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Events for March 07, 2019

  • CS Colloquium: Eunsol Choi (University of Washington) - Learning to Understand Entities In Text

    Thu, Mar 07, 2019 @ 09:30 AM - 10:30 AM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Eunsol Choi, University of Washington

    Talk Title: Learning to Understand Entities In Text

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: Real world entities such as people, organizations and countries play a critical role in text. Reading offers rich explicit and implicit information about these entities, such as the categories they belong to, relationships they have with other entities, and events they participate in. In this talk, we introduce approaches to infer implied information about entities, and to automatically query such information in an interactive setting. We expand the scope of information that can be learned from text for a range of tasks, including sentiment extraction, entity typing and question answering. To this end, we introduce new ideas for how to find effective training data, including crowdsourcing and large-scale naturally occurring weak supervision data. We also describe new computational models, that represent rich social and conversation contexts to tackle these tasks. Together, these advances significantly expand the scope of information that can be incorporated into the next generation of machine reading systems.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.

    Biography: Eunsol Choi is a Ph.D candidate at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on natural language processing, specifically applying machine learning to recover semantics from text. She completed a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics at Cornell University, and is a recipient of the Facebook fellowship.

    Host: Xiang Ren

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 109

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • CS Colloquium: Chi Jin (UC Berkeley) Machine Learning: Why Do Simple Algorithms Work So Well?

    Thu, Mar 07, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Chi Jin, UC Berkely

    Talk Title: Machine Learning: Why Do Simple Algorithms Work So Well?

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: While state-of-the-art machine learning models are deep, large-scale, sequential and highly nonconvex, the backbone of modern learning algorithms are simple algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent, or Q-learning (in the case of reinforcement learning tasks). A basic question endures---why do simple algorithms work so well even in these challenging settings?

    This talk focuses on two fundamental problems: (1) in nonconvex optimization, can gradient descent escape saddle points efficiently? (2) in reinforcement learning, is Q-learning sample efficient? We will provide the first line of provably positive answers to both questions. In particular, we will show that simple modifications to these classical algorithms guarantee significantly better properties, which explains the underlying mechanisms behind their favorable performance in practice.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium

    Biography: Chi Jin is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, advised by Michael I. Jordan. He received a B.S. in Physics from Peking University. His research interests lie in machine learning, statistics, and optimization, with his PhD work primarily focused on nonconvex optimization and reinforcement learning.

    Host: Haipeng Luo

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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