Select a calendar:
Filter April Events by Event Type:
SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for April 21, 2023
-
Pitfalls and Paradoxes in the History of Probability Theory
Fri, Apr 21, 2023 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael Shlesinger, Office of Naval Research
Talk Title: Pitfalls and Paradoxes in the History of Probability Theory
Abstract: From the throwing of bones, dice, choosing long or short sticks, or debating the risk of the smallpox vaccine, fascinating and sometimes puzzling questions have arisen to advance the field of probability. We discuss interesting personalities and their famous questions and paradoxes including Galileo and Newton's dice game, de Mere's Grand Scandal, the Pascal-Fermat letters, the St. Petersburg Paradox, Bernoulli's Monster, and Bertrand's Paradox. We discuss the discovery of limit theorems from DeMoivre who first arrived at the Gaussian to Poisson who studied the same process, but with a twist arrived instead at the Poisson distribution. Levy considered a self-similar random process to arrive at random variables with infinite moments with now connections to fractals.
Biography: Dr. Michael Shlesinger received a B.S. in Math and Physics from SUNY Stony Brook in 1970 and PhD in Physics from the University of Rochester in 1976. He then worked at the La Jolla Institute, Georgia Tech, and the University of Maryland before joining the Office of Naval Research in 1983. He became Head of ONR's Physics Division in 1986 and a member of the Senior Executive Service in 1987. He switched to a Chief Scientist role in 1995 and received the Presidential Rank Award in 2004 and ONR's Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. He has held the Kinnear Chair for Science at the USNA. One of his ONR responsibilities was the Division Director for Marine Corps programs. His ONR programs have focused on fields including Nonlinear Dynamics; Fractals; and Plasmonic Materials. He co-founded the Experimental Chaos Conference and received the APS Outstanding Referee Award. His work on random processes can be found in his 2021 mathematical autobiography "An Unbounded Experience in Random Walks with Applications."
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
-
BME Speaker, Dr. Hangbo Zhao
Fri, Apr 21, 2023 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Hangbo Zhao , Assistant Professor, Viterbi School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Talk Title: Soft 3-dimensional bioelectronics
Host: BME Professor Ellis Meng - ZOOM link available upon request
Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 145
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michele Medina
-
DEI: Coffee Hour Meet & Greet
Fri, Apr 21, 2023 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Receptions & Special Events
Come meet the members of the AME Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Committee! Join us for coffee and snacks on Friday, April 21st between 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM in OHE 406 / Laufer Conference Room!
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 406
Audiences: Department Only
Contact: Victoria Sevilla
-
Engineers for Earth Day - Wikipedia Editathon
Fri, Apr 21, 2023 @ 01:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Workshops & Infosessions
Join the Engineering in Society Program and the Science & Engineering Library in their second annual Engineers for Earth Day Wikipedia Editathon!
When: Friday, April 21, 2023
When: 1-3PM
Where: SSL 210
Use your research and writing skills to improve the world's knowledge about sustainability and engineering!
We welcome new and experienced Wikipedia editors.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 210
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Helen Choi
-
PhD Thesis Defense - Brendan Avent
Fri, Apr 21, 2023 @ 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
PhD Thesis Defense - Brendan Avent
Title: Practice-Inspired Models and Mechanisms for Differential Privacy
Committee Members: Aleksandra Korolova (chair), Salman Avestimehr (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering), Leana Golubchik, David Kempe, Cyrus Shahabi
Abstract: Now more than ever, organizations such as companies, governments, and researchers must collect and analyze people's sensitive data to drive decisions and fuel innovation. Differential privacy has become the gold standard for data privacy in computer science literature, particularly for privacy-preserving data analysis and machine learning. Significant research effort has been devoted to designing and theoretically analyzing mechanisms that satisfy differential privacy. However, far less research has studied the pragmatic considerations of differential privacy, i.e., how its trust models and mechanisms can be adapted and applied for real-world uses.
I focus on making differential privacy useful for real-world applications by removing barriers that hinder its adoption in practice. In the first part, I address the utility gap between the more and less desirable trust models of differential privacy by defining and analyzing a new hybrid trust model. In the second part, I address the lack of tools for analyzing the utility of complex differentially private mechanisms by developing a new method for quantifying such mechanisms privacy--utility trade-offs. Finally, I show how to improve the utility of DP mechanisms that answer statistical queries on a large scale. In the classic setting where all queries are provided to the mechanism in advance, I detail how we extend the state-of-the-art differentially private mechanism for answering marginal queries to a more general, flexible query class. I then define a new setting where our extended mechanism is only provided partial knowledge of which queries will be posed. Analyzing the mechanism in both settings, I show that it answers a massive number of queries both efficiently and effectively.
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Melissa Ochoa
