Past Events

Soft electronic devices that can acquire vital signs from the human body represent an important trend for healthcare. Combined strategies of materials design and advanced microfabrication allow the integration of a variety of components and devices on a stretchable platform, resulting in functional systems with minimal constraints on the human body. In this presentation, I will demonstrate a wearable multichannel patch that can sense a collection of signals from the human skin in a wireless mode.

The great progress achieved by communications in the last twenty years can be attested by the amount of audio-visual multimedia services available nowadays, such as digital television and IP-based video transmission. The success of these kind of services relies on their trustworthiness and the delivered quality of experience. Therefore, the development of efficient real-time quality monitoring tools that can quantify the audio-visual experience (as perceived by the end user) is key to the success of any multimedia service or application.

Information theory can characterize one-way, non-interactive communication, where one source sends a message to one destination, very well. When the communication is interactive, as in (1) channels with feedback, or (2) two-way channels where two users exchange messages over a shared channel, much less is understood. We outline what is understood about interactive communications as in (1) and (2) from an information theoretic perspective, and why they are so challenging to characterize. Many open problems and connections to related fields will be presented.

The following problem arose from the work of Fonio et al, a group of ecologists and computer scientists, who tried to understand the behaviour of longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicomis) in navigating back to their nest after gathering food. Single ants were demonstrated to be laying pheromone ‘pointers’ to be followed by groups of ants carrying large loads. Sometimes the pointers are wrong. This leads to an optimization problem on networks with a destination node (the nest). A GPS or other system selects a direction (pointer) to the nest at every node.

In this talk, I will discuss some of my recent and surprising findings on the use of hashing algorithms for large-scale estimations. Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) is a hugely popular algorithm for sub-linear near neighbor search. However, it turns out that fundamentally LSH is a constant time (amortized) adaptive sampler from which efficient near-neighbor search is one of the many possibilities. Our observation adds another feather in the cap for LSH. LSH offers a unique capability to do smart sampling and statistical estimations at the cost of few hash lookups.

Abstract: Approximate probabilistic inference is a key computational task in modern machine learning, which allows us to reason with complex, structured, hierarchical (deep) probabilistic models to extract information and quantify uncertainty.

Abstract: We present a new statistical framework to quantify uncertainty (UQ) for recovering low-rank matrices from incomplete and noisy observations. We further develop a sequential active sampling approach guided by the uncertainties. The motivation comes from two related and widely studied problems, matrix completion, which aims to recover a low-rank matrix X from a partial, noisy observation of its entries, and low-rank matrix recovery, which recovers X from a set of linear combination its entries with additive noise.

Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. The premise is that despite nonconvexity, the loss function may possess benign geometric properties that enable fast global convergence under carefully designed initializations, such as local strong convexity, local restricted convexity, etc.

*PLEASE NOTE CORRECTION: Seminar will take place in EER 3.646 (North Tower)This talk focuses on the statistical sample complexity and model reduction of Markov decision process (MDP).  We begin by surveying recent advances on the complexity for solving MDP, without any dimension reduction. In the first part we study the statistical state compression of general Markov processes. We propose a spectral state compression method for learning state features and aggregation structures from data.

The concept of a blockchain was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto to maintain a distributed ledger for an electronic payment system, Bitcoin. In addition to its security, important performance measures of a blockchain protocol are its transaction throughput, confirmation latency and confirmation reliability. These measures are limited by two underlying physical network attributes: communication capacity and speed-of-light propagation delay. Existing systems operate far away from these physical limits.