The TTIC Colloquium (weekly talk series) is a forum for talks by invited speakers on work of current relevance and broad interest to the computer science community.

Colloquia are typically held on Mondays at 11:30am in TTIC Room 530.

For additional questions, contact Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)

Upcoming Talks


Title: Learning features with two-layer neural networks, one step at a time

Date: March 18, 2024

Speaker: Bruno Loureiro, École Normale Supérieure

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


Title: TBD

Date: March 22, 2024 (SPECIAL DAY)

Special Time: 2:00pm

Speaker: Eva Tardos, Cornell University

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: The NASA Volatiles Inspecting Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) Mission

Date: April 8, 2024

Speaker: Terry Fong, NASA

Host: Matthew Turk (mturk@ttic.edu)


Title: TBD

Date: April 11, 2024 (SPECIAL DAY)

Speaker: Elchanan Mossel, MIT

Host: Liren Shan (lirenshan@ttic.edu)


Past Talks


2023/2024 Academic Year

Title: When Does Allocation Require Prediction?

Date: February 27, 2024 (SPECIAL DAY)

Speaker: Rediet Abebe, Harvard

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


Title: On Flase Positive Error

Date: January 31, 2024 (SPECIAL DAY)

Special Time: 10:00am

Speaker: Venkat Chandrasekaran, Caltech

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


Title: Algorithms, (Combinatorial) Optimization and Applications

Date: January 30, 2024 (SPECIAL DAY)

Special Time: 11:00am

Speaker: Chandra Chekuri, UIUC

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: Hypothesizing about effects in experiment design and interpretation

Date: January 29, 2024

Special Time: 10:00am

Speaker: Jessica Hullman, Northwestern University

Host: Emily Diana (emilydiana@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


Title: Eliciting Information without Verification from Humans and Machines

Date: January 25, 2024 (SPECIAL DAY)

Special Time: 11:00am

Speaker: Yuqing Kong, Peking University

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


Title: Spectral Clustering in High-Dimensional Gaussian Mixture Block Models

Date: October 27, 2023

Speaker: Tselil Schramm, Stanford University

Host: Madhur Tulsiani (madhurt@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


Title: On Provable Copyright Protection for Generative Model

Date: October 2, 2023

Speaker: Boaz Barak, Harvard

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


2022/2023 Academic Year

Title: Random Separating Hyperplanes and Applications

Date: July 11, 2022

Speaker: Ravi Kannan, Microsoft Research

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


Title: TBD

Date: September 19, 2022

Speaker: Pragya Sur, Harvard University

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


Title: How many labelers do you have? Some perspectives on "gold standard" labels

Date: October 3, 2022

Speaker: John C. Duchi, Stanford University

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


Title: Interaction and Natural Language Learning

Date: October 24, 2022

Speaker: Yoav Artzi, Cornell

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


Title: Mitigating Bias in Data Science

Date: November 7, 2022

Speaker: Elisa Celis, Yale

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: Mean Estimation in Low and High Dimensions

Date: November 14, 2022

Speaker: Paul Valiant, Purdue

Host: Madhur Tulsiani (madhurt@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


Title: Out-of-distribution generalization, causation, and features

Date: January 9, 2023

Speaker: Leon Bottou, Facebook

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


Title: TBD

Date: February 27, 2023

Speaker: Tselil Schramm, Stanford

Host: Madhur Tulsiani (madhurt@ttic.edu)


Title: Implicit Bias in Machine Learning

Date: March 27, 2023

Speaker: Ohad Shamir, Weizmann Institute

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Beyond Supervised Human Action Recognition: Learning with Limited Labels and Privacy Preservation

Date: April 27, 2023

Speaker: Mubarak Shah, University of Central Florida

Host: Matthew Turk (mturk@ttic.edu)

Video Link: via Panopto


Title: Integrating interactive devices with the User’s Body

Date: May 15, 2023

Speaker: Pedro Lopes, University of Chicago

Video Link: via Panopto


2021/2022 Academic Year

Title: Adaptive Attention: Bringing Active Vision into the Camera

Date: August 16, 2021

Speaker: Sanjeev Koppal, University of Florida

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Cascaded Norms in Clustering

Date: August 23, 2021

Speaker: Eden Chlamtáč, Ben Gurion University

Host: Yury Makarychev (yury@ttic.edu)


Title: Developing Robot Teammates that Enhance Social Dynamics and Performance in Human-Robot Teams

Date: October 4, 2021

Speaker: Sarah Sebo, University of Chicago

Host: Audrey Sedal (asedal@ttic.edu)


Title: Advances and Limitations in Generalization via Self-Supervised Pretrained Representations

Date: October 18, 2021

Speaker: Kristina Toutanova, Google

Host: Sam Wiseman (swiseman@ttic.edu)


Title: Speech representation learning with wav2vec

Date: November 29, 2021

Speaker: Michael Auli, FAIR

Host: Kevin Gimpel and Karen Livescu (kgimpel@ttic.edu)


Title: Firm Foundations for Private Machine Learning and Statistics

Date: December 6, 2021

Speaker: Jonathan Ullman, Northeastern University

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: TBD

Date: March 14, 2022

Speaker: Raymond Mooney, UT Austin

Host: David McAllester and Matthew Walter (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Modewise Methods for Tensor Compression and Recovery

Date: May 16, 2022

Speaker: Elizaveta Rebrova, Princeton University

Host: Yury Makarychev (yury@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning from Multiple Data Sources

Date: June 3, 2022

Special Time: 12:30 pm

Speaker: Jamie Morgenstern, University of Washington

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


2020/2021 Academic Year

Title: Getting Human-Robot Interaction Strategies to Emerge from First Principles

Date: October 19, 2020

Speaker: Anca Dragan, UC Berkeley

Host: Matthew Walter (mwalter@ttic.edu)


Title: Scaffolding, Abstraction and Learning from Demonstration - A Route to Robot Learning

Date: November 2, 2020

Speaker: Jeannette Bohg, Stanford

Host: Matthew Walter (mwalter@ttic.edu)


Title: From Language Models to Human Brains and Back Again

Date: November 16, 2020

Speaker: Leila Wehbe, Carnegie Mellon University

Host: Allyson Ettinger (aettinger@ttic.edu)


Title: Model-free vs Model-based Reinforcement Learning

Date: November 30, 2020

Speaker: Oriol Vinyals, Google DeepMind

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: How Do We Build Models That Learn and Generalize?

