 Recording in progress. Okay, good afternoon everybody. It's always a pleasure, actually, to be here on this occasion of post-graduate diploma graduation ceremony. ICTP has been hosting this diploma course for over 30 years and we are very pleased of our track record. It's wonderful to see really this rainbow of young scientists from 26 different countries. This year, in fact, also our track record in gender in STEM is improving. We have had 40% of the total number of students are women this year, so I'm very happy about that. If you recall, some of you maybe were here last year, we had the 30th year celebration, 30 years of post-graduate diploma celebration. It was a very nice event. Many of past post-graduate diploma students joined from all over the world. And we had Andrea Gates, the Nobel laureate as the commencement speaker, and it was a very nice ceremony to see all the past and the present students together. And this is after the COVID time, we are continuing with this. It's very nice to see people in person. I guess some of our former students have gone on to now. They might be in the audience. Some of them are doing their PhD at CISA. So I welcome them also here. The latch of the students next year will probably overlap with some of you, and I hope that you will help them and mentor them to get settled at ICTP. I'm also very pleased that this year we have Professor Dan Thun Son here who has agreed to give a keynote talk for this important occasion. He's a Dirac medalist so Dirac medal is a prestigious medal given by ICTP. So he was a recipient of 2018 Dirac medal together with two other people. He's originally from Vietnam. He graduated from the Moscow State University in 1991 receiving his PhD in Moscow in 1995 and he has been at Washington, at MIT at Columbia University and currently is a professor at the University of Chicago. Apart from the Dirac medal he's also a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences so I'm very happy that we have a distinguished speaker for this occasion. These contributions actually would be interesting because this group of students is quite diverse. Son's own contributions also span from particle physics to condensed matter physics so it will be an interesting sort of view for you to get from an eminent scientist about sort of the unity of science in some ways and he will describe some of the similarities in the theoretical concepts like a quasi-particle in condensed matter physics and an elementary particle in particle physics how the two things are kind of related so I'm sure you'll look forward to his talk. He's also I should mention in passing that he's also a very strong supporter of science in the developing world especially in Vietnam. As I understand he has a blog addressing interesting science questions for young students so you should feel free to ask him questions so I welcome Son for his talk. So hello everyone, it's a great honor for me to be here at the great day of your career. You have worked very hard and you have achieved the results and congratulations for your graduation. I received the invitation to give this keynote talk at the ICTP graduation ceremony. I was very nervous. It's a customary for a keynote speaker on a ceremony like this to either offer the listener some word of wisdom, a few advices or to share something from the speaker's experience. And to be honest I'm not good at that. I used to give only scientific talks. I'm not good at motivating, sometimes even motivating myself to do something. So I thought a lot what I would tell you on this occasion. I asked myself what I would tell myself in the year of 1991 when I have just graduated from Moscow University full of enthusiasm, full of dreams, but lacking the type of experience that I have accumulated from 1991 to now. So I decided that I would share with you two, so first of all congratulations. I would share with you two episodes from my career, from my experience. Two episodes related to discovery in theoretical physics. Two discoveries that I have luck to be a witness and a participant. So I will do that with full recognition that some part of the story may be not totally useful for everybody in this audience. At the end I belong to a generation that may be 30 years older than you. The type of problems that people of our generation are concerned about may be different from the type of problem that you are concerned about. The word that you are entering now is very different from the word that I have lived around 1991. On the other hand, from my experience I think that a lot of aspects of human life is remarkably time translation invariant. So I hope that the stories that I am going to tell you today may be entertaining and even useful for some of you, for many of you. The first story began around the year 2000. So I was a young faculty member at Columbia University in New York. I was lucky to get a faculty job. At that time it was not easy for postdoc to land a faculty job. My job was possible because of a new machine that was about to start the relativistic heavy ion collider, or RIC. The RIC experimentalist was trying to create a state of matter called the Quagluon plasma by colliding two heavy nuclei. In the case of RIC these are the gold nuclei. In heavy ion collision people collect very big nuclei and they hope that if two big objects, as big as the atomic nucleus of gold or lead collide with high energies then there will be enough energy released in a small volume enough to heat up the vacuum to a very high temperature so that the Quagluon and the gluons which are usually confined in the nucleon become free and the state of matter that is created would be the Quagluon plasma a state of matter that presumably has existed in the universe during the very first moment of its existence. So what people were interested in are the following type of questions. Suppose you managed to collide these two nuclei together, are we sure that we have been able to create the Quagluon plasma? What we observe in experiments