<html><body><div id="9fa6274a-1b34-4f45-893b-c0a3fda3060b"><span name="x"></span></div><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; display: inline !important; float: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Better Science Through Better Bayesian Computation<br>Ryan Adams, Harvard University<br>Thursday, November 13, 4:30pm<br>Computer Science 105<br><br>As
we grapple with the hype of "big data" in computer science, it
is important to remember that the data are not the central objects:
we collect data to answer questions and inform decisions in
science, engineering, policy, and beyond. In this talk, I will discuss
my work in developing tools for large-scale data analysis, and the
scientific collaborations in neuroscience, chemistry, and astronomy that
motivate me and keep this work grounded. I will focus on two lines of
research that I believe capture an important dichotomy in my work and in
modern probabilistic modeling more generally: identifying the
"best" hypothesis versus incorporating hypothesis uncertainty. In the
first case, I will discuss my recent work in Bayesian optimization,
which has become the state-of-the-art technique for automatically
tuning machine learning algorithms, finding use across academia and
industry. In the second case, I will discuss scalable Markov chain Monte
Carlo and the new technique of Firefly Monte Carlo, which is the
first provably correct MCMC algorithm that can take advantage of subsets
of data.</span><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span class="ZmSearchResult" id="DWT4836" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ryan</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; display: inline !important; float: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Adams
is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, in
the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He leads the Harvard
Intelligent Probabilistic Systems group, whose research focuses on
machine learning and computational statistics, with applied
collaborations across the sciences. </span><span class="ZmSearchResult" id="DWT4840" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ryan</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; display: inline !important; float: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>received
his undergraduate training in EECS at MIT and completed his Ph.D.
in Physics at Cambridge University as a Gates Cambridge Scholar
under David MacKay. He was a CIFAR Junior Research Fellow at the
University of Toronto before joining the faculty at Harvard. His Ph.D.
thesis received Honorable Mention for the Leonard J. Savage Award
for Bayesian Theory and Methods from the International Society
for Bayesian Analysis. </span><span class="ZmSearchResult" id="DWT4844" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ryan</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; display: inline !important; float: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>has won paper awards at ICML, AISTATS, and UAI, and received the DARPA Young Faculty Award.</span><br></body></html>