Date: December 14, 2020

Speaker: Andrew Gordon Wilson, NYU

Host: D.J. Sutherland (danica@ttic.edu)


Title: Surprises in the Quest for Robust Machine Learning

Date: January 25, 2021

Speaker: Percy Liang, Stanford University

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Rethinking Machine Learning Data

Date: February 1, 2021

Speaker: Emily Denton, Google

Host: D.J. Sutherland (danica@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning and Simulating Atomic-Level Biomolecular Structure

Date: May 10, 2021

Speaker: Ron Dror, Stanford

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Hardness of Approximation: From the PCP Theorem to the 2-to-2 Games Theorem

Date: May 24, 2021

Speaker: Subhash Khot, NYU

Host: Madhur Tulsiani (madhurt@ttic.edu)


Title: Characterizing the "value" of information

Date: June 7, 2021

Speaker: Chenhao Tan, University of Chicago

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


2019/2020 Academic Year

Title: TBD

Date: July 29, 2019

Speaker: Hedyeh Beyhaghi, Cornell

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: Building Blocks for Discriminative and Generative Image-Language Tasks

Date: September 11, 2019

Speaker: Lana Lazebnik, UIUC

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Deep Learning for Precision Medicine for Cancer

Date: September 16, 2019

Speaker: Rick Stevens, UofC/Argonne

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Why Deep Learning Works: Traditional and Heavy-Tailed Implicit Self-Regularization in Deep Neural Networks

Date: September 23, 2019

Speaker: Michael Mahoney, Berkeley

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: Commonsense Intelligence: Cracking the Longstanding Challenge in AI

Date: October 7, 2019

Speaker: Yejin Choi, University of Washington

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Fairness in visual recognition

Date: October 14, 2019

Speaker: Olga Russakovsky, Princeton University

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Sum-of-Squares Meets Nash: Lower Bounds for Finding Any Equilibrium

Date: October 21, 2019

Speaker: Ruta Mehta, UIUC

Host: Madhur Tulsiani (madhurt@ttic.edu)


Title: Structured Prediction for Molecular Inverse Problems

Date: October 28, 2019

Speaker: Eric Jonas, University of Chicago

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Bayesian Experimental Design in the Physical Sciences

Date: November 4, 2019

Speaker: Yuxin Chen, University of Chicago

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Toward Unified Theory for Supervised Inference: The Lessons of Deep Learning

Date: November 11, 2019

Speaker: Misha Belkin, Ohio State University

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Extending Intrinsic Images with Authorable Image Decompositions

Date: November 18, 2019

Speaker: David Forsyth, UIUC

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: Langevin Monte Carlo Without Smoothness

Date: November 25, 2019

Speaker: Jelena Diakonikolas, Berkeley

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: First-Order Optimization and the Calculus of Variations

Date: December 2, 2019

Speaker: Lorenzo Orecchia, University of Chicago

Host: Madhur Tulsiani (madhurt@ttic.edu)


Title: Expect the Unexpected: Learning to Generalize across Similarly Different Datasets

Date: December 9, 2019

Speaker: Adam Kalai, Microsoft Research

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning about Language with Normalizing Flows

Date: December 16, 2019

Speaker: Graham Neubig, CMU

Host: Kevin Gimpel (kgimpel@ttic.edu)


Title: AlphaGo Zero, Monte Carlo Tree Search and Self-Play: Towards Theoretical Foundations

Date: January 13, 2020

Speaker: Devavrat Shah, MIT

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Scalable Robot Learning in Rich Environments

Date: February 3, 2020

Speaker: Raia Hadsell, Google

Host: Matthew Walter (mwalter@ttic.edu)


Title: TBD

Date: February 17, 2020

Speaker: Alberto Bietti

Host: TBD (tbd@ttic.edu)


2018/2019 Academic Year

Title: Robot Skill Learning: From the Real World to Simulation and Back

Date: August 27, 2018

Speaker: Peter Stone, UT Austin

Host: Matthew Walter (mwalter@ttic.edu)


Title: Talking about Images

Date: August 29, 2018

Speaker: Gal Chechik, Bar Ilan University/Google

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning from Highly Correlated Features using Graph Total Variation

Date: September 17, 2018

Speaker: Rebecca Willett, University of Chicago

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Getting Computers to Understand Descriptions of Everyday Events

Date: September 24, 2018

Speaker: Julia Hockenmaier, UIUC

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: On the Complexity of Clustering Problems

Date: October 1, 2018

Speaker: Anand Louis, IISc

Host: Madhur Tulsiani (madhurt@ttic.edu)


Title: Understanding the User in Socialbot Conversations

Date: October 4, 2018

Speaker: Mari Ostendorf, UW

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning Adaptive Models for Robot Motion Planning and Human-Robot Interaction

Date: October 15, 2018

Speaker: Tom Howard, U. Rochester

Host: Matthew Walter (mwalter@ttic.edu)


Title: On a Generalization of Iterated and Randomized Rounding

Date: October 22, 2018

Speaker: Nikhil Bansal, Eindhoven University of Technology

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: Deep Learning for Formal Reasoning

Date: October 29, 2018

Speaker: Christian Szegedy, Google

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Multichannel End-to-End Speech Recognition

Date: November 5, 2018

Speaker: Shinji Watanabe, Johns Hopkins University

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: On Locality-Sensitive Orderings and their Applications

Date: November 12, 2018

Speaker: Sariel Har-Peled, UIUC

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: Scaling Probabilistically Safe Learning to Robotics

Date: November 19, 2018

Speaker: Scott Niekum, UT Austin

Host: Matthew Walter (mwalter@ttic.edu)


Title: “The Curse of Generality”: Deep Reinforcement Learning in the Wild

Date: November 26, 2018

Speaker: Sanjay Krishnan, University of Chicago

Host: Matthew Walter (mwalter@ttic.edu)


Title: Inspecting Word Embeddings with Definition Modeling

Date: December 3, 2018

Speaker: Doug Downey, Northwestern

Host: Kevin Gimpel (kgimpel@ttic.edu)


Title: Deictic Abstractions for Robotic Manipulation

Date: December 10, 2018

Speaker: Robert Platt, Northeastern University

Host: Matthew Walter (mwalter@ttic.edu)