are not the plasma itself but the result of it decay. Whatever is created in these heavy ion collisions, collisions of very heavy nuclei live for very short amount of time and then it decays into particles that fly into the detector. That is the first question. Have we created the Quagluon plasma or not? The second question is suppose we have created the Quagluon plasma. Can we learn the properties of that plasma? So to give a very succinct answer to these questions one can say that most people believe now that at the relativistic heavy ion collider one has able to create the Quagluon plasma. And the Quagluon plasma that was created we have in a very strange but somewhat familiar way. We have like a droplet of liquid, almost like a droplet of perfect fluid with a small, very small viscosity. But now there is an event that at the first sight is not related at all to the relativistic heavy ion collider. But an event that would change my scientific career. When I was in New York I got connected reconnected to one of my old friends from Moscow Andrei Starinets. So Andrei told me about a problem that he and his collaborator Giuseppe Policastro from Italy was trying to solve. And he was telling me that they have some road blocks in their calculations. So what they were trying to do is to verify the so called gauge gravity duality. Which is duality between a gauge theory and a gravity in higher dimension. The gauge gravity duality is one of the greatest achievement in theoretical physics. It was conjectured by Juan Maldesina in 1997. It is duality which is equivalence between two theories that looks very different from each other. On the one side of the duality is a field theory in d dimension. In the Maldesina original conjecture that was the so called supersymmetric Young Mills theory. N equal 4 supersymmetric Young Mills theory. And that theory is supposed to be dual to some gravity theory in one higher dimension. The duality is very non trivial because it is a duality between a theory without gravity on one side and with gravity on the other side. A theory in d dimension on one side and d plus one dimension on the other side. Almost nothing on the two side match. But somehow Maldesina conjectured that these two theories are the two different descriptions of the same physical system. People were trying to check this very non trivial duality by doing calculations. In a typical check, one would compute the physical quantity in the quantum field theory. N equal 4 supersymmetric Young Mills theory. And then repeat the calculation in gravity. There is a certain so called dictionary that allows one to translate from field theory to gravity. So a quantity in field theory correspond to some equivalent quantity in gravity. And computing this quantity in the gravitational theory we get another result. And if these two results of the two calculations coincide then that would be a check. That would be an indication that the conjecture by Maldesina is valid. So Maldesina was motivated by progress in string theory. This conjecture by Maldesina at the first site doesn't have anything to do with say the Quakluon plasma or the collision of heavy ions. Andrei Starinets in Giuseppe Policastro was trying to verify the gauge gravity duality at finite temperature. That was a new thing at the time. Most of the verification, most of the checks was done at zero temperature. But what Andrei and Giuseppe was hoping that they would be the first people who managed to verify the gauge gravity duality in the new environment that is an environment of finite temperature. But right away there is a problem. The calculation on the gravity side can be done. It's related to some processes that happen in the presence of the black hole. But the calculation in field theory is now impossible. And the reason is that the quantum field theory that where we have to do the calculation is a strongly interacting, strongly coupled supersymmetric field theory at finite temperature. The finite temperature breaks supersymmetry and a lot of technique that one may use to overcome the problem of strong coupling works only at zero temperature. They would not work at finite temperature. So when Andrei told me about his problems, that was the first time I listened and I started to learn techniques from string theory. And at some point I realized that what they are computing is not an average, some generic quantity, some generic correlation function, a green function in finite temperature field theory. It is something that has a real physical interpretation. The quantity that they are computing, at least one of the quantities, is related to the so-called viscosity. Viscosity is something that we use to think in the context of normal fluids like water or air. But viscosity makes sense even in extreme environments like quantum field theory at finite temperature. What Andrei was computing is actually the viscosity. And so with this insight, we are able to reverse our point of view. Instead of viewing the calculation as the possible test of gauge gravity duality, we can look at the calculation and view it as a prediction for the shear viscosity of a strongly interacting quantum field theory at finite temperature. Though one cannot compute this quantity in quantum field theory because the field theory is strongly interacting, we were able to compute it using the toolbox of gauge gravity duality. And that was the first time such a calculation was possible, a calculation of viscosity in a strongly interacting theory, or any kinetic coefficient in a strongly interacting field theory. So I will skip a lot of details in the subsequent developments in the subject. But in short, what happened is that the calculation that we did originally in a very peculiar theory, non-physical theory, n equals 4 supersymmetric Young-Mills theory that seems to have no relationship with the standard model turned out to imply a result that can be compared directly to experiment. And surprisingly, the result matched very well with the