CS Department Colloquium Series

There is a strong correspondence between mathematics and programming, under which mathematical proofs correspond to programs. A _proof assistant_ is a tool that a mathematician/programmer can use to represent proofs/programs, in such a way that a computer can verify whether or not they are correct.

A major challenge in machine learning is to reliably and automatically discover hidden structure in data with minimal human intervention.

In 2003, the Human Genome Project marked a major scientific milestone by releasing the first consensus DNA sequence of the human genome.

On your one-minute walk from the coffee machine to your desk each morning, you pass by dozens of scenes -- a kitchen, an elevator, your office -- and you effortlessly recognize them and perceive their 3D structure.

Procedural tasks such as following a recipe or editing an image are very common. They require a person to execute a sequence of operations (e.g. chop the onions, or sharpen the image) and people commonly use step-by-step tutorials to learn these tasks.

Machine learning is a vibrant field with many rich techniques. However, these approaches are often heuristic: we cannot prove good bounds on either their performance or their running time except in limited settings.

Fully automated algorithms are inadequate for a number of data analysis tasks, especially those involving images, video, or text.

Bayesian nonparametrics is an area in machine learning in which models grow in size and complexity as data accrue. As such, they they are particularly relevant to the world of "Big Data", where it may be difficult or even counterproductive to fix the number of parameters a priori.

This talk discusses a mix of concepts, problems and techniques at the crossroads of signal processing, machine learning and music. I will start by motivating the use of content-based methods for the analysis and retrieval of music.

There are an estimated 3.5 trillion photographs in the world, of which 10% have been taken in the past 12 months. Facebook alone reports 6 billion photo uploads per month. Every minute, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.