Title: Cooperative and Competitive Machine Learning through Question Answering

Date: December 17, 2018

Speaker: Jordan Boyd-Graber, University of Maryland

Host: Kevin Gimpel (kgimpel@ttic.edu)


Title: On Data & Algorithm: An Artist's View

Date: January 28, 2019

Speaker: Jason Salavon, University of Chicago

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Task-Independent Sentence Understanding

Date: February 11, 2019

Speaker: Sam Bowman, NYU

Host: Kevin Gimpel (kgimpel@ttic.edu)


Title: Fault-tolerant Federated and Distributed Learning

Date: March 4, 2019

Speaker: Sanmi Koyejo, UIUC

Host: Suriya Gunasekar (suriya@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning to Optimize Multigrid PDE Solvers

Date: April 8, 2019

Speaker: Ronen Basri, Weizmann Institute

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Visual Learning with Fewer Labels

Date: April 29, 2019

Speaker: Bharath Hariharan, Cornell

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: An Economic Analysis of the Bitcoin Payment System

Date: May 6, 2019

Speaker: Jacob Leshno, University of Chicago

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: Local Algorithms for Sparse Connected Subgraphs

Date: May 20, 2019

Speaker: Ronitt Rubinfeld, MIT

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: Embodied Perception for Open-World Robotics

Date: June 3, 2019

Speaker: Deva Ramanan, CMU

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Sampling-Based Motion Planning: From Manipulators to Intelligent CAD to Protein Folding

Date: June 10, 2019

Speaker: Nancy Amato, UIUC

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: Industrial Scale Brain Mapping

Date: June 17, 2019

Speaker: Narayanan (Bobby) Kasthuri, University of Chicago / Argonne National Laboratory

Host: Michael Yu (mikeyu@ttic.edu)


Title: Human-Interpretable Concept Learning via Information Lattices

Date: June 24, 2019

Speaker: Lav R. Varshney, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Host: Mesrob Ohannessian (mesrob@ttic.edu)


2017/2018 Academic Year

Title: "Blind" Visual Inference

Date: July 11, 2017

Speaker: Michal Irani, Weizmann Institute

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning Mixtures of Well-Separated Gaussians

Date: August 7, 2017

Speaker: Aravindan Vijayaraghavan, Northwestern

Host: Yury Makarychev (yury@ttic.edu)


Title: Distribution Alignment for Visual Domain Adaptation

Date: August 31, 2017

Speaker: Kate Saenko, Boston University

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Peer Grading and Mechanism Design

Date: September 11, 2017

Speaker: Jason Hartline, Northwestern

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: Biases Beyond Observation

Date: September 25, 2017

Speaker: Moritz Hardt, Berkeley

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Computational Efficiency and High-Dimensional Robust Statistics

Date: October 2, 2017

Speaker: Ilias Diakonikolas, University of Southern California

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia.ttic.edu)


Title: Adaptive rates in Active Learning with label noise

Date: October 9, 2017

Speaker: Samory Kpotufe, Princeton University

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: From Naive Physics to Connotation: Modeling Commonsense in Frame Semantics

Date: October 16, 2017

Speaker: Yejin Choi, University of Washington

Host: Kevin Gimpel (kgimpel@ttic.edu)


Title: A New Approach to Approximate Counting and Sampling

Date: October 30, 2017

Speaker: Ankur Moitra, MIT

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Outranked: Exploiting Nonlinear Algebraic Structure in Matrix Recovery Problems

Date: November 6, 2017

Speaker: Rob Nowak, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: The Statistical Foundations of Learning to Control

Date: November 13, 2017

Speaker: Ben Recht, Berkeley

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Using Simple ML to Model and Mimic Human Behavior

Date: November 20, 2017

Speaker: Ben Zhao, University of Chicago

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Moving Away from Big Data

Date: November 29, 2017

Speaker: Regina Barzilay, MIT

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Mobile Sensing at the Edge

Date: December 4, 2017

Speaker: Heather Zheng, University of Chicago

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Why and Why Not Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)?

Date: January 22, 2018

Speaker: C.-C. Jay Kuo, University of Southern California

Host: Sadaoki Furui (furui@ttic.edu)


Title: Cs of Computer Vision

Date: February 26, 2018

Speaker: Alexander Schwing

Host: Matthew Walter (mwalter@ttic.edu)


Title: Mathematical Models for Human-Robot Collaboration

Date: March 5, 2018

Special Time: 3:00 pm

Speaker: Sidd Srinivasa, University of Washington

Host: Matthew Walter (mwalter@ttic.edu)


Title: End-to-End Modeling For Automatic Speech Recognition

Date: April 9, 2018

Speaker: Rohit Prabhavalkar, Google

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Some Mathematical and Computational Challenges Arising in Structural Molecular Biology

Date: April 23, 2018

Speaker: Bruce Donald, Duke

Host: Mark Hallen (mhallen@ttic.edu)


Title: Using Interaction for Simpler and Better Learning

Date: April 30, 2018

Speaker: Sanjoy Dasgupta, UC San Diego

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


Title: Scaling Up Visual Recognition

Date: May 14, 2018

Speaker: Ross Girschick, Facebook

Host: Michael Maire (mmaire@ttic.edu)


Title: Hand-holding Learning of Latent Structure for Natural Language Processing

Date: June 25, 2018

Speaker: Greg Durrett, UT Austin

Host: Kevin Gimpel (kgimpel@ttic.edu)


Title: Scalable Algorithms in the Age of Big Data and Network Sciences: Characterization, Primitives, and Techniques

Date: July 16, 2018

Speaker: Shang-Hua Teng, USC

Host: Avrim Blum (avrim@ttic.edu)


2016/2017 Academic Year

Title: Towards Joint Understanding of Images and Language

Date: June 26, 2017

Speaker: Svetlana Lazebnik, UIUC

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: The Move to Neural Machine Translation at Google

Date: June 19, 2017

Speaker: Mike Schuster, Google

Host: Sadaoki Furui and Karen Livescu (furui@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning by Moving and by Clustering Movie Characters

Date: June 12, 2017

Speaker: Erik Learned-Miller, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Observational studies from social media using robust text classification and learning from label proportions

