This week on Tuesday…
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
Joint Computer Science and Engineering and Statistics
COLLOQUIUM
SPEAKER: Ben Recht, University of Wisconsin, Madison
TITLE: How to make predictions when you’re short on information
DATE: Tuesday, February 26, 2013
TIME: 3:30pm
PLACE: EEB-105
HOST: Carlos Guestrin
ABSTRACT:
With the advent of massive social networks, exascale computing, and
high-throughput biology, researchers in every scientific department now
face profound challenges in analyzing, manipulating and identifying
behavior from a deluge of noisy, incomplete data. In this talk, I will
present a unifying framework to make such data analysis tasks less
sensitive to corrupted and missing data by exploiting domain specific
knowledge and prior information about structure.
Specifically, I will show that when a signal or system of interest can be
represented by a combination of a few simple building blocks—called
atoms—it can be identified with dramatically fewer sensors and
accelerated acquisition times. For example, a few principal factors can
determine preferences across a user-base, a small number of genes may
constitute the signature of a disease, and a sum of a few permutations can
summarize the ranking of sports teams. In each application, the challenge
lies not only in defining the appropriate set of atoms, but also in
estimating the most parsimonious combination of atoms that agrees with a
small set of measurements.
This talk advances a framework for transforming notions of simplicity and
latent low-dimensionality into convex optimization problems. My approach
builds on the recent success of generalizing compressed sensing to matrix
completion, creating a unified framework that greatly extends the catalog
of objects and structures recoverable from partial information. This
framework provides a standardized methodology to sharply bound the number
of observations required to robustly estimate a variety of structured
models. It also enables focused algorithmic
development that can be deployed in many different applications, a variety
of which I will detail in this talk. I will close by demonstrating how
this framework provides the abstractions necessary to scale these
optimization algorithms to the massive data sets we now commonly acquire.
Bio:
Benjamin Recht is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer
Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and holds courtesy
appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mathematics, and
Statistics. He is a PI in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID), a
newly founded center for research at the convergence of information
technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. Ben received his B.S. in
Mathematics from the University of Chicago, and received a M.S. and PhD
from the MIT Media Laboratory. After completing his doctoral work, he was
a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Mathematics of Information at
Caltech. He is the recipient of an NSF Career Award, an Alfred P. Sloan
Research Fellowship, and the 2012 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize in Continuous
Optimization.
Refreshments to be served in room prior to talk.
This lecture will be broadcast live via the Internet. See
http://www.cs.washington.edu/news/colloq.info.html for more information.
Email: talk-info@cs.washington.edu
Info: http://www.cs.washington.edu/
(206) 543-1695
On Thursday of this week…
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
Computer Science and Engineering
COLLOQUIUM
SPEAKER: Ari Juels, Chief Scientist, RSA
TITLE: Aggregation and Distribution in Cloud Security
DATE: Thursday, February 28, 2013
TIME: 3:30pm
PLACE: EEB-105
HOST: Tadayoshi Kohno
ABSTRACT:
Cloud computing and virtualization, a key supporting technology, offer
flexibility and agility in the placement of resources. Certain risks,
however, arise from cloud services’ tendency to aggregate sensitive data
and workloads. I’ll discuss side-channel attacks resulting from the co-
location of disparate tenants’ virtual machines (VMs) on hosts and the
vulnerabilities posed by databases aggregating the authentication secrets,
e.g., password hashes, of numerous users. Conversely, cloud computing
offers new opportunities to distribute data. I’ll describe a new,
research-driven RSA product that splits sensitive data across systems or
organizations, removing the single points of compromise that otherwise
naturally arise in cloud services.
Bio:
Dr. Ari Juels is Chief Scientist of RSA, The Security Division of EMC, and
Director of RSA Laboratories. He joined RSA in 1996.
Refreshments to be served in room prior to talk.
This lecture will be broadcast live via the Internet. See
http://www.cs.washington.edu/news/colloq.info.html for more information.
Email: talk-info@cs.washington.edu
Info: http://www.cs.washington.edu/
(206) 543-1695