value measured at the relativistic heavy ion collider. And that became very... make a lot of people in the string theory community interested in the physics of heavy ion collision and vice-versa. So what one can extract from this period, from this episode? I would extract the following conclusion. First of all, there are physical systems with no quasi-particles. From the calculation that we have done, we see no indication that the Kwakluon plasma, or the supersymmetric strongly coupled version, at least, of the Kwakluon plasma can be interpreted as a collection of quickly interacting quasi-particles, like in many cases we were able to do in condensed matter physics. The Kwakluon plasma at RIC seems to be also a system that cannot be described as a collection of quasi-particles. Another more general reason that I drew from this episode is that physics is an interconnected discipline. There is a connection that at the first sight is not obvious. The connection between string theory on the one side and finite temperature field theory and hydrodynamics, fluid mechanics on the other side. Later on, groups in India and in other places have managed to show a direct connection between the dynamics of the horizon of a black hole and dynamics of a fluid. Our work has established a connection between string theory and fluid dynamics, and later on, together with Kirchhoch, Pavel Kapton, Subir Sajdev we have managed to establish a connection to condensed matter physics as well. But there is another lesson that I would like to draw from this episode. From my experience, it is sometimes difficult to say whether one does at the moment would have application in the future. Sometimes something that looked useless in the beginning may become useful later on. When Andre and Giuseppe set out to do their calculations, their motivation is purely theoretical. They were trying to verify a conjecture by Maldesina at finite temperature. They were not able to do so because at finite temperature there was no supersymmetry. But we managed to reimagine the calculation as a prediction of the gauge gravity duality. This prediction, however, is still a prediction for very unphysical theory, strongly coupled theory N equal 4 with N equal 4 supersymmetry. But somehow unexpectedly for everybody, including ourselves, our result was later found to be very popular in heavy iron physics since it furnished a reference point for the value of the viscosity, which is not very far away from the value that one measures in experiment. I would like to add something to this point, though. Although one can never say in the beginning that a piece of calculation would become useful in the future, I would claim that some calculation that pulls together knowledge from different fields of physics, from different fields of science, had a good chance to become useful. In our case, we have draw knowledge from field theory, string theory, fluid mechanics very different fields, very different subfields of knowledge. And so maybe just the fact that it is a research that draw from different subfields make our calculation more useful, more have some chance to become useful. That is probably subjective opinion that I draw from this calculation. My second story has to do with one of the problem that is closer to the heart of condensed matter physics, the fractional quantum whole effect. When one plays two-dimensional gas of electrons, which can be realized in superconductors, in the very high magnetic field, many very strange quantum phases appear. One of these phases is the so-called half field Landau level, which appear when exactly half of the lowest Landau level, a state of electron in a high magnetic field is filled. And then among various other miracle of strongly interacting condensed matter physics, we have a situation in which the quantum states that appear at half field Landau level seems to have a quasi-particle that move in the straight line, which is very unnatural for a system of charged particles like electrons in the very high magnetic fields, where all the electrons have to move in a tightly curved orbit. There is a conventional explanation for the existence of such a quasi-particle that was proposed in the 1990s by Harper, Lee and Reid based on the notion of the so-called composite fermions, which in this picture is a bound object consisting of an electron and two attached flux quanta. This picture was very successful, but it has one theoretical problem that it breaks a symmetry of the half field Landau level called the particle whole symmetry. The construction of the composite fermions relies on the fact that it is a bound state of an electron with two flux quanta. So when already breaks, the symmetry between an electron and a whole when we make this construction. On the half field Landau level, there should be a complete symmetry between particle and whole because it's like a half empty cup which is also a half full cup. Now going back to in time, around 2002 I discovered a set of paper two very interesting paper written by Michael Peskin and another paper by Das Gupta and Harper. I was very excited about these two papers. These two papers establish the duality or the equivalence between two theories in two plus one dimensions that looks completely different from each other. One theory is a theory of a complex scalar field and the other theory is a theory of a complex scalar field coupled with a gauge field. The claim of these two paper is that at the point of phase transition, these two theories are equivalent to each other. And the equivalence works very non-trivial. A particle in one theory is mapped onto a vortex in another theory and vice versa. So this duality is called the particle vortex duality. I was so excited about this that I started to think about this problem and try to find out what kind of tests one can do to test this remarkable conjecture. So in 2002 I managed to even write a paper that proposed some tests. But it turned out that these things that I came up were not new