Date: May 22, 2017

Speaker: Aron Culotta, IIT

Host: Kevin Gimpel (kgimpel@ttic.edu)


Title: On Phase Transitions for Spiked Random Matrix and Tensor Models

Date: May 15, 2017

Speaker: Afonso Bandeira, NYU

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Toward Robots that Understand People and their Environments

Date: May 8, 2017

Speaker: Dieter Fox, U. Washington

Host: Matthew Walter (mwalter@ttic.edu)


Title: Visual People Modeling

Date: May 1, 2017

Speaker: Ira Kemelmacher-Schlizerman, U. Washington/Facebook

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Structured Attention Networks

Date: April 3, 2017

Speaker: Alexander Rush, Harvard

Host: Kevin Gimpel (kgimpel@ttic.edu)


Title: Finding Low-rank Structure in Messy Data

Date: March 13, 2017

Speaker: Laura Balzano, U. Michigan

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Mixed regression: Fast Algorithms, Optimal Rates, and Multiple Components

Date: January 30, 2017

Speaker: Constantine Caramanis, UT Austin

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Interactive Dialogue Systems: Challenges and Opportunities for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Date: January 23, 2017

Speaker: Joelle Pineau, McGill

Host: Matthew Walter (mwalter@ttic.edu)


Title: Recent progresses on the optimality of online binary search trees

Date: December 5, 2016

Speaker: Parinya Chalermsook, Aalto University

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


Title: What would it take for a neuroscientist to understand a microprocessor

Date: November 28, 2016

Speaker: Konrad Kording, Rehabilitation Institute

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: A Non-generative Framework and Convex Relaxations for Unsupervised Learning

Date: November 21, 2016

Speaker: Elad Hazan, Princeton

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Image reconstruction in computed tomography and multiview computational microscopy

Date: November 14, 2016

Speaker: Patrick La Riviere, U. Chicago

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: On the Single-Pass Streaming Complexity of the Set Cover Problem

Date: October 31, 2016

Speaker: Sanjeev Khanna, U. Pennsylvania

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


Title: Redundancy in Deep Learning

Date: October 24, 2016

Speaker: Kilian Weinberger, Cornell

Host: Greg Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Computational Complexity of Cosmology in String Theory

Date: October 17, 2016

Speaker: Michael Douglas, Stonybrook U.

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Representation Power of Neural Networks

Date: September 26, 2016

Speaker: Matus Telgarsky, UIUC

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Second Order Optimization for Large Scale Stochastic Programming

Date: September 19, 2016

Speaker: Jorge Nocedal, Northwestern University

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Biomedical Big Data Analytics for Outcome-Driven Precision Health

Date: September 12, 2016

Speaker: May Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology

Host: Hammad Naveed (hammad.naveed@ttic.edu)


Title: Robustness and Flexibility in Non-convex Low-rank Estimation

Date: August 22, 2016

Speaker: Yudong Chen, Cornell

Host: Srinadh Bhojanapalli (srinadh@ttic.edu)


Title: Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

Date: August 1, 2016

Speaker: Kyunghyun Cho, New York University

Host: Kevin Gimpel (kgimpel@ttic.edu)


Title: Autoregressive Neural Transducers for Speech Recognition

Date: July 25, 2016

Speaker: Navdeep Jaitly, Google

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Hopsets with Constant Hopbound, and Applications to Approximate Shortest Paths

Date: July 21, 2016

Speaker: Michael Elkin, Ben Gurion University

Host: Yury Makarychev (yury@ttic.edu)


Title: Recurrent Networks and Beyond

Date: July 11, 2016

Speaker: Tomas Mikolov, Facebook

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


2015/2016 Academic Year

Title: Machine learning for Public Policy and Social Good: Case Studies, Challenges, and Opportunities

Date: June 13, 2016

Speaker: Rayid Ghani, University of Chicago

Host: Greg Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Supervised Machine Learning as an Adversarial Game

Date: June 6, 2016

Speaker: Brian Ziebart, UIC

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: High-dimensional Permutations and Discrepancy

Date: May 25, 2016

Speaker: Nati Linial, Hebrew University

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


Title: Privacy Preserving Optics for Miniature Vision Sensors

Date: May 16, 2016

Speaker: Sanjeev J. Koppal, University of Florida

Host: Ayan Chakrabarti (ayanc@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning Image Representations from Unlabeled Video

Date: Apr 18, 2016

Speaker: Kristen Grauman, University of Texas at Austin

Host: Greg Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Words, Pictures, and Common Sense

Date: Apr 1, 2016

Speaker: Devi Parikh, Virginia Tech

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Towards Transparent Intelligent Systems: Diverse Predictions from Perception Modules

Date: Mar 31, 2016

Speaker: Dhruv Batra, Virginia Tech

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Advances in Solving Structured Optimization Problems

Date: Mar 14, 2016

Speaker: Mark Schmidt, University of British Columbia

Host: Ofer Meshi (meshi@ttic.edu)


Title: Topological Sampling Problems

Date: Feb 29, 2016

Speaker: Shmuel Weinberger, University of Chicago

Host: Sasha Razborov (razborov@math.uchicago.edu)


Title: Mining Gummi Bears in One and Two Jars

Date: Jan 11, 2016

Speaker: Gunnar Klau, CWI Amsterdam

Host: Stefan Canzar (canzar@ttic.edu)


Title: Analysis of Dynamic Interaction Networks

Date: Dec 14, 2015

Speaker: Tanya Berger-Wolf, University of Illinois at Chicago

Host: Hammad Naveed (hammad.naveed@ttic.edu)


Title: Approximate Nearest Neighbor methods in computer vision, beyond L2

Date: Nov 23, 2015

Speaker: Lihi Zelnik-Manor, Technion

Host: Greg Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: False Discovery Rates - a new deal

Date: Nov 16, 2015

Speaker: Matthew Stephens, University of Chicago

Host: Aly Khan (aakhan@ttic.edu)


Title: Single and Multichannel Raw Waveform Neural Network Acoustic Models

Date: Nov 9, 2015

Speaker: Tara Sainath; Google Research

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Diderot: a Domain-Specific Language for Portable Parallel Scientific Visualization and Image Analysis

Date: Nov 2, 2015

Speaker: Gordon Kindlmann, University of Chicago

Host: Greg Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Fast, Approximate and Scalable Geometric Optimization

