[Colloquium] Talks at TTIC: Rong Ge, Microsoft

[Dawn Ellis]

When:     Wednesday, March 11th at 11am

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526

Who:       Rong Ge, Microsoft

Title:       Towards Provable and Practical Machine Learning

Abstract:

Many problems --- especially machine learning problems like sparse coding
or topic modeling --- are hard in the worst-case, but nevertheless solved
in practice by algorithms whose convergence properties are not understood.
In this talk I will show how we can identify natural properties of
"real-life" instances that allow us to design scalable algorithms for a
host of well-known machine learning problems. Most of the talk will be
focused on the sparse coding problem: a basic task in many fields including
signal processing, neuroscience and machine learning where the goal is to
learn a basis that enables a sparse representation of a given set of data,
if one exists. Here we give a general framework for understanding
alternating minimization which we leverage to analyze existing heuristics
and to design new ones also with provable guarantees.

Host:  Madhur Tulsiani,  madhurt at ttic.edu

-- 
*Dawn Ellis*
Administrative Coordinator,
Bookkeeper
773-834-1757
dellis at ttic.edu

TTIC
6045 S. Kenwood Ave.
Chicago, IL. 60637
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