at all. I think various people already know what I proposed probably a long time ago. I was very late. 2002 is very late compared to 1980. So although I managed to publish in this subject, I suspect that the reason the referee accepted the paper is that it was written in a way that some of the knowledge known in condensed matter physics into a language that is familiar to some high energy physicists. I even think that for many high energy physicists what I have written is not new at all. So I quickly found out that what I have written is not new. I think that was, I thought this was probably one of the papers although it's published was a failure and then I moved on. What I didn't know is that my brief infatuation with duality in 2 plus 1 dimensional field theory would give me the basis on which I could build a new theory of the half field land-out level that is both consistent with all the symmetries and with experimental results. For such a construction is a fermionic version of particle vortex duality. That fermionic version of particle vortex duality was proposed in 2015 and using it one can explain the appearance of the composite fermion in the half field land-out level in a way that doesn't break particle whole symmetry. I propose a theory called the Dirac composite fermion for this purpose. It also clarifies in a very transparent way the physics of interacting states on the surface of topological insulator that was done by Max Mitlitzky, Ashwin Vishwanath, one in Central among other people. And in high energy physics it has motivated the search and the discovery of many dualities between different 2 plus 1 dimensional quantum field theory. A set of dualities that is now called the web of dualities in high energy physics. That was done by high energy physicists like Karch and Tong, Cyberg, Central, Wang and Witten. What kind of lessons one can learn from this episode? One lesson one learned is that the quasi-particle do not have to be a dressed particle. Often one learns in textbooks that if we have a particle, we can turn on non-interacting theory, we turn on interaction, that quasi-particle becomes a dressed quasi-particle. But it doesn't have to be always so. The composite fermion in the half field land-out level is neither a dressed electron nor a dressed hole. It is less thought of as a quasi-particle that appears from a duality between one field theory and another field theory. It can be thought of as a vortex, a fermionic vortex in the original theory. This example illustrates the deep connection between high energy physics and condensed matter physics. Duality is something that is quite familiar in high energy physics community, but the example of this example of half field land-out level is one of the examples where such a duality becomes useful in a real physical system. In this case we have seen the unity of nation revealed to us in a rather dramatic fashion. We have quasi-particles that appear almost as a miracle of duality. But I would draw another lesson from this episode, at least for myself. The lesson is one should not be too disappointed if one works very well, work very hard. One thing that one have achieved some results discover new facts in nature to be later discovered that this fact has been known for a long time. I sometimes tell a joke to my students that the short duality is named after the third person who discovered it. I learned this inequality in Vietnam as the Koshy Buñacovsky inequality. But jokes aside, when you discover something yourself, even something that has been long known your effort has not been wasted. The knowledge that you have obtained with a great effort becomes your own knowledge and most of the time you can understand it better and you can apply it much efficiently than something that you learn by reading from textbooks or research papers. So these are all my stories. Congratulations again for your great achievement and good luck for your next step in life. Any questions? Well you'll have opportunity to ask him questions over the refreshments later on if you want. Thank you. Thank you so much for a wonderful talk. I hope it was inspiring for our students. So I think now we can proceed with the formal ceremony. I join Son in congratulating you and I pass the floor to Professor Misha Kiselev who is the head of the diploma program to also to take over the moderation of the subsequent. Thank you. Thank you very much, Atish. Thank you very much Professor Son for your inspiring talk. I would like to say a few words but I'm not going to speak long so you come here almost a year ago beginning of September. You come from 26 different countries and for many of you it was first trip abroad. So you come here and first you meet your new friends you meet your new professors, your lecturers colleagues whom you start to collaborate and with your new family and ICTP became your new home for a year. Definitely you learned many, many things scientifically and a part of that I know that you all learned how to live in multicultural community and ICTP is one of the perfect models of multicultural community. You learn how to interact between your friends your colleagues, how to respect different cultures how to respect different opinions you pass some exams and you attended lectures and so many of you will soon come back to ICTP in a different style as a post-doc, as participant of conferences, as keynote speakers of the conference and what I hope is that you still be feeling ICTP as a home and keep this feeling for many years. You will keep your contacts with your friends even if you come to different places as a beginning of your scientific career. So this is your day. You are the heroes of the day and my congratulations to you as the heroes. Among other things I hope that you learn that one needs to work hard in order to achieve success and one needs to learn to work even harder to progress with this success and this is a day of your success today and as your day of success I will start to acknowledge the persons