Buildings have been introduced by Tits in order to study semi-simple algebraic groups from a geometrical point of view. One of the most important results in the theory of buildings is the classification of thick irreducible spherical buildings of rank at least 3. In particular, any such building comes from an RGD-system. The decisive tool in this classification is the Extension theorem for spherical buildings, i.e. a local isometry extends to the whole building.
Twin buildings were introduced by Ronan and Tits in the late 1980s. Their definition was motivated by the theory of Kac-Moody groups over fields. Each such group acts naturally on a pair of buildings and the action preserves an opposition relation between the chambers of the two buildings. This opposition relation shares many important properties with the opposition relation on the chambers of a spherical building. Thus, twin buildings appear to be natural generalizations of spherical buildings with infinite Weyl group. Since the notion of RGD-systems exists not only in the spherical case, one can ask whether any twin building (satisfying some further conditions) comes from an RGD-system. In 1992 Tits proves several results that are inspired by his strategy in the spherical case and he discusses several obstacles for obtaining a similar Extension theorem for twin buildings. In this talk I will speak about the history and developments of the Extension theorem for twin buildings.
We provide a unified combinatorial framework to study orbits in affine flag varieties via the associated Bruhat-Tits buildings. We first formulate, for arbitrary affine buildings, the notion of a chimney retraction. This simultaneously generalises the two well-known notions of retractions in affine buildings: retractions from chambers at infinity and retractions from alcoves. We then present a recursive formula for computing the images of certain minimal galleries in the building under chimney retractions, using purely combinatorial tools associated to the underlying affine Weyl group. Finally, for Bruhat-Tits buildings, we relate these retractions and their effect on certain minimal galleries to double coset intersections in the corresponding affine flag variety. This is joint work with Elizabeth Milicevic, Yusra Naqvi and Petra Schwer.
Group of automorphisms of a connected locally finite graph is naturally a totally disconnected locally compact topological group, when equipped with the permutation topology. It therefore makes sense to ask for which graphs is the topology not discrete. We show that in case of Cayley graphs of Coxeter groups, one can fully characterise the discrete ones in terms of the symmetries of the corresponding Coxeter system. Joint work with Federico Berlai.
I will give an overview of a programme investigating projective embeddings of (exceptional) geometries which Hendrik Van Maldeghem and I started in 2010.
The geometry of elements fixed by an automorphism of a spherical building is a rich and well-studied object, intimately connected to the theory of Galois descent in buildings. In recent years, a complementary theory has emerged investigating the geometry of elements mapped onto opposite elements by a given automorphism. In this talk we will give an overview of this theory. This work is joint primarily with Hendrik Van Maldeghem (along with others).
Supply chain management comprises many vehicle routing and scheduling problems across different time and geographical scales. In this talk, we discuss a supply chain management problem spanning a large geographical area that integrates customer clustering, transshipment and local transportation. While much research has been performed on each component of our proposed problem, there is currently no established technique for the integration of transshipment with local transportation. This talk will present an iterative, large-neighbourhood search heuristic to find high quality solutions to the integrated transshipment and local transportation problem. We will describe the numerous techniques necessary to diversify the search and solve large-scale supply chain management problems. Our proposed heuristic, based on a multi-armed bandit algorithm, is able to find high-quality solutions for the integrated problem that significantly reduce costs compared to solving each problem sequentially.
Times are CST, Canada (These dates will be 29th of November to 2nd of December for Australian time zones) Note dates have changed due to a clash with WIPCE
This will be an International event that is mainly online. Conference Website
Chaired by Associate Professor Edward Doolittle