The natural world is full of complex systems characterized by intricate relations between their components: from social interactions between individuals in a social network to electrostatic interactions between atoms in a protein. Topological Deep Learning (TDL) provides a framework to process and extract knowledge from data associated with these systems, such as predicting the social community to which an individual belongs or predicting whether a protein can be a reasonable target for drug development. By extending beyond traditional graph-based methods, TDL incorporates higher-order relational structures, providing a new lens to tackle challenges in applied sciences and beyond. This talk will introduce the core principles of TDL and provide a comprehensive review of its rapidly growing literature, with a particular focus on neural network architectures and their performance across various domains. I will present open-source implementations that make TDL methods more accessible and practical for real-world applications. All in all, this talk will showcase how TDL models can effectively capture and reason about the complexity of real-world systems, while highlighting the remaining challenges and exciting opportunities for future advancements in the field.
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Coisotropic reduction in symplectic geometry can be phrased cohomologically and goes under the name of BRST cohomology in Physics. It provides a quantisation procedure for gauge theories which is equivariant under global symmetries. It was first discovered in the context of gauge theories in the mid 1970s, but it plays a very important role in the quantisation of string theories, where it usually appears in th guise of semi-infinite cohomology, a cohomology theory for certain infinite-dimensional Lie algebras which sits in between homology and cohomology. I will summarise some of the history of the subject and mention a recent application in the context of so-called non-relativistic strings.
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