who actually contributed to your success. This is your success but I would also like to thank your family who supported you during your stay at ICTP during the hard time, COVID, vaccination leaving at ICTP campus. This is very important that family is with you and supporting you all the time. I would like to thank all your friends who helped you to be strong and I would like to thank the ICTP team in particular my first thank is to Patrice and Sandra with whom you communicated every day and without whom it will be impossible to achieve your success. Thank you Patrice, thank you Sandra. I would like to mention a few because it's always good to say words appreciation and target, say particular words appreciation. I would like to thank your lecturers and professors who are carefully teaching you science. I would like to thank your tutor, your junior colleagues who helped you in understanding of science and not only science. I would like to thank the ICTP library for providing you everyday support. I would like to thank ICTS, our computer section, which made your life easy and helped you entering to the electronic world of ICTP. I would like to thank the housing office for giving you this condition to leave and stay in the campus. I would like to thank the medical office for solving your emerging problem in a very efficient way. I would like to thank the ICTP cafeteria for providing you not only food for thinking but also food for your stomach, ICTP financial office for help you, ICTP visa office, ICTP coffee team, administration, director office and everybody from ICTP team who worked as the ICTP team and contribute to your success. So my congratulations and gratitude to all of you. Thank you very much. So now we start with the most important part of the ceremony diploma and we begin with high energy and astroparticle physics. Paola, please. Okay, so first of all I should say that as you might notice I'm not Giovanni Viradoro with the coordinator of the high energy diploma. Unfortunately Giovanni had a difficult week and he cannot be here so let me congratulate with you and I'm sure Giovanni will join in these congratulations. So how should I do it? Okay, so let me start. So we start with Alan Alonso Arties from Honduras and sorry, the title of his thesis is soft limits in effective field theories and his supervisor is Giovanni Liesmiro that is not at ICTP today. Congratulations. So let me also add that I would have addressed more properly if I knew that I had to give. Okay, second we have Quoc Trung Ho from Vietnam. The title of this is a positivity constraints in Lorentz invariant theories and I was his supervisor. So now we have Mohamed Khalil from Egypt. The title of this thesis is a minimal model of wind dark matter and his supervisor was Giovanni Viradoro. Now we have Mohamed Reza Kansari from Iran. The title of this thesis is conformal bootstrap and its constraints on effective field theories and his supervisor is Merdad Mirabai please. So we come to Thailand. So we have Warren Patrick McBlaine. The title of this thesis is slow roll natural inflation and it was supervised by myself and Borna Salayan. Now we have Alisa Mustafa from Pakistan. Her thesis was thermal production of sanctions and her supervisor was Giovanni Viradoro. Now it's time for Bolivia. So we have Indira Ocampo Eustiniano. The title of her thesis is a covariate shift in supervised the galaxy classification and her supervisor was Roberto Trotta. Last but not least, Johan Quenta Raigada from Peru. The title of this thesis is generalized global theories and his supervisor was is Pavel Putrov. Thank you. By the way, I encourage my colleagues to say a few words in a time of giving certificate because definitely I did not say everything which I wanted to say and there are many many other things to be said. Okay we proceed with condensed meta section. Three students of condensed meta section all you left to the United States are being admitted to program in Virginia Tech and Penn State and University of Houston. So Ms. Amalare Bakare who is in absentia and hopefully connected by Zoom. Amalare, are you with us? Yes. Yeah. So Ms. Bakare the thesis is analysis of molecular dynamics data on radiation damage. In tungsten the supervisor is Nicola Seriani. Congratulations Amalare for your success. Thank you. You will get a photoshopped version of the ceremony. The next is David Tespades Gonzalez from Peru. His thesis non-Marcovian quantum jobs were done under supervision of Marcela Dalmond and Giuliani Siraco. Okay Mr. Tonk Hulé from Vietnam also in absentia. Lea, are you with us? Yes. It's difficult. We knew that you may be connected after four but okay Lea did the thesis out of time with the staggered field under supervision of Alexander Silva. Okay congratulations Lea. Mr. Jericho Narvaza from Philippines did his thesis for the electronic spectroscopy investigation of some system and metals substrate under supervision of Delangela and Nicola Seriani. Congratulations. Ms. Huma Navas from Pakistan also in here. Yeah. Huma informed that unfortunately she cannot be online. She did her thesis amorphous molybdenum from machine learning in atomic potential simulations under supervision of Nicola Seriani and we will come to Ms. Germain Nezha Khuzana from Rwanda Mr. Polinario Tano from Philippines about two studies on the one to change and the other model is done under supervision of Antonellis Cardicchio. So unfortunately two colleagues are busy with the two weeks right away. They are here but Mr. Arn Vietran from Vietnam who's thesis on computational studies of uniform and boundary frustrated quantum spin chains is done under supervision of Martello Del Monte and Jesus Chanda. So now I'm giving floor to Mr. Tizas Chanda. Okay good afternoon and congratulations to all earth system physics diploma students. So we start with Moro Abdullah from Ghana who did a thesis on time dependent noise HV analysis as stations of a temporary seismic network installed after the M6.4 2020 Petrinia earthquake that was already an achievement supervised by Stefano Parolai and then Mustafa Almasri from Palestine who did a thesis on mapping crustal discontinuities using tele-seismic P wave Coda autocorrelations supervised by Cary Maudia and Harry Tapa. Yeah he's coming. Congratulations. And now Blanca Castillo Autista from Mexico did a thesis on analysis of extreme events over the great Alpine regions supervised by Ericka Coppola congratulations. But connected on zoom hopefully Cadia Floregali from Cameroon with a thesis on statistics of cold pools derived from high resolution cloud resolving models supervised by Adrian Tompkins. And now Minnesur Kibria from Bangladesh with a thesis on the role of topography in modulating monsoon precipitation over Bangladesh supervised by Ericka Coppola. Now we move to Michael Oyelakin from Nigeria with a thesis on modeling the Arctic amplification response using a simplified ICTP AGCM model connected on zoom supervised by Fred Kuharski. Congratulations Michael. So now Manitrinyana Ravoson from Madagascar Cary Maudia and Daniel Manumar. Got this Rikyoma from the Philippines with a thesis on transport of parses in the surface of the ocean using a Lagrangian particle dynamics supervised by Stefano Salon and Cosimo Solidoro. Congratulations. Mariana Salinas from Mexico with a thesis on impact of ocean model resolutions on the hydrography and dynamics of the southern ocean supervised by myself. And finally Muhammad Zafar from Pakistan with a thesis on numerical study of source and nonlinear effects for tsunami modeling supervised by Cary Maudia and Fabio Romanelli. So I also want to congratulate the mathematics students. So well done. So we start with Mohamed Alihwane from Algeria and the title of this project was an introduction to the McKay correspondence. Obviously I should have said that the supervisor was Fernando Rodriguez. Now the next one is Erden Baya Manjai from Mongolia. The title of this project was Introduction to Toric Varieties. I was a supervisor and I don't know, yeah, there he is. Congratulations Erden Baya. Now comes Maget Bey from Senegal and the title was Minimal Services in Romanian Manifolds. Supervisor Claudio Arezzo. Now we have Haga Ibrahim from Egypt. The title was Horseshoes with Internal Tensions supervised by Stefano Luzato. So now we have Tolybion Ismailov from Uzbekistan. The title was Calderon-Sigmund Theory for Singular Integrals Supervisor Emmanuel Canero. Now we have Roy Jamil from Pakistan. The title of the thesis is Sub-Shift of Finite Type and Supervisor Stefano Luzato. Now we have Jose Quintero Campo from Colombia. The title of this project is Introduction to Cala Manifolds and with Claudio Arezzo. The next one is Biswanullah from Pakistan and the title of the project is Invariant Measures for Gips Markov Maps with the Supervisor Stefano Luzato. Finally we have Laurence Fijaya from Indonesia and the title of the project was An Exposition to Small Gaps Between Primes supervised by Emmanuel Canero. Hi sorry, I just wanted to say one thing. Cadia Floregali, one of our ESP students, is not from Cameroon but is from Chad sorry about that. I just wanted to make that clear because he's our first ever student from Chad and we're very proud of it. So sorry Cadia for the mistake. Now for the Quantitative Life Sciences Diploma Program I'm very proud to congratulate with all of you. So let's start with Anna Maria Bupu Theses was a numerical study of phase transitions in low rank spike models supervised by Jean Bobier. Sahar Farak a convolutional dynamics in the gut microbiome supervised by Jaco Pugrilli. Gips, Nemadi Chakov, statistical storage capacity of a quantum perceptron with bias patterns supervised by Fabio Benatti. Christian Pajanonot, fluctuations in response in typical biophysical models, supervised by Edgar Rodin and Sara Loos. Marielle Bispatinho, measuring time and reversibility of a stochastic biological oscillator, supervised by Edgar Rodin. Layla Salih, Bulfurg's ear hair cell bundles as thermal machines supervised by Edgar Rodin. And we have Carlos Soto Lopez, quantitative analysis of the frequencies of letters in the alphabet as an explanatory factor of letter colors in aesthetics supervised by Matteo Marcilli. Carlos is there. Hi! Manuel Vasquez Ibarra analysis of genetic distance between strains of bacteria in the human gut supervised by Jaco Pugrilli. And now we are coming to something which was a secret before this day. We are announcing the best students of the section. To begin with to the best performing students in 2021 2022 postgraduate diploma program in high-energy cosmology and astro-particle physics, the diploma is given to Kwok Trunk Ho to the best performing student in 2021 2022 postgraduate diploma program in condensed metaphysics the diploma is given to Tonk Ho Le Please Tonk! Yes, I'm here professor. Thank you very much. Hi, can you hear me? On the screen? Hello I'm here professor. No, our congratulations. Thank you very much. To the best performing student in 2021 2022 postgraduate diploma program in earth system physics, the diploma is given to Minhatsul Kibriyya to the best performing student in 2021 2022 postgraduate diploma program in mathematics diploma is given to Erden Bayar Magnai the diploma for to the best performing student in postgraduate program in quantitative life the diploma is given to Gips Nevedmaji Tiakon. Everybody and now it's time when... I just want to say that No, I think there is, I just want to congratulate you one more time. Let's clap to ourselves. No, I just want to say that I'm sure you had oftentimes the students say that being at ICTP leaves an imprint on their life and I hope you continue this connection with ICTP and you remain the part of the ICTP family and I'm sure many of you will visit us again in different capacities whether you remain in science or you leave science I think ICTP gives you this international spirit and which I think with you and I congratulate all of you again I think you have learned many things here