IDSS Special Seminars

Abstract:  Algorithm design has moved from being a tool used exclusively for designing systems to one used to present people with personalized content, advertisements, and other economic opportunities. Massive amounts of information is recorded about people's online behavior including the websites they visit, the advertisements they click on, their search history, and their IP address. Algorithms then use this information…

Abstract: Although the genetic information in each cell within an organism is identical, gene expression varies widely between different cell types. The quest to understand this phenomenon has led to many interesting mathematics problems. Experimental evidence suggests that the differential gene expression is related to the spatial organization of chromosomes in the cell nucleus. I…

Abstract: Learning from people represents a new and expanding frontier for data science. Two critical challenges in this domain are of developing algorithms for robust learning and designing incentive mechanisms for eliciting high-quality data. In this talk, I describe progress on these challenges in the context of two canonical settings, namely those of ranking and…

Abstract:  The widespread use of machine learning systems creates a new class of computer security vulnerabilities where, rather than attacking the integrity of the software itself, malicious actors exploit the statistical nature of the learning algorithms. For instance, attackