AMSI-ANZIAM Lecture Tour - applied mathematics

This year, the AMSI-ANZIAM Lecture Tour invites a distinguished French academic in an applied mathematical field to speak at universities across Australia after the conclusion of the ANZIAM conference.

13 - 22 February 2023 in Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Newcastle and Brisbane!

Markov chains represent a versatile tool for modelling phenomena in nature and technology. Many phenomena unfold on several time scales. In this talk Professor Konstantin Avrachenkov first gives an accessible introduction to Markov chains and in particular to singularly perturbed Markov chains, which are stochastic dynamical models with several time scales. Then, he demonstrates the application of singularly perturbed Markov chains to queueing systems, web ranking and reinforcement learning.

Professor Konstantin Avrachenkov

National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA)

Konstantin Avrachenkov received his Master degree in Control Theory from St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University (1996), Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from University of South Australia (2000) and Habilitation from University of Nice Sophia Antipolis (2010). Currently, he is a Director of Research at Inria Sophia Antipolis, France. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Performance Evaluation, Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, ACM TOMPECS, Stochastic Models and IEEE Network Magazine. Konstantin has co-authored two books “Analytic Perturbation Theory and its Applications”, SIAM, 2013 and “Statistical Analysis of Networks”, Now Publishers, 2022. He has won 5 best paper awards. His main theoretical research interests are Markov chains, Markov decision processes, random graphs and singular perturbations. He applies these methodological tools to the modeling and control of networks, and to design data mining and machine learning algorithms.