besides physics from, I don't know, table tennis to dancing and swimming so congratulations and we will now celebrate after this. No, it's still time typically we give a floor to students to those volunteers who would like to say a few words to share your experience, to criticize us which we will take. If somebody from the audience or from Zoom audience would like to say something, please don't be shy, please. So I actually knew that we could share something like two days ago I wanted to share about my experience, I had a unique experience at ICTP and to be honest around eight months ago during the Christmas vacation I was talking to one of my friends from Egypt on the phone and I said if I could go back in time I would just stay back home and I'm happy to say that standing here today I take this back if I could go back in time I would just do it all over again with all ups and downs because I actually grew a lot scientifically and I learned a lot in different subjects that I couldn't have learned staying just home and I mean I struggled a lot during most of them but I also had fun learning some of them I had a lot of fun and it's not just academically I also grew a lot as a person because coming here to ICTP I had all these hopes and dreams and thinking that life can be pink and purple and all these kind of nice things but I learned that it's not pink and purple but it's also not black because life is misty and it comes in all different colors and it's always ups and downs and it's up to us to know how to enjoy the good parts of it even if they are very small or tiny and to push through the hard parts of it and of course I'm still in progress to learning how to do this in practical but I'm grateful for the experience I'm thankful for ICTP for the great opportunity that was provided for me and for all my colleagues I'm grateful for the second chance and I'm grateful for my coordinator, Professor Ducha for all the help and support I really couldn't have been here without you, thank you so much and thank you all for listening to me So would somebody else want to say Apollinario? I'm from the condensed matter section I'm Apollinario Tan, I'm from the Philippines and I was able to give a talk but to say a few words so it's hard to condense everything into a few words so I would like to put it in gratitude so from the very beginning from around May when it was the height of the pandemic and everything was still unsure when we were given emails saying that we were accepted it already felt like it was a long time coming the plan was set in motion and I know it's been repeated words of gratitude from Professor Kislev but I think it deserves to or even a lot of repetitions so thank you to the ICTP staff for helping us do something that's seemingly impossible to bring students from all over the world into a place in the height of the pandemic thank you so much I know it's hard to deal with we're still kids at heart thank you so much for your patience and to the Galileo reception cleaning staff in the cafeteria they were very helpful the unsung heroes of the year because they were very patient with us and we're very glad to have them in our day-to-day life they made it easier they made it feel like we were just at home to the ICTP community to the other PhD students to the postdocs to the professors that we can see eating in the cafeteria outside of academic activities to playing ping-pong to writing in the blackboard to seeing in Dopolavoro thank you for making it feel like a really good community to the teachers to their professors specifically to the ones in Condensed Matter to Professor Kiselev for making sure that we understand the difference between a gap and a gapless spectrum special thanks to Professor Ali Asanali for treating us to ice cream that one day and there's a lot we're run out of time to if I mention every other professor but I'm sure that we would like to send our gratitude to you especially and this is to our classmates to my classmates and to my batch mates thank you for making for making it easier for me personally it was hard it was hard to go out of my comfort zone and to each and every one of you it made me feel like I had a second home outside of my country and to my classmates specifically in the Condensed Matter thank you for tolerating alright no this is not for the Condensed Matter but to everyone thank you for tolerating Condensed Matter's noise in the diploma room I hope it was still okay and that's all I have to say and thank you so much for ICTP and to everyone here thank you Apollinario please hello my name is Layla I'm from QLS section so I am as well was volunteered to say some words and I got really excited then when I was showing for my colleagues what I wrote they were like no no no no take another page from this is a lot this will take forever so I think I will repeat some words but it's necessary so actually this year has grown so fast and it feels like yesterday we stepped out of quarantine in September to seek our dessert freedom and excited for all pasta, pizza, gelato and four coffees of coffee every day so excited but it became an addiction to us, usual addiction to us now the diploma program of ICTP was definitely intense it's called postgraduate intense program for a reason and we had to work really hard under extremely high pressure stress like of sleep tiredness but it was all worth it and in return we learned to think critically and as well to manage for example to submit a homework project thesis at 11 5.59 p.m. before the deadline and yes while having for example one of our colleagues Patty using three computers at the same time but most importantly we learned how to be bold and not being afraid of asking a lot of questions even the silly ones or expressing our opinions about the particular idea or topic in class because simply why not and in case if you run out of questions just take the advice of Gibbs our classmate and ask people how they end up doing their work in research that will work definitely