[Colloquium] 4/28 Research at TTIC: Mesrob Ohannessian, TTIC

[Mary Marre via Colloquium]

When:     Friday, April 28th at noon



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



Who:       Mesrob Ohannessian; TTIC



Title:       Combining Hard and Soft Structures and Using Them Only When
Needed

Abstract: Data is always a scarce resource. This is either because the
complexity of what we want to do with data is proportional to how much of
it we have or because the useful rare information hides in a sea of
irrelevant details. To deal with this, machine learning and statistics (or
dare we say data science?) have proposed methods that use additional
structure inherent in nature and/or the performed task, to let the same
data go a longer way. Some of the better methods even discover structure
and adapt to it.

I will talk about what I believe are two shortcomings of this program. The
first is the fact that focus has often been only on one of two types of
structures, instead of combining them: either “hard structures” such as
latent variable models and low-dimensional representations or “soft
structures” such as parametric models and smoothness assumptions. The
second shortcoming is that often the same structure is used heavy-handedly
on the entirety of the data, rather than locally adapting to where it’s
needed. I will explore these ideas and present a framework for addressing
them in the context of discrete distribution estimation, with some (very
lightweight) application to language modeling.

********************************************************************************************************

*Research at TTIC Seminar Series*

TTIC is hosting a weekly seminar series presenting the research currently
underway at the Institute. Every week a different TTIC faculty member will
present their research.  The lectures are intended both for students
seeking research topics and adviser, and for the general TTIC and
University of Chicago communities interested in hearing what their
colleagues are up to.

To receive announcements about the seminar series, please subscribe to the
mailing list: https://groups.google.com/a/ttic.edu/group/talks/subscribe

Speaker details can be found at: http://www.ttic.edu/tticseminar.php.

For additional questions, please contact Nathan Srebro at nati at ttic.edu
<mcallester at ttic.edu>





Mary C. Marre
Administrative Assistant
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 504*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757 <(773)%20834-1757>*
*f: (773) 357-6970 <(773)%20357-6970>*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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