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CS Distinguished Colloquium Speaker: Jon Kleinberg, Thursday, 4/29 at 4:30pm
by Emily C. Lawrence 22 Apr '21

22 Apr '21

CS Distinguished Colloquium Speaker Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University Host: Sanjeev Arora Date: Thursday, April 29 Time: 4:30pm ET Event page: [ https://www.cs.princeton.edu/events/26075 | https://www.cs.princeton.edu/events/26075 ] Register for Zoom webinar here: [ https://princeton.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lh8warWtSVexsnJqz3tsHA | https://princeton.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lh8warWtSVexsnJqz3tsHA ] Title: Monoculture and Simplicity in an Ecosystem of Algorithmic Decision-Making Abstract: Algorithms are increasingly used to aid decision-making in high-stakes settings including employment, lending, healthcare, and the legal system. This development has led to an ecosystem of growing complexity in which algorithms and people interact around consequential decisions, often mediated by organizations and firms that may be in competition with one another. We consider two related sets of issues that arise in this setting. First, concerns have been raised about the effects of algorithmic monoculture, in which multiple decision-makers all rely on the same algorithm. In a set of models drawing on minimal assumptions, we show that when competing decision-makers converge on the use of the same algorithm as part of a decision pipeline, the result can potentially be harmful for social welfare even when the algorithm is more accurate than any decision-maker acting on their own. Second, we consider some of the canonical ways in which data is simplified over the course of these decision-making pipelines, showing how this process of simplification can introduce sources of bias in ways that connect to principles from the psychology of stereotype formation. The talk will be based on joint work with Sendhil Mullainathan and Manish Raghavan. Bio: Jon Kleinberg is the Tisch University Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University. His research focuses on the interaction of algorithms and networks, the roles they play in large-scale social and information systems, and their broader societal implications. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and the recipient of MacArthur, Packard, Simons, Sloan, and Vannevar Bush research fellowships, as well awards including the Harvey Prize, the Nevanlinna Prize, and the ACM Prize in Computing.

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Sadhika Malladi will present her General Exam "A Mathematical Exploration of Why Language Models Help Solve Downstream Tasks" on Wednesday, May 5, 2021 at 1:30PM via Zoom.
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 21 Apr '21

21 Apr '21

Sadhika Malladi will present her General Exam "A Mathematical Exploration of Why Language Models Help Solve Downstream Tasks" on Wednesday, May 5, 2021 at 1:30 PM via Zoom. Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/2722265961 Sadhika's committee are as follows: Sanjeev Arora (adviser), Elad Hazan, Karthik Narasimhan Link to Abstract: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mpmrnTFHIRvHr2YyLvi1S3xEGt36WvQxWqECZsfY 00E/edit?usp=sharing Link to Reading List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fPdCU-OHv6DHAAMrOdz9oUQUrzqyTUivLjNFKTNV X9w/edit?usp=sharing Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

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Xinyi Chen will present her General Exam "Black-box Control for Linear Dynamical Systems " on Wednesday, May 12, 2021 at 4PM via Zoom
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 21 Apr '21

21 Apr '21

Xinyi Chen will present her General Exam on Wednesday, May 12, 2021 at 4PM via Zoom. Title: Black-box Control for Linear Dynamical Systems Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/8809833006 The members of Xinyi's committee are as follows: Elad Hazan (adviser), Sanjeev Arora, Jason D. Lee Link to Abstract: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WSHycShlcY7viJNM2wkYYc4reCYH85zOAGOwOS4f 2sk/edit?usp=sharing Link to Reading List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VhTEHXUX0_gNVM1vwQSXahnTNBznND1f9JZbJ2D0 138/edit?usp=sharing Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

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Udaya Ghai will present his General Exam "Generating Adversarial Disturbances for Controller Verification" on Monday, May 10, 2021 at 4:30PM via Zoom.
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 21 Apr '21

21 Apr '21

Udaya Ghai will present his General Exam on Monday, May 10, 2021 at 4:30PM via Zoom. Title: "Generating Adversarial Disturbances for Controller Verification" Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/6781332031 The members of Udaya's committee are as follows: Elad Hazan (adviser), Yoram Singer, Karthik Narasimhan Link to Abstract: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1up0hCfyVK1XQGDRomDdJptHQmk-xWmo8qvqVtH7h Y-U/edit Link to Reading List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qv4aZw7QQm8KCppmXUk6dgd2bnOBFxp_BPnT-hhB i8s/edit Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

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Kurtland Chua will present his General Exam "How Fine-Tuning Allows for Effective Meta-Learning" on Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 4PM via Zoom.
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 19 Apr '21

19 Apr '21

Kurtland Chua will present his General Exam "How Fine-Tuning Allows for Effective Meta-Learning" on Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 4PM via Zoom. Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/97600343750 <https://princeton.zoom.us/j/97600343750> The members of Kurtland's committee are as follows: Jason Lee - ELE (adviser), Sanjeev Arora, Elad Hazan Link to the Abstract and Reading List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xYgkSSOlG3Exm_7hzouZmK3A8MQ7hA8ASTBqblb0 hLk/edit?usp=sharing Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

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Jianan Lu will present her General Exam "Building an Efficient Key-Value Store on Blended Storage" on Friday, May 14, 2021 at 1PM via Zoom
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 19 Apr '21

