[Colloquium] Guest Speakers @ TTI-C Next Week (4/24/06-4/28/06)

[Katherine Cumming]

**********TTI-C Guest Speakers Next Week***********
                             April 24 - April 28, 2006
        Presented by:  Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
 
(1)
 
Speaker:  Ilya Ruvinsky, Department of Ecology and Evolution of the
University of Chicago
Speaker's home page:
http://pondside.uchicago.edu/ecol-evol/faculty/ruvinsky_i.html
 
Date: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 
Location: TTI-C Conference Room, Part of Bioinformatics Seminar
Time: 2:00 pm      
Title:  Computational and comparative view of evolution and development in
Metazoa
Abstract:
The availability of complete genome sequences of a wide variety of
organisms, an essential part of the "genomics revolution", has greatly
accelerated discovery in biology over the last decade.  This abundance of
data has brought to the forefront comparative and computational methods.  I
will describe two projects that take advantage of these approaches.
 
The first uses comparative analyses to elucidate the patterns and functional
consequences of changes in regulatory elements that control spatial and
temporal patterns of gene expression.  If successful, it will improve our
ability to predict functional elements from sequence data alone.
 
The second project exploits our ability to use computation to predict gene
expression patterns.  We have identified a number of genes whose products
are present in all neurons and few, if any, other cell types.  Together
these genes constitute a "genetic definition" of neurons as a cell type.
Since many of these genes are also highly conserved between all animals
studied to date, we can use them to infer, for the first time, the origin
and diversification of neurons in animal evolution.
 
Please visit http://pondside.uchicago.edu/ecol-evol/faculty/ruvinsky_i.html
for more information about these projects.
 
(2) 
 
Speaker: Mark Sandler, Cornell University
 Speaker's home page:  http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~sandler/
 
Date: Thursday, April 27, 2006
Time: 10:00 am
Location: TTI-C conference room
 
Title:  Algorithms for Mixture Models: Analysis and Experiments
 
Abstract:
 
Mixture models form one of the most fundamental classes of generative models
for clustered data, and they have numerous applications in information
retrieval, computer vision, and other fields.  However, until very recently,
there have been only a few algorithms known that can provably guarantee
reconstruction of the model with small error, given observed data.  In this
talk we present algorithms for two different learning problems which enjoy
this property.  We also present results of experiments performed on
collection of abstracts from ArXiV using one of our algorithms.
 
One interesting property shared by both our algorithms is that they are
based on the use of the L1-norm, and we show that it is a better choice than
Euclidean norm for these problems. 
 
(3)
 
Speaker:  Michael Kearns, University of Pennsylvania
Speaker's home page:  http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mkearns/
 
Date: Friday, April 28, 2006 
Location: Ryerson 251   Part of TTI-C Distinguished Lecturer Series
Time:  3:00 pm
Refreshments to follow: Ryerson 255
 
Title:   Behavioral Graph Coloring
Abstract:
The pioneering work of Travers and Milgram in 1969 established the
now-familiar folklore of "six degrees" of separation in natural social
networks.  More recently, researchers including Jon Kleinberg and Duncan
Watts have explored the algorithmic aspects of how messages are forwarded in
such networks.  Perhaps the computer science view of this fascinating line
of thought can be best summarized as follows: Using relatively local
information, distributed human organizations can compute good approximations
to the all-pairs shortest paths problem.  What other sorts of distributed
optimization problems can humans networks solve?
 
In this talk, I will describe the preliminary but thought-provoking findings
of a series of behavioral experiments we have been performing at Penn. Human
subjects attempt to perform distributed graph coloring using a system that
controls network structure, information conditions, incentives, and a
variety of other variables of interest.  The experiments shed early light on
whether such problems can be solved by human networks, under what
conditions, and on what algorithms they seem to adopt.
 
Joint work with Siddharth Suri and Nick Montfort. 
 
 
 
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If you have questions, or would like to meet the speaker, please contact
Katherine at 773-834-1994 or  <mailto:kcumming at tti-c.org> kcumming at tti-c.org

For information on future TTI-C talks and events, please go to the TTI-C
Events page:  http://www.tti-c.org/events.html.  TTI-C (1427 East 60th
Street, Chicago, IL  60637)
 
 
 
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