Date: Oct 5, 2015

Speaker: Chandrajit Bajaj, University of Texas at Austin

Host: Jinbo Xu and Qixing Huang (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Machine Learning Approaches to Speech Enhancement

Date: Sept 28, 2015

Speaker: Paris Smaragdis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Towards Universal Syntactic Processing of Natural Language

Date: Sept 4, 2015

Speaker: Slav Petrov, Google

Host: Mohit Bansal (mbansal@ttic.edu)


Title: Vertex Sparsification of Cuts, Flows, and Distances

Date: Aug 31, 2015

Speaker: Robert Krauthgamer, Weizmann Institute

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


Title: Sampling Strategies for Feature-Efficient and Active Learning

Date: Aug 17, 2015

Speaker: Lev Reyzin, UIC

Host: Greg Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Approximate Matchings in Dynamic Graph Streams

Date: Aug 10, 2015

Speaker: Sanjeev Khanna, University of Pennsylvania

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


Title: Blind deblurring and blind super-resolution using internal patch recurrence

Date: Aug 3, 2015

Speaker: Tomer Michaeli, Technion

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: What can vectorial representations do? Distributed structure processing in neural networks

Date: July 20, 2015

Speaker: Paul Smolensky, John Hopkins

Host: Kevin Gimpel (kgimpee@ttic.edu)


Title: Unsupervised Word Segmentation and Lexicon Discovery from Speech using Acoustic Word Embeddings

Date: July 17, 2015

Speaker: Sharon Goldwater, University of Edinburgh

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Sparse Recovery via Dynamics

Date: July 15, 2015

Speaker: Yuan Yao, Peking University

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


2014/2015 Academic Year

Title: Extracting hidden structure from multiple higher order arrays

Date: June 18, 2014

Speaker: Koh Takeuchi, NTT Japan

Host: Ryota Tomioka (tomioka@ttic.edu)


Title: Multiresolution Matrix Factorization

Date: July 14, 2014

Speaker: Risi Kondor, Univ of Chicago

Host: Greg Shakhnarovich (greg@ttic.edu)


Title: Palindrome Recognition In The Streaming Model

Date: July 31, 2014

Speaker: Funda Ergun, Indiana University Bloomington and Simon Fraser University

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Towards Improving the Robustness of Gesture Recognition Systems: Addressing Large Vocabularies and Cluttered Scenes

Date: August 25, 2014

Speaker: Vassilis Athitsos, Univ of Texas at Arlington

Host: Greg Shakhnarovich (greg@ttic.edu)


Title: Asynchronous Stochastic Optimization for Sequence Training of Deep Neural Networks: Towards Big Data

Date: August 28, 2014

Speaker: Erik McDermott, Google

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Semantic Parsing, Latent Variables, and Inference

Date: September 15, 2014

Speaker: Percy Liang, Stanford

Host: Mohit Bansal (mbansal@ttic.edu)


Title: Human-Centered Language Processing: Event Detection and Impaired Speech Recognition

Date: September 22, 2014

Speaker: Bonnie J. Dorr-Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC)

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Graph Grammars and Automata for NLP

Date: September 29, 2014

Speaker: David Chiang, University of Notre Dame

Host: Kevin Gimpel (kgimpel@ttic.edu)


Title: Reverse engineering the neural mechanisms involved in robust speech processing

Date: October 6, 2014

Speaker: Nima Mesgarani, Electrical Engineering Department at Columbia University

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Leontief Exchange Markets Can Solve Multivariate Polynomial Equations, Yielding FIXP and ETR Hardness

Date: October 16, 2014

Speaker: Ruta Mehta, Georgia Institute of Technology

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


Title: Video-Based Analysis of Human Actions, Interactions and Social Behaviors

Date: October 20, 2014

Speaker: Stan Sclaroff, Boston University

Host: Greg Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Algorithmic progress on the Lovasz Local Lemma

Date: October 27, 2014

Speaker: Aravind Srinivasan, University of Maryland

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


Title: Incentives for Collective Behavior: Badges, Procrastination, and Long-Range Goals

Date: November 5, 2014

Speaker: Jon Kleinberg, Cornell

Host: Madhur Tulsiani (madhurt@ttic.edu)


Title: A Framework for Analysis of Computational Imaging Systems

Date: November 17, 2014

Speaker: Oliver Cossairt, Northwestern

Host: Ayan Chakrabarti (ayanc@ttic.edu)


Title: Novel directions for biological network comparison: implications for aging

Date: December 1, 2014

Speaker: Tijana Milenkovic, University of Notre Dame

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: What's wrong with convolutional nets?

Date: January 23, 2015

Speaker: Geoff Hinton, University of Toronto & Google

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: How Good Is Structured Prediction?

Date: February 23, 2015

Speaker: David Sontag, NYU

Host: Greg Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Spectral Language Modeling

Date: March 2, 2015

Speaker: Lyle Ungar, University of Pennsylvania

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Do Deep Nets Really Need To Be Deep?

Date: April 30, 2015

Speaker: Rich Caruana, Microsoft

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Robust Camera Location Estimation by Convex Programming

Date: June 4, 2015

Speaker: Amit Singer, Princeton

Host: Nathan Srebro and Qixing Huang (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Zodiac — A comprehensive depiction of genetic interactions in cancer by integrating TCGA data

Date: June 22, 2015

Speaker: Yuan Ji, University of Chicago, Northshore Hospital

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


2013/2014 Academic Year

Title: Optimal Provision-After-Wait in Healthcare

Date: October 3, 2013

Speaker: Mark Braverman, Princeton

Host: Madhur Tulsiani (madhurt@ttic.edu)


Title: Large-Scale Paraphrasing – Extraction and Application

Date: October 7, 2013

Speaker: Juri Ganitkevitch

Host: Kevin Gimpel (kgimpel@ttic.edu)


Title: Completing the noisy circuit: Systems of feedback in models of dysarthria

Date: November 12, 2013

Speaker: Frank Rudzicz, University of Toronto

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Predicting Linguistic Structures Accurately and Efficiently

Date: November 26, 2013

Speaker: Franz Kiraly, University College London

Host: Ryota Tomioka (tomioka@ttic.edu)


Title: Predicting Linguistic Structures Accurately and Efficiently

Date: January 17, 2014

Speaker: Hal Daume lll, Univ of Maryland

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Foundations For Learning in the Age of Big Data