19 Apr '21

Jianan Lu will present her General Exam on Friday, May 14, 2021 at 1PM via Zoom. Title: "Building an Efficient Key-Value Store on Blended Storage" Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/8915382623 The members of Jianan's committee are as follows: Mike Freedman (adviser), Amit Levy, Wyatt Lloyd Abstract link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18slDxnN0vZNLcBtgE3FdN_WS97Y_vz2i-KeLO-TX WI8/edit?usp=sharing Reading list link: <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cJEkbce6VI1oRf3zfLn6wzjb7fRKe-m4pUNCtln GeCs/edit?usp=sharing> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cJEkbce6VI1oRf3zfLn6wzjb7fRKe-m4pUNCtlnG eCs/edit?usp=sharing Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

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Lauren Pick will present her Pre-FPO "Scaling Automatic Verification with Domain-targeted Invariants" on Tuesday, April 20 from 1:30 to 3:30pm via Zoom.
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 17 Apr '21

17 Apr '21

Lauren Pick will present her Pre-FPO "Scaling Automatic Verification with Domain-targeted Invariants" on Tuesday, April 20 from 1:30 to 3:30pm via Zoom. Zoom Link: <https://princeton.zoom.us/j/99333126007> https://princeton.zoom.us/j/99333126007 Committee Members: Aarti Gupta (advisor, examiner) Zak Kincaid (examiner) Lennart Beringer (examiner) Andrew Appel (reader) Grigory Fedyukovich (reader, Florida State University) All are welcome to attend. Title: Scaling Automatic Verification with Domain-targeted Invariants Abstract: Automated software verification techniques, while widely successful, often suffer from scalability issues due to state-space explosion. In my thesis work, I have applied the idea of using domain insights to exploit and infer invariants, often with particular shapes, to help scale verification. In this talk, I will discuss how this approach can be used to tackle the state-space explosion problem in several domains: the verification of k-hyperproperties and safety properties for general single-threaded interprocedural programs, with special consideration for the problem of verifying information-flow security--a specific kind of 2-hyperproperty, and the verification of distributed systems. For each domain, I will highlight the specific aspects of the domain that make the invariants either easy to exploit or easy to infer and describe the exploitation or inference techniques used. I will describe how to use synchrony to infer relational invariants and how to use the symmetry within these invariants to identify and eliminate redundant verification subtasks for verifying k-hyperproperties of single-threaded programs. For safety verification of interprocedural programs, I will describe parameterizable bounded environments and how to use them to infer invariants, where the parameter helps manage the tradeoff between scalability and invariant relevance, as well as describe new forms of invariants that help handle mutual recursion. For verifying information flow security, I will show how to leverage the common structural features of information-flow properties to formulate grammar templates for inferring invariants, including those that handle quantification over array indices. Finally, I will show that for distributed systems, using a representation called a value summary to capture reachability invariants facilitates the merging of system states and their components, enabling efficient systematic exploration.

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Kunal Mittal will present his General Exam "Block Rigidity: Strong Multiplayer Parallel Repetition implies Super-Linear Lower Bounds for Turing Machines" on Tuesday, May 11, 2021 at 10AM via Zoom.
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 15 Apr '21

15 Apr '21

Kunal Mittal will present his General Exam "Block Rigidity: Strong Multiplayer Parallel Repetition implies Super-Linear Lower Bounds for Turing Machines" on Tuesday, May 11, 2021 at 10AM via Zoom. Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/91478054351?pwd=MERlYjRtTWNSUElDam9EM0xtL1pjQT09 The members of Kunal's committee are as follows: Ran Raz (adviser), Gillat Kol, Mark Braverman Abstract: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-pU9TTEYKhZTdPdWbSWvayfAYMkjWrM6iggfHRk- P-4/edit?usp=sharing Reading List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BHEPgT9RbmytqlypsrtDdkgT-h5Rt448EyArzpd1 0rk/edit?usp=sharing Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

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Darby Haller will present his General Exam "Search Heuristics and Term Encoding for Neural Theorem Proving" on Monday, May 10, 2021 at 2PM via Zoom.
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 15 Apr '21

15 Apr '21

Darby Haller will present his General Exam "Search Heuristics and Term Encoding for Neural Theorem Proving" on Monday, May 10, 2021 at 2PM via Zoom. Zoom Link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/5159240372 The members of Darby's committee are as follows: Jia Deng (adviser), Danqi Chen, Karthik Narasimhan Link to Abstract: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JS5T3ESSKmSOC9f_wWg_dFpmghqpQkABOqZIPT61 jZQ/edit?usp=sharing Link to Reading List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o1ZKtoIUEhsgy4e5YP8V7M4JY78fUkpRroe3VTZE -j0/edit?usp=sharing Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

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Changyan Wang will present his MSE Talk "Data Echoing with Adagrad' on Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 1:30PM via Zoom.
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 15 Apr '21

15 Apr '21

Changyan Wang will present his MSE Talk "Data Echoing with Adagrad' on Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 1:30PM via Zoom. Zoom Link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/3023000473 Committee: Yoram Singer (adviser), Mark Braverman (reader) All are welcome to attend. Abstract: In modern neural networks, hardware accelerators such as GPU's have been highly successful in speeding up training. However, GPU's are not suitable for accelerating all parts of the training pipelines: operations such as data I/O and preprocessing are still run on the CPU. As accelerators improve, these non-accelerated operations are becoming bottlenecks in some workloads. Data echoing is an approach to reduce this load on the CPU, by having the GPU run multiple iterations on each batch provided on the CPU. Previous work with data echoing focused on standard SGD or proximal SGD: in this project, we experimented with and analyzed data echoing with a proximal version of Adagrad.

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