[Colloquium] CDAC Distinguished Speaker Series: Alexander Gray (IBM), October 25th

[Rob Mitchum]

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Announcement]

*Please join us October 25th as we continue our Fall Distinguished Speaker
Series
<https://uchicago.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e0b067f9a3f85cd7e439ae8f0&id=8f11158aef&e=467e369681>
with
Alexander Gray, Vice President for Foundations of AI at IBM.*
CDAC DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER SERIES Foundations for Automated Data ScienceFriday,
October 25, 2019 · 12:30-1:30pm
Room 390, John Crerar Library Building, 5730 S. Ellis Avenue

Data science, despite its clear value, still has not received satisfactory
formal treatment as a discipline. Many regard data science as a pragmatic
black art, in large part due to the fact that data preparation, model
deployment, and many practical model desiderata beyond simple predictive
accuracy are generally not treated in courses or textbooks on statistics or
machine learning in the sense of being guided by any rigorous underlying
principles. This has resulted, for example, in much data science education
focusing on the ability to use a collection of specific tools. It has also
resulted in the widespread occurrence of subtle but significant conceptual
errors being made in practice, even by PhDs in major institutions. In this
talk I will present a mathematical model of data science that can clarify
and guide the aforementioned important pragmatic aspects of data science
rather than simply ascribing best practice to heuristics, general
experience, or domain knowledge. I will discuss open practical issues in
data science, including learnings from extensive user studies, show how
such a theoretical foundation can address them, and finally show how these
principles can translate to new practical data science tools in the form of
the user experience, both graphical and programmatic in the form of
libraries/languages.

*Lunch will be provided. We expect a crowded audience, so please RSVP as
soon as possible.*
RSVP Here
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*Alexander Gray*
Vice President for Foundations of AI, IBM

Alexander Gray serves as VP of Foundations of AI at IBM, leading IBM’s
basic AI research globally. He previously served as CEO and CTO of Skytree,
which he co-founded, then at Infosys as GM of Research and Fellow. Prior to
that, he served as a tenured Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute
of Technology. A theme of his research work, beginning at NASA in 1993, has
been on the computational aspects of machine learning for handling massive
datasets, long predating the movement of “big data” in industry. His work
helped enable the Science journal’s Top Breakthrough of 2003, and have won
a number of research awards. He served as a member of the 2010 National
Academy of Sciences Committee on the Analysis of Massive Data, a National
Academy of Sciences Kavli Scholar, and a frequent advisor and speaker on
topics of large-scale machine learning and data science at top research
conferences, government agencies, and leading corporations. He received AB
degrees in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and a
PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. His current
interests are in automated data science, automated programming, and in new
formalisms for AI beyond today’s machine learning, toward achieving reading
comprehension and strong AI.
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CDAC is the incubator for new multidisciplinary data science and artificial
intelligence research at the University of Chicago. We catalyze new
discoveries by fusing fundamental and applied research with real-world
applications.


-- 
*Rob Mitchum*

*Associate Director of Communications for Data Science and Computing*
*University of Chicago*
*rmitchum at uchicago.edu <rmitchum at ci.uchicago.edu>*
*773-484-9890*
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