every time more than this wonderful scientific community that ICTP has as Apple mentioned ICTP felt like home for some of us it was our first time living alone without our families we felt homesick, we felt lonely sometimes but the relationship that we built with our classmates and other diploma students and professors felt like home our classmates and I we constantly were there for each other even in the smallest things like bringing and picking up breakfast when we don't catch it and yes thank you ICTP, thank you professors for all the help patience, guidance, encouragement and motivation you gave us classmates for the wonderful memories and company that we had together and for the nice cafeteria ladies of course and we don't want to forget the security guards that let us stay really late at night to finish studying until I don't know really late and we're going to miss all of this moments and small celebration we had after our exams and we had together as a group, classmate and eventually friends and despite being so different I wish you all the success and finally I will finish my talk with our QLS gang sign and stay positively convex every time thank you more volunteers, please Good afternoon, I'm from the Philippines and as my colleagues, my friends would say and from Apple himself I would start with thanking everyone, the staff, our professors, the cafeteria the security personnel, our guest houses personnel and everyone in general as well as my colleagues thank you for making each other's lives a lot easier and better so in behalf of our of my section the ESP section, I would start with maybe a timeline of how our life was from the day we started here so we were the first batch to go out as a group as a batch and we thought that yes, we can go out of every after exams, it didn't happen and actually we'd never got the chance to go out as a group anymore and at that time I think all of us was very shy to say the things that we did not like about each other so we just, I'm so hungry, why are you sitting there? like that, but you will find later that I think we got too honest again with each other towards the end especially after the defense so and so months has passed by and the Earth system section broke up, yes we did break up the solid Earth went on their world Earth, the climate went into their world and so we never, we rarely see each other but despite that whenever we see each other I think slowly we got to mock each other and so on the day of our defense I think one of us was very, very honest and full of self love to a point that he called himself pretty boy and that when we stand together in the picture he said that we don't look very good to some way at least pleasant, but I Mr. Pretty Boy we'll see each other very soon my world before was very small, it was like a point, when I came here the world was 360 spherical world and it was here at ICTP that I learned it's true that there will be those people who are both left and right brained people, if I remember it correctly I did a cheat sheet earlier, if you're right brained you are good in arts you are creative, but after seeing one of our colleagues play the piano play the piano yesterday I realized that oh they do exist, the left and the right brained people oh my gosh, and they witnessed it real time, and then I said yeah I think even though I play like a kindergarten maybe I do have a chance maybe 30 years after, I hope that I'm still alive but we'll see sometimes I talk too much, sometimes I don't after a point that my friends would tell me oh long time no see but here I am now, you see me I'm alive hi, so to wrap this up my world went bigger and I'm very sure that to some extent all of our worlds went bigger from where we were before, and to the next diploma students I'm sure you will experience it too, thank you and good afternoon so I see one raising hand in zoom so this is Ocadia, could you unmute your microphone and can you hear me please yes yes I just want to say a short word because I cannot stay there after something I would like to thanks ICTP because I'm the first student from CHAL and when I was coming to Idlib I was kind of struggling because I have to meet new students speak new language and everything so it was not easier for me and all the professors make it easy for me, so I would like to thank everyone especially Professor Panleti and Professor Tomkis thank you so much and God bless ICTP thank you nice words, somebody else I always see who is going to be volunteer, please oh so this is how the podium feels like okay so good evening everyone, so my life here I'm probably the worst person to speak here because I barely leave my room throughout the year but my life here in ICTP to quote one of the speakers before is pink and purple referring to all the bruises and blood, sweat and tears throughout the year but you know what, we made it give ourselves a pat on the back good job okay so I don't really have much to say, I just want to thank everyone involved in this year long process I just want to thank the secretariat, thank you very much for maintaining everything in order to thank all the staff in the ICTP, all the professors all the staff for everything I want to thank Professor Paolo, thank you very much for your words of encouragement actually my few months during the project was one of the best times in this year and I just want to thank all of my friends, so I'm not really good socially, but so many of my friends have managed to lure me out of my room with food with game of cards and everything and I somehow lose and I have to get out of my room once in a while, so thank you very much okay, we are going to make a group picture before I say the last words, there will be group picture here and then we will go for this refreshment and to the kiss and cry area to take last selfies, last pictures so again, congratulations to all of you with your success and I wish you great success in the future and please come to ICTP and fill ICTP at home as being at home