Date: January 28, 2014

Speaker: Maria Florina (Nina) Balcan, Georgia Institute of Technology

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


2012/2013 Academic Year

Title: Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning in Brain Diffusion MRI

Date: October 23, 2012

Speaker: Thomas Shultz, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

Host: Samory Kpotufe (samory@ttic.edu)


Title: Global and Local Approach of Part-of-Speech Tagging for Large Copora

Date: November 13, 2012

Speaker: Shi Yu, University of Chicago

Host: Kevin Gimpel (kgimpel@ttic.edu)


Title: Automatically Learning the Structure of Spoken Language Without Supervision

Date: November 27, 2012

Speaker: Aren Jansen, Johns Hopkins

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Analysis and Modeling of Opinions and Sentiments

Date: December 4, 2012

Speaker: Bing Liu, UIC

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Natural image statistics and image restoration

Date: February 18, 2013

Speaker: Yair Weiss, Hebrew University

Host: Tamir Hazan (tamir@ttic.edu)


Title: Convergence of latent population structures in finite admixture models

Date: March 5, 2013

Speaker: Long Nguyen, Department of Statistics, University of Michigan

Host: Anand Sarwate (asarwate@ttic.edu)


Title: Distributed Hessian-free Optimization for Deep Neural Network Acoustic Models

Date: March 11, 2013

Speaker: Brian Kingsbury, IBM

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: From Contextual Search to Automatic Content Generation: Scaling Human Editorial Judgment

Date: April 10, 2013

Speaker: Larry Birnbaum, Northwestern University

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Predictions of Structures of Protein Interactions

Date: May 20, 2013

Speaker: Daisuke Kihara, Purdue University

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Integrating Learning in Structured Prediction and Latent Variable Models

Date: June 4, 2013

Speaker: Rich Zemel, University of Toronto

Host: Tamir Hazan (tamir@ttic.edu)


Title: Non-invasive Human-Machine Interfaces for the disabled: rehabilitation, phantom pain and more

Date: June 28, 2013

Speaker: Claudio Castellini, German Aerospace Center

Host: Francesco Orabona (orabona@ttic.edu)


Title: TTIC Colloquium: Flavio Villanustre

Date: July 16, 2013

Speaker: Flavio Villanustre, Vice President of Technology Architecture and Product for LexisNexis and leads HPCC Systems

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Component Analysis for Human Sensing

Date: July 30, 2013

Speaker: Fernando de la Torre

Host: Raquel Urtasun (rurtasun@ttic.edu)


Title: Dense 3D scene flow estimation for locally rigid scenes

Date: July 30, 2013

Speaker: Konrad Schindler, ETH Zurich

Host: Raquel Urtasun (rurtasun@ttic.edu)


Title: Large-Scale Sparse Learning for Biomedical Data

Date: August 14, 2013

Speaker: Jieping Ye, Arizona State University

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


2011/2012 Academic Year

Title: Structure from Motion in the Wild: Towards Reconstructing Active 3D Scenes from Moving Cameras

Date: September 26, 2011

Speaker: Yaser Sheikh, CMU

Host: Raquel Urtasun (rurtasun@ttic.edu)


Title: Predicting Beta-Sheet Protein Folding Pathways Using Ensemble Models

Date: September 30, 2011

Speaker: Jerome Waldispuhl, McGill

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Privacy Preserving Speech Processing

Date: October 17, 2011

Speaker: Manas Pathak, CMU

Host: Joseph Keshet (jkeshet@ttic.edu)


Title: Collective Construction by Termites and Other Robots

Date: October 24, 2011

Speaker: Justin Werfel, Harvard

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: What is Singular Learning Theory?

Date: November 7, 2011

Speaker: Shaowei Lin, Berkeley

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Power-aware Routing and Scheduling

Date: November 16, 2011

Speaker: Daniel M (Matthew) Andrews

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


Title: Perfect Matchings in Regular Bipartite Graphs

Date: November 17, 2011

Speaker: Sanjeev Khanna, University of Pennsylvania

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


Title: Dimension Reduction in L_1

Date: November 18, 2011

Speaker: Moses Charikar

Host: Yury Makarychev (yury@ttic.edu)


Title: Approximation Algorithms for Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization

Date: November 21, 2011

Speaker: Anupam Gupta, CMU

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning A Semantic Space: From Image Annotation to Music Similarity

Date: November 22, 2011

Speaker: Samy Bengio, Google

Host: Joseph Keshet (jkeshet@ttic.edu)


Title: The Peptide Binding Problem

Date: November 30, 2011

Speaker: Steve Smale, TTIC/City University of Hong Kong

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Algorithms for submodular objectives via continuous extensions and dependent randomized rounding

Date: December 7, 2011

Speaker: Chandra Chekuri

Host: Yury Makarychev (yury@ttic.edu)


Title: Universal Speech Attribute Characterization for Automatic Speech Recognition and Spoken Language Recognition

Date: December 8, 2011

Speaker: Torbjørn Svendsen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Nonparametric Bayesian Models for Structured Objects

Date: January 18, 2012

Speaker: Zoubin Ghahramani, University of Cambridge

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Challenges for Machine Learning in Ecological Science and Environmental Management

Date: January 26, 2012

Speaker: Tom Dietterich, Oregon State

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Packing ellipsoids with overlap

Date: February 13, 2012

Speaker: Steve Wright

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Combinatorial Hodge Theory and Applications

Date: February 20, 2012

Speaker: Yuan Yao, PKU

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning from Natural Instructions

Date: February 21, 2012

Speaker: Dan Roth

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Probabilistic Databases for Large-scale Knowledge-base Construction

Date: March 21, 2012

Speaker: Andrew McCallum

Host: Raquel Urtasun (rurtasun@ttic.edu)


Title: Convex Tensor Decomposition with Performance Guarantee

Date: March 22, 2012

Speaker: Ryota Tomioka, University of Tokoyo

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Factor Graphs, Bayes Trees, and Preconditioning for SLAM and SFM

Date: May 9, 2012

Speaker: Frank Dellaert, Georgia Tech

Host: Raquel Urtasun (rurtasun@ttic.edu)


Title: Selected Topics from ASR Research for Asian Languages at Tokyo Tech

Date: June 7, 2012

Speaker: Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: How to Modify Bayesian Inference when All Models are Wrong

Date: June 21, 2012

Speaker: Peter Grunwald, CWI Amsterdam

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Phase Transition in Random Integer Programs

Date: June 25, 2012

Speaker: Kathekeyan Chandrasekaran

Host: Madhur Tusiani (madhurt@ttic.edu)


Title: Ensemble image segmentation using efficient integer linear programming

Date: August 6, 2012

Speaker: Jacob Goldberger, Bar-Ilan University

Host: Gregory Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Statistical Models for Illumination and Geometry Inference.

