Fall 2017

September 21, 2017

Semidefinite Programming For Chance Constrained Optimization Over Semialgebraic Sets

Speaker: Ashkan Jasour (CSAIL)

This talk addresses the  “chance constrained problems”, optimization problems with probabilistic constraints, and also "chance optimization" where one aims at maximizing the probability of a set defined by polynomial inequalities. These...

September 28, 2017

Polynomial Time Algorithms for Dual Volume Sampling

Speaker: Chengtao Li (CSAIL)

I will talk briefly about our recent work on polynomial time algorithms for dual volume sampling (DVS), accepted by NIPS this year. DVS is a method for selecting k columns from an n × m short and wide matrix (n ≤ k ≤ m) such that the...

October 5, 2017

Verification and Synthesis with Linear Temporal Logic Specifications

Speaker: Cristian Ioan Vasile (LIDS)

This talk introduces the basic principles on formal verification and synthesis for dynamical systems. The two problems lie at the intersection of control theory and computer science, and play a fundamental role in applications requiring...

October 6, 2017 to October 7, 2017

How to apply for your dream academic job: a practical overview

Speaker: Luca Carlone (LIDS & AeroAstro)

Applying and getting a faculty position involves a number of steps. Knowing where to find advertisements of open positions, what to expect during the different phases of the application process, and preparing for the interview season is...

October 12, 2017

Re-thinking Information Freshness with Age-of-Information

Speaker: Rajat Talak (LIDS)

Exchanging timely updates over wireless network is gaining increasing relevance with the advent of technologies such as vehicular networks, internet-of-things, and futuristic network of unmanned aerial vehicles. Traditionally, packet delay...

October 19, 2017

Compressing Financial Networks

Speaker: Tarik Roukny (Media Lab)

We study how the size of financial markets can be reduced while satisfying individual net positions and trading relationships. First, we find that the networked nature of these markets generates an excess of notional obligations between the...

October 26, 2017

The Polynomial Method and the Cap SET Problem

Speaker: Pritish Kamath (CSAIL)

If you have played the popular card game, SET, you have probably wondered about what is the largest number of cards that one could have that does not contain a SET. This number was shown to be 20 in the classic game of SET. But one could ask...

November 2, 2017

The Network Topology of Locally Interacting Agents and System-Level Distributions of Agent Actions

Speaker: Janelle Schlossberger (Harvard Economics)

This work develops the mathematics that underlies many agent-based models and multi-agent systems, both of which could only previously be studied by computer simulation. It also introduces complexity into the study of economic systems while...

November 9, 2017

Practical Distance-Preserving Compression with Provable Guarantees

Speaker: Tal Wagner (CSAIL)

Distance-preserving compression (or quantization) is a widely used tool for speeding up machine learning and data mining tasks such as near-neighbor searches. The goal is to compress a large high-dimensional dataset so as to approximately...

November 16, 2017

Omer Tanovic

Speaker: Omer Tanovic (LIDS)

November 30, 2017

Permutation-based Causal Inference Algorithms with Interventions

Speaker: Yuhao Wang (LIDS)

Causal inference using both observational and interventional data is a fundamentally important problem in real world applications. In this paper, we present two algorithms of this type and prove that both are consistent under the...

December 14, 2017

Subspace Clustering with Ordered Weighted L1 Minimization

Speaker: Ulas Ayaz (LIDS)

Ulas Ayaz will talk about geometry of subspace clustering following the work of Soltanolkotabi and Candes, and sparse estimation of strongly correlated variables using ordered weighted L1 regularizer following Figueiredo and Nowak....