quantum regime of gravity and the standard effective field theory regime below the Planck scale.

In a series of four lectures, I give an introduction to evolutionary game theory and the literature on the evolution of cooperation. This series covers
(i) Evolutionary game theory in infinite and finite populations (Replicator dynamics, Moran process);
(ii) Evolution of cooperation and direct reciprocity
(iii) Social norms and the evolution of indirect reciprocity
(iv) Some current research directions (e.g., direct reciprocity in complex environments).

We present a model of opinion formation game resource limited utility-maximizing agents interacting over a social network. The opinion dynamics is the result of each agent simultaneously revising its opinion by gradient ascent of its utility function. We analyze the evolution of opinions, including boundedness of opinions, convergence to an equilibrium and oscillatory behavior. In some special cases, we comment on the relative dominance of the agents on the steady state opinions. We also establish connections to Nash equilibria and prices of anarchy.

Bio: Pavan Tallapragada is an Associate Prof. in the Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber Physical Systems at the Indian Institute of Science. His research interests are broadly in multi-agent systems and control, including in multi-robot control, multi-agent reinforcement learning and dynamics of social systems.

Animals in the natural world face many choices, and their decisions with respect to food and habitat have major consequences for their fitness. Many factors influence these behavioural decisions, including the ecological and life history context of individuals. I will present our work analysing how females of a cosmopolitan and generalist pest — the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum — choose where and how to lay eggs. When presented with a choice of an optimal (wheat flour) vs. a non-optimal resource (finger millet), females sometimes allocate more eggs in finger millet. However, we find that this preference depends on their age and density context, and is tuned to optimize distinct fitness components for their offspring, likely mediated via differential nutrient provisioning. During laboratory evolution in wheat-finger millet habitats, the founder female context also determines evolutionary changes in decision-making, though these maternal effects decline over time. Importantly, founder context also influenced population size and the effect of an inadvertent parasitic infection in our experiment. Our work highlights the role of ecological context in driving female decision-making, and demonstrates some wide-ranging effects of founder context on adaptation and trait evolution.