Sums of Squares: from Algebra to Analysis

Francis Bach, NRIA, ENS, and PSL Paris

Abstract: The representation of non-negative functions as sums of squares has become an important tool in many modeling and optimization tasks. Traditionally applied to polynomial functions, it requires rich tools from algebraic geometry that led to many developments in the last twenty years. In this talk, I will look at this problem from a functional analysis point of view, leading to new applications and new results on the performance of sum-of-squares optimization.


Francis Bach is a researcher at Inria, leading since 2011 the machine learning team which is part of the Computer Science department at Ecole Normale Supérieure. He graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in 1997 and completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley in 2005, working with Professor Michael Jordan. He spent two years in the Mathematical Morphology group at Ecole des Mines de Paris, then he joined the computer vision project-team at Inria/Ecole Normale Supérieure from 2007 to 2010. Francis Bach is primarily interested in machine learning, and especially in sparse methods, kernel-based learning, large-scale optimization, computer vision and signal processing. He obtained in 2009 a Starting Grant and in 2016 a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council, and received the Inria young researcher prize in 2012, the ICML test-of-time award in 2014 and 2019, as well as the Lagrange prize in continuous optimization in 2018, and the Jean-Jacques Moreau prize in 2019. He was elected in 2020 at the French Academy of Sciences. In 2015, he was program co-chair of the International Conference in Machine learning (ICML), and general chair in 2018; he is now co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Machine Learning Research.

Local Time

  • Timezone: America/New_York
  • Date: 26 Apr 2023
  • Time: 12:00 - 13:00

Location

Virtual

Organizer

TILOS & OPTML++

Speaker