Events Calendar

Seminar will be exclusively online (no in-room presentation) - CS Colloquium: Aditya Grover (Stanford University) - Machine Learning for Accelerating Scientific Discovery

Speaker: Aditya Grover, Stanford University

Talk Title: Machine Learning for Accelerating Scientific Discovery

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: The dramatic increase in both sensor capabilities and computational power over the last few decades has created enormous opportunities for using machine learning (ML) to enhance scientific discovery. To realize this potential, ML systems must seamlessly integrate with the key tools for scientific discovery. For instance, how can we incorporate scientific domain knowledge within ML algorithms? How can we use ML to quantify uncertainty in simulations? How can we use ML to plan experiments under real-world budget constraints? For these questions, I'll first present the key computational and statistical challenges through the lens of probabilistic modeling. Next, I'll highlight limitations of existing approaches for scaling to high-dimensional data and present algorithms from my research that can effectively overcome these challenges. These algorithms are theoretically principled, domain-agnostic, and exhibit strong empirical performance. Notably, I'll describe a collaboration with chemists and material scientists where we used probabilistic models to efficiently optimize an experimental pipeline for electric batteries. Finally, I'll conclude with an overview of future opportunities for using ML to accelerate scientific discovery.

This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium

Biography: Aditya Grover is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Stanford University advised by Stefano Ermon. His research focuses on probabilistic modeling and reasoning and is grounded in real-world scientific applications. Aditya's research has been published in top scientific and ML/AI venues (e.g., Nature, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, AISTATS), included in widely-used open source ML software, and deployed into production at major technology companies. His work has been recognized with a best paper award (StarAI), a Lieberman Fellowship, a Data Science Institute Scholarship, and a Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship. He is also a Teaching Fellow at Stanford since 2018, where he co-created and teaches a new class on Deep Generative Models. Previously, Aditya obtained his bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi in 2015, where he received a best undergraduate thesis award.

Host: Bistra Dilkina

Location: Seminar will be exclusively online (no in-room presentation)

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair