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Events for February 09, 2018
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W.V.T. RUSCH ENGINEERING HONORS COLLOQUIUM
Fri, Feb 09, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Marina Agranov, Caltech Division of Humanities and Social Sciences
Talk Title: Negotiations and Group Decisions: Passing Bills With Backroom Deals
Host: Dr. Prata & EHP
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Su Stevens
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NL Seminar-Contextual Bandits in a Collaborative Environment
Fri, Feb 09, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Hongning Wang , University of Virginia
Talk Title: Contextual Bandits in a Collaborative Environment
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Contextual bandit algorithms provide principled online learning solutions to find optimal trade offs between exploration and exploitation with companion side-information. They have been extensively used in various important practical scenarios, such as display advertising and content recommendation. A common practice estimates the unknown bandit parameters pertaining to each user independently. This unfortunately ignores dependency among users and thus leads to suboptimal solutions, especially for the applications that have strong social components.
In this talk, I will introduce our newly developed collaborative contextual bandit algorithm, in which the adjacency graph of users is leveraged to share context and payoffs among neighboring users during online updating. We rigorously prove an improved upper regret bound of the proposed collaborative bandit algorithm comparing to conventional independent bandit algorithms. More importantly, we also prove that user dependency relation is only needed to be time-invariant, such that a sublinear upper regret bound is still achievable in such an algorithm. This enables online user dependency estimation. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and three large scale real world datasets verified the improvement of our proposed algorithm against several state-of-the-art contextual bandit algorithms. In addition, I will also cover our recent progress in online matrix factorization, optimizing user long- term engagement, and bandit learning in a non-stationary environment.
Biography: Dr. Hongning Wang is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science at the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana in 2014. His research generally lies in the intersection among machine learning, data mining and information retrieval, with a special focus on computational user intent modeling. His work has generated over 40 research papers in top venues in data mining and information retrieval areas. He is a recipient of 2016 National Science Foundation CAREER Award and 2014 Yahoo Academic Career Enhancement Award.
Host: Nanyun Peng and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Astani CEE Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Feb 09, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ruda Zhang, Civil Engineering PhD. Student
Talk Title: An Engineering-Economics-Law Framework of Transportation
Abstract:
Analyzing social systems such as cities requires a different set of formal methods than those used for physical systems. With a personal goal to eliminate traffic congestion, I propose an analytical framework that integrates engineering, economics, and law. The framework traces up to the root cause of congestion inefficient transportation institutions and seeks a solution that endures under behavior changes of the society.
To demonstrate this framework, my PhD research studied taxi transportation. I obtained all the 868 million trip records of New York City taxis between 2009 and 2013 generated by in vehicle TPEP systems, which integrate GPS receiver, cellular modem, and smart card reader with the taximeter. With these records, I built models of taxi operations to estimate taxi supply and demand the outcome of traffic equilibrium proved and validated driver supply decisions the equilibrium strategy, and studied the effect of property rights regulation on taxi operation the efficiency of current institutions.
Location: Ray R. Irani Hall (RRI) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
