Natural language research announcements

[Daniel Khashabi <khashab2 AT illinois.edu>]

Title: Some Limitations and Possibilities Toward Data-driven Optimization

Speaker: Yaron Singer, Harvard University

Time/Location: 4pm Sep 24, 2015, 114 Transportation Building

Abstract:
As we grow highly dependent on data for making predictions, we translate
these predictions into models that help us make informed decisions.  But
how do the guarantees we have on predictions translate to guarantees on
decisions? In many cases, we learn models from sampled data and then aim
to use these models to make decisions. In some cases, despite having
access to large data sets, the current frameworks we have for
learnability do not suffice to guarantee desirable outcomes.  In other
cases, the learning techniques we have introduce estimation errors which
can result in poor outcomes and stark impossibility results.  In this
talk we will formalize some of these ideas using convex and
combinatorial optimization.

Biography:
Yaron Singer is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard
University.  He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Google
Research and obtained his PhD from UC Berkeley.  He is the recipient of
the NSF CAREER award, 2012 Best Student Paper Award at the ACM
conference on Web Search and Data Mining, the 2010 Facebook Fellowship,
the 2009 Microsoft Research Fellowship, and several awards for
entrepreneurial work on social networks.