This week we have *Viral Shah * from * Julia Computing * giving a talk
on *Fri September
14 2018* at *10:30* in room *Z315 (in Pavilion Claire McNicoll)*. It's not
our usual room but it'll be a regular room for the next two months :)
Will this talk be streamed <https://mila.bluejeans.com/809027115/webrtc>?
Yes
And you can sign up to meet the speaker here:
if there's a tea talk, you should always GOTO it
Michael
*TITLE* On Machine Learning and Programming Languages
*KEYWORDS *ML/DL infrastructure, Programming Languages
*ABSTRACT*
We ask, what might the ideal ML language of the future look like? Our
thoughts are published in this blog post:
https://julialang.org/blog/2017/12/ml&pl As programming languages (PL)
people, we have watched with great interest as machine learning (ML) has
exploded -- and with it, the complexity of ML models and the frameworks
people are using to build them. State-of-the-art models are increasingly
programs, with support for programming constructs like loops and recursion,
and this brings out many interesting issues in the tools we use to
create them -- that is, programming languages. While machine learning does
not yet have a dedicated language, several efforts are effectively creating
hidden new languages underneath a Python API (like TensorFlow) while others
are reusing Python as a modeling language (like PyTorch). We'd like to ask
-- are new ML-tailored languages required, and if so, why? Now that Julia
1.0 is released, we will also discuss how Julia evolved to get where it is
today, and how it might evolve to taking on some of the challenges posed
by machine learning
*BIO*
Dr. Viral Shah is a co-creator of the Julia project and Co-founder and CEO
of Julia Computing. He has had a long-term track record of building
open-source software. Apart from Julia, he is also co-creator of
Circuitscape, an open-source program which borrows algorithms from
electronic circuit theory for ecological conservation. In the Government of
India, he was an early member of the country’s national ID project -
Aadhaar, where his work on re-architecting India’s social security systems
led to a significant increase in social and financial inclusion, while
simultaneously saving the exchequer over a billion dollars in slippage. The
experiences of implementing technology at such scale for a billion people
are collected in his book: Rebooting India. Viral has a Ph. D. from the
University of California at Santa Barbara, in Computer Science.
This week we are super lucky to have *Geoff Gordon*, Research Director of *
MSR Montreal * giving a talk on *Fri September 7 2018* at *10:30* in room
*AA3195*
Will this talk be streamed <https://mila.bluejeans.com/809027115/webrtc>?
*No*
Geoff will be available to meet in the afternoon! Sign up here
<https://calendar.google.com/calendar/selfsched?sstoken=UVBVTVF0X25Nd09LfGRl…>
Knowing that this talk is likely awesome and that you probably come to
talks given they're awesome, you're probably going to the talk! Good choice!
Michael
*TITLE* Neural Networks and Bayes Rule
*KEYWORDS* Deep Graphical Models, Reasoning with NNs
*ABSTRACT*
Relational or structured reasoning is an important current research
challenge. The classical approach to this challenge is a templated
graphical model: highly expressive, with well-founded semantics, but (at
least naively) difficult to scale up, and difficult to combine with the
most effective supervised learning methods. More recently, researchers have
designed many different deep network architectures for structured reasoning
problems, with almost the flip set of advantages and disadvantages. Can we
get the best of both worlds? That is, can we design deep nets that look
more like graphical models, or graphical models that look more like deep
nets, so that we get a framework that is both practical and "semantic"?
This talk will take a look at some progress toward such a hybrid framework.
*BIO*
Dr. Gordon is the Research Director of Microsoft Research Montreal. He is
on leave as a Professor in the Department of Machine Learning at Carnegie
Mellon University, where he has also served as Interim Department Head and
as Associate Department Head for Education. His research interests include
artificial intelligence, statistical machine learning, game theory,
multi-robot systems, and planning in probabilistic, adversarial, and
general-sum domains. His previous appointments include Visiting Professor
at the Stanford Computer Science Department and Principal Scientist at
Burning Glass Technologies in San Diego. Dr. Gordon received his B.A. in
Computer Science from Cornell University in 1991, and his Ph.D. in Computer
Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999.