Events Calendar

Finding Structure in Data: Clustering and Representation Learning

Speaker: Arya Mazumdar, College of Information & Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Talk Title: Finding Structure in Data: Clustering and Representation Learning

Abstract: This talk is loosely divided into two parts, both about uncovering hidden structures in data by unsupervised or semisupervised methods. In the first, we discuss new tools to learn parameters of mixtures of distributions, statistical block models, and interactive algorithms for such problems. In the second, we describe new algorithms to learn nonlinear models of data, primarily focusing on networks of rectified linear units. We will emphasize on the information theoretic tools that have been used in both of the parts. We provide rigorous theoretical guarantees and our algorithms perform very well in experiments conducted with real data.


Biography: Arya Mazumdar is an assistant professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since Fall 2015. Prior to this, Arya was an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and a postdoctoral scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Arya received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2011, where his thesis won the Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship Award. Arya is a recipient of the 2015 NSF CAREER award and the 2010 IEEE ISIT Jack K. Wolf Student Paper Award. He spent the summers of 2008 and 2010 at the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, and IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA, respectively. Arya's research interests include information theory and machine learning.

Host: Professor Salman Avestimehr

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Talyia White