Speaker: Shaoping Xiao, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Speaker: Laurent Jay, Department of Mathematics

This talk will focus itself on games. Some basic games will be introduced and their strategies analyzed. We will scratch the surface of combinatorial game theory, a lovely, playful, and often overlooked branch of mathematics. In the process we will stumble upon the surreal numbers and explore the very nature of “numbers”. This talk will be accessible for all audiences. There is no prerequisite knowledge needed, just an open mind.

We will have milk and cookies! Remember to bring your...

Marco Gaboardi (Boston University)

Data analysts aim at guaranteeing that the result of a data analysis run on sample data does not differ too much from the result one would achieve by running the analysis over the entire population. To achieve this goal, they have developed several techniques to control the generalization errors of their data analyses. In this talk, I will discuss how programming language techniques can help data analysts to design adaptive data analyses...

Yingyu Liang

An important characteristic of neural networks is their ability to learn representations of the input data with effective features for prediction, which is believed to be a key factor to their superior empirical performance. To better understand the source and benefit of feature learning in neural networks, we consider learning problems motivated by practical data, where the labels are determined by a set of class relevant patterns and the inputs are generated...