Speaker: Dr. Damian Mayorga Peña of the University of Witwatersrand

Abstract: String theory is a leading candidate for a theory of quantum gravity. Instead of providing a single model with all the desired features of the real world, it provides a landscape of valid models. Deriving the standard model of particle physics from string theory amounts to looking for a needle in a haystack. In the first part of the talk, I discuss human efforts to obtain phenomenologically realistic models from various branches of string theory. As large datasets are inherent to string models (compactifications), In the second part I discuss various Machine Learning efforts to analyze and identify relevant features in concrete examples: (a) Obtaining the metric of Calabi-Yau compactifications, (b) Testing swampland conjectures in toroidal compactifications.