Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Varun Kanade (Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris) - Distributed Online Learning

Speaker: Varun Kanade, Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris

Talk Title: Distributed Online Learning

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: The massive amount of data involved in modern information processing systems necessitates the use of new paradigms to effectively handle data. One such paradigm is the design of machine learning algorithms that interact with data in an online fashion, i.e., data used to make predictions is received little at a time. In addition, such algorithms may be implemented on distributed systems, resulting in a tradeoff between communication cost and prediction accuracy. In this talk, I will present a classical question in the context of online learning, the so-called experts problem. The goal in this problem is to design a prediction strategy over a set of actions in the face of uncertainty that is guaranteed to perform almost as well as the best single action in hindsight. This is a fundamental question with several applications such as drug testing, network routing, and online advertising. I will discuss the new challenges that arise when implementing algorithms for this problem in a distributed setting and present a novel algorithm that achieves a non-trivial tradeoff between prediction accuracy and communication.

The lecture will be available to stream HERE.

Biography: I am now a postdoctoral fellow at ENS through the Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris (FSMP). Before this I was at UC Berkeley as a Simons Fellow. I completed my Ph.D. at Harvard University, and was extremely fortunate to have had Leslie Valiant as my adviser. Before joining Harvard, I was a graduate student at Georgia Tech, where I was working with Adam Kalai (now at Microsoft Research). I obtained a B.Tech at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in Mumbai, India.

Host: Computer Science Department

More Info: https://bluejeans.com/112351952

Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair

Event Link: https://bluejeans.com/112351952