Date: August 27, 2012

Speaker: Dimitris Samaras, SUNY Stony Brook

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Robust Computation of Linear Models

Date: September 24, 2012

Speaker: Gilad Lerman, Univerity of Minnesota

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


2010/2011 Academic Year

Title: ProbIN: Probabilistic Inertial Navigation

Date: September 20, 2010

Speaker: Joy Zhang, CMU

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning with Approximate inference - From LP Relaxations to Pseudo-Max Approaches

Date: September 28, 2010

Speaker: Amir Globerson, Hebrew University

Host: Tamir Hazan (tamir@ttic.edu)


Title: TTIC Colloquium: Azarakhsh Malekian

Date: October 11, 2010

Speaker: Azarakhsh Malekian, Northwestern

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning Components for Human Sensing

Date: October 18, 2010

Speaker: Fernando De la Torre, CMU

Host: Raquel Urtasun (rurtasun@ttic.edu)


Title: Probabilistic Graphical Models of Protein Sequence and Structure

Date: October 25, 2010

Speaker: Chris Langmead, CMU

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Network based comparison of temporal gene expression patterns

Date: November 1, 2010

Speaker: Sheng Zhong, UIUC

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: TTIC Colloquium: Vijay Vazirani

Date: November 10, 2010

Speaker: Vijay Vazirani, Georgia Tech

Host: Sasha Razborov (razboroe@cs.uchicago.edu)


Title: TTIC Colloquium: Vijay Vazirani

Date: November 11, 2010

Speaker: Vijay Vazirani, Georgia Tech

Host: Sasha Razborov (razborov@cs.uchicago.edu)


Title: TTIC Colloquium: Andrew Gallagher

Date: November 15, 2010

Speaker: Andrew Gallagher, Eastman Kodak Company

Host: Dhruv Batra and Devi Parikh (dbatra@ttic.edu)


Title: TTIC Colloquium: Raj Rao Nadakuditi

Date: November 22, 2010

Speaker: Raj Rao Nadakuditi, University of Michigan

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Physics in Human Motion Estimation and Scene Understanding

Date: January 10, 2011

Speaker: Marcus Brubaker, University of Toronto

Host: Raquel Urtasun (rurtasun@ttic.edu)


Title: Improving the Visible with the Invisible: Applications of visible/near-infrared imaging in Computational Photography and Computer Vision

Date: February 14, 2011

Speaker: Sabine Suesstrunk, EPFL

Host: Mathieu Salzmann (salzmann@ttic.edu)


Title: What else can we do with more data?

Date: February 15, 2011

Speaker: Shai Shalev-Shwartz, The Hebrew University

Host: Tamir Hazan (tamir@ttic.edu)


Title: Modeling Brain Circuitry using Scales Ranging from Micrometer to Nanometer

Date: February 16, 2011

Speaker: Pascal Fua, EPFL

Host: Mathieu Salzmann (salzmann@ttic.edu)


Title: Rank aggregation via Hodge theory

Date: February 21, 2011

Speaker: Lek-Heng Lim, University of Chicago

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Graph approximation, local clustering, and the solution of systems of linear equations.

Date: March 7, 2011

Speaker: Dan Spielman, Yale

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Text and Other Quantitative Data: Relating What We Say and What We Do

Date: March 9, 2011

Speaker: Noah Smith, CMU

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Detecting High Log-Densities -- an O(n^{1/4}) Approximation for Densest k-Subgraph

Date: March 14, 2011

Speaker: Aravindan Vijayaraghavan, Princeton

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


Title: Optimal Distributed Online Prediction

Date: March 21, 2011

Speaker: Ohad Shamir, Microsoft Research New England

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning with Exploration

Date: March 22, 2011

Speaker: John Langford, Yahoo Research

Host: Joseph Keshet (jkeshet@ttic.edu)


Title: Entire Relaxation Path for Maximum Entropy Models

Date: March 30, 2011

Speaker: Yoram Singer, Google

Host: Joseph Keshet (jkeshet@ttic.edu)


Title: The Road From DBNs to Image Segmentation is Paved with Submodularity

Date: April 4, 2011

Speaker: Jeff Blimes, University of Washington

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Rational Convex Programs

Date: Apr. 6, 2011

Speaker: Vijay Vazirani, Georgia Tech

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Adaptively Learning the Crowd Kernel

Date: April 8, 2011

Speaker: Adam Kalai, Microsoft Research

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Semi-supervised and unsupervised graph-based learning for natural language processing

Date: April 11, 2011

Speaker: Katrin Kirchhoff, University of Washington

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: TTIC Colloquium: Alex & Tamara Berg

Date: April 20, 2011

Speaker: Alex & Tamara Berg, Stony Brook University

Host: Raquel Urtasun (rurtasun@ttic.edu)


Title: Population scale detection of common and rare genomic rearrangements and transcriptomic aberrations

Date: May 6, 2011

Speaker: Cenk Sahinalp, Simon Fraser University

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Integration of Genomic Data for Functional Genomics

Date: May 10, 2011

Speaker: Sayan Mukherjee, Duke University

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: Putting humans into the loop for image based modeling

Date: June 17, 2011

Speaker: Adarsh Kowdle, Cornell

Host: Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra (dparikh@ttic.edu)


Title: Machine Learning for Discovery in Legal Cases

Date: July 11, 2011

Speaker: David Lewis

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Unlabeled Data and Other Marginals

Date: July 13, 2011

Speaker: Mark Hasegawa-Johnson

Host: Joseph Keshet (jkeshet@ttic.edu)


Title: Generalized Agreement Statistics over fixed set of labelings

Date: July 18, 2011

Speaker: Mohak Shah, Accenture Technology Labs

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Lagrangian relaxation for inference in natural language processing

