Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) and social networks have provided unprecedented information platforms. The information is often governed by processes that evolve over time and/or space (e.g., on an underlying graph) and they may not be stationary or stable. We seek to devise efficient strategies to collect […]

Yian Ma, Assistant Professor, UC San Diego Abstract: Professor Ma will introduce some recent progress towards understanding the scalability of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods and their comparative advantage with respect to variational inference. Further, he will discuss an optimization perspective on the infinite dimensional probability space, where MCMC leverages stochastic sample paths while variational […]

Melvin Leok, Department of Mathematics, UC San Diego Abstract: Geometric mechanics describes Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics geometrically, and information geometry formulates statistical estimation, inference, and machine learning in terms of geometry. A divergence function is an asymmetric distance between two probability densities that induces differential geometric structures and yields efficient machine learning algorithms that minimize […]

Hamed Hassani, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania Abstract: In this talk, we will focus on the emerging field of (adversarially) robust machine learning. The talk will be self-contained and no particular background on robust learning will be needed. Recent progress in this field has been accelerated by the observation that despite unprecedented performance on clean […]

Alexandros G. Dimakis, Professor, The University of Texas at Austin Abstract: Sparsity has given us MP3, JPEG, MPEG, Faster MRI and many fun mathematical problems. Deep generative models like GANs, VAEs, invertible flows and Score-based models are modern data-driven generalizations of sparse structure. We will start by presenting the CSGM framework by Bora et al. […]

Sicun Gao, Assistant Professor, UC San Diego Abstract: Highly-nonlinear continuous functions have become a pervasive model of computation. Despite newsworthy progress, the practical success of “intelligent” computing is still restricted by our ability to answer questions regarding their quality and dependability: How do we rigorously know that a system will do exactly what we want it […]

Dr. Ismail Bustany, Fellow at AMD Abstract: The FPGA physical design (PD) flow has innate features that differentiate it from its sibling, the ASIC PD flow. FPGA device families service a wide range of applications, have much longer lifespans in production use, and bring templatized logic layout and routing interconnect fabrics whose characteristics are captured by […]

Sherief Reda, Professor, Brown University and Principal Research Scientist at Amazon Abstract: Combinatorial optimization methods are routinely used in many scientific fields to identify optimal solutions among a large but finite set of possible solutions for problems of interests. Given the recent success of machine learning techniques in classification of natural signals (e.g., voice, image, […]