Research by four department authors published in PNAS
May 08, 2023
Second-year PhD student David Freeman, Professor Dimitris Giannakis, third-year PhD student Brian Mintz, and Professor Joanna Slawinska are authors of the paper Data assimilation in operator algebras, recently published in PNAS. The paper grew out of a collaboration with Slawinska and Abbas Ourmazd (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) on using techniques from ergodic theory and quantum mechanics to perform sequential data assimilation of partially observed dynamical systems, with applications in climate dynamics. In 2021 work by Giannakis, Freeman, and Mintz as part of graduate independent reading course furthered the research: “During that course and in the subsequent months, we developed a formulation that views data assimilation as information processing through a quantum channel associated with algebras of observables of the dynamical system,” says Giannakis. “Classical (Bayesian) and ‘quantum’ data assimilation correspond to abelian and non-abelian choices of that algebra, respectively, which we believe provides an interesting unified viewpoint that offers opportunities for new algorithms for forecasting dynamical systems.”