EPFL People — Lenka Zdeborová (original) (raw)

Biography

Lenka Zdeborová is a Professor of Physics and of Computer Science in École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where she leads the Statistical Physics of Computation Laboratory. She received a PhD in physics from University Paris-Sud and from Charles University in Prague in 2008. She spent two years in the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the Director's Postdoctoral Fellow. Between 2010 and 2020 she was a researcher at CNRS working in the Institute of Theoretical Physics in CEA Saclay, France. In 2014, she was awarded the CNRS bronze medal, in 2016 Philippe Meyer prize in theoretical physics and an ERC Starting Grant, in 2018 the Irène Joliot-Curie prize, in 2021 the Gibbs lectureship of AMS. She is an editorial board member for Journal of Physics A, Physical Review E, Physical Review X, SIMODS, Machine Learning: Science and Technology, and Information and Inference. Lenka's expertise is in applications of concepts from statistical physics, such as advanced mean field methods, replica method and related message-passing algorithms, to problems in machine learning, signal processing, inference and optimization. She enjoys erasing the boundaries between theoretical physics, mathematics and computer science.

Teaching & PhD

Teaching

Physics

Computer Science
Communication Systems

Courses

Data analysis for Physics

This lecture will introduce the basics of data analysis and learning from data, error estimation and stochasticity in physics. Concepts will be introduced theoretically as well as via numerical exercises done in Python.

Machine learning for physicists

Machine learning and data analysis are becoming increasingly central in sciences including physics. In this course, fundamental principles and methods of machine learning will be introduced and practised.

Statistical physics for optimization & learning

This course covers the statistical physics approach to computer science problems, with an emphasis on heuristic & rigorous mathematical technics, ranging from graph theory and constraint satisfaction to inference to machine learning, neural networks and statitics.

Lecture series on scientific machine learning

This lecture presents ongoing work on how scientific questions can be tackled using machine learning. Machine learning enables extracting knowledge from data computationally and in an automatized way. We will learn on examples how this is influencing the very scientific method.