Date: July 21, 2011

Speaker: Michael Collins, Columbia University

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Computational strategies for understanding how biological networks function

Date: Aug. 3, 2011

Speaker: Tamer Kahveci, University of Florida

Host: Jinbo Xu (j3xu@ttic.edu)


Title: FTV (Free-viewpoint TV)

Date: Aug. 12, 2011

Speaker: Masayuki Tanimoto, Nagoya University

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Positive definite matrices and the SB-Divergence

Date: Aug. 16, 2011

Speaker: Suvrit Sra, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


2009/2010 Academic Year

Title: On Sparse Rectangular Representations of Matrix Data

Date: Oct. 5, 2009

Speaker: Konstantin Makarychev, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Host: Yury Makarychev (yury@ttic.edu)


Title: A simpler approach to matrix completion

Date: Oct. 26, 2009

Speaker: Ben Recht

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: A Quasi-Newton Approach to Nonsmooth Convex Optimization

Date: Nov. 2, 2009

Speaker: S V N Vishwanathan, Purdue

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Reconstructing Deformable Surfaces: A Convex Formulation

Date: Nov. 9, 2009

Speaker: Mathieu Salzmann, ICSI Berkeley

Host: Raquel Urtasun (rurtasun@ttic.edu)


Title: Statistical Models in Computer Vision

Date: Nov. 16, 2009

Speaker: Yali Amit, University of Chicago

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning with Annotation Noise

Date: Nov. 23, 2009

Speaker: Beata Beigman Klebanov, Northwestern University

Host: Joseph Keshet (jkeshet@ttic.edu)


Title: Learning from Labeled and Unlabeled Data, Global vs. Multiscale Approaches

Date: Nov. 30, 2009

Speaker: Boaz Nadler, Weizmann Institute

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Strategic Network Formation and Group Formation

Date: Dec. 14, 2009

Speaker: Elliot Anshelevich, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Host: Julia Chuzhoy (cjulia@ttic.edu)


Title: Semi-Supervised Learning with Measure Propagation

Date: Jan. 4, 2010

Speaker: Amar Subramanya, Google

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Bounding Rationality by Computational Complexity

Date: Jan. 11, 2010

Speaker: Lance Fortnow, Northwestern University

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Unsupervised Learning of Deep Probabilistic Models

Date: Jan. 19, 2010

Speaker: Ruslan Salakhutdinov, MIT

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Unsupervised Learning of Natural Language Morphology

Date: Jan. 25, 2010

Speaker: John Goldsmith, University of Chicago

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Statistical inference in high-dimensional settings: A unified analysis of regularized estimators

Date: Feb. 1, 2010

Speaker: Martin Wainwright, U. C. Berkeley

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Optimal Control of Hybrid Systems with Applications to Robotics

Date: Feb. 8, 2010

Speaker: Milos Zefran, UIC

Host: Nathan Ratliff (ndr@ttic.edu)


Title: Geometry and Topology in Statistical Inference

Date: Mar. 8, 2010

Speaker: Sayan Mukherjee, Duke

Host: Andreas Argyriou (argyriou@ttic.edu)


Title: Compressed Counting for Estimating Frequency Moments and Entropy of Data Streams

Date: May 17, 2010

Speaker: Ping Li, Cornell

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


2008/2009 Academic Year

Title: RTComposer: A Framework for Real-Time Components with Scheduling Interface

Date: Sept. 29, 2008

Speaker: Gera Weiss, University of Pennsylvania

Host: Ronen Basri (ronen.basri@tti-c.org)


Title: Axiomatic view of clustering - overcoming Kleinberg's impossibility result

Date: Oct. 6, 2008

Speaker: Shai Ben-David, University of Waterloo

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: A Geometric Perspective on Learning Theory and Algorithms

Date: Oct. 13, 2008

Speaker: Partha Niyogi, University of Chicago

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Homology Flows

Date: Oct. 20, 2008

Speaker: Jeff Erickson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Host: Benoit Hudson (bhudson@tti-c.org)


Title: There Aren't Any Real Belief-Desire Intention Theories Out There ... But Mine!! (And really, I'm not too sure about mine.

Date: Oct. 27, 2008

Speaker: David Israel, SRI International

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Looking at People

Date: Nov. 3, 2008

Speaker: David Forsyth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Host: Greg Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: Random Features: Replacing Optimization with Randomization in Learning

Date: Nov. 10, 2008

Speaker: Ali Rahimi, Intel

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Community Structure in Large Social and Information Networks

Date: Nov. 24, 2008

Speaker: Michael Mahoney, Stanford University

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Complexity, Learnability, and Constraint-Based Grammars

Date: Dec. 15, 2008

Speaker: Jason Riggle, University of Chicago

Host: Karen Livescu (klivescu@ttic.edu)


Title: Computational Awareness

Date: Jan. 12, 2009

Speaker: Lance Fortnow, Northwestern U.

Host: Ronen Basri (ronen.basri@tti-c.org)


Title: Large-scale Bayesian regression: A novel prior distribution, with applications to genome wide association studies.

Date: Feb. 2, 2009

Speaker: Matthew Stephens, U. Chicago

Host: David McAllester (mcallester@ttic.edu)


Title: Tensors: Theory and Applications

Date: Mar. 2, 2009

Speaker: Shmuel Friedland, UIC

Host: Shai Shalev-Shwartz (shai@tti-c.org)


Title: Vox Populi: On Learning from Crowds

Date: Mar. 9, 2009

Speaker: Ohad Shamir

Host: Shai Shalev-Shwartz (shai@tti-c.org)


Title: Perception as Bayesian inference about causes

Date: July 20, 2009

Speaker: Konrad Koerding, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University

Host: Greg Shakhnarovich (gregory@ttic.edu)


Title: An effective belief-propagation algorithm for constrained linear least-squares problems.

Date: Aug 3, 2009

Speaker: Jacob Goldberger, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: The Dynamics of Equilibria

Date: Aug 24, 2009

Speaker: Maria Florina (Nina) Balcan, MSR New England and Georgia Tech

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)


Title: Constrained Conditional Models: Learning and Inference in Natural Language Understanding

Date: Sept 21, 2009

Speaker: Dan Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Host: Nati Srebro (nati@ttic.edu)