Professor Marc Mézard, Director of l’École normale supérieure, Paris, France, will deliver the Abdus Salam Distinguished Lecture Series 2020. The second talk in the series on "The spin glass cornucopia" will take place on Tuesday 28 January @ 16.30 hrs. Abstract: Motivated originally by some anomalies in the magnetic response of some magnetic alloys, spin glass theory has developed in the last 40 years into a vast research field. Apart from providing a theoretical framework for understanding glassy phases in various physical systems, it has also provided a corpus of concepts and methods, like the replica and the cavity method, that have found applications in various other branches of science, where one is interested in emerging properties in systems built from many interacting elementary components: computer science, information theory, economy, biology, etc. This talk will review some of the basic concepts and methods originating from spin glass theory, and present some aspects of their relevance to other fields Lecture 3 follows on Wednesday 29 January @ 11.00 hrs) and is on "Statistical physics of inference and machine learning". The three talks will be livestreamed from the ICTP website. Light refreshments will be served afterwards. All are welcome to attend the events. Biosketch: Marc Mézard is a theoretical physicist. He received a PhD from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, followed by a post-doc in Rome, and became the head of the statistical physics group in Paris-Sud University. He has been the director of École normale supérieure since 2012. His main field of research is the statistical physics of disordered systems and its use in various branches of science - biology, economics and finance, information theory, computer science, statistics, and signal processing. In recent years his research has focused on information processing in neural networks. He has received the Lars Onsager prize from the American Physical Society, the Humboldt-Gay-Lussac prize, the silver medal of CNRS and the Ampere prize of the French Academy of Science. He is a member of the European Academy of Science. The Abdus Salam Distinguished Lecture Series receives generous support from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS). For more information see: https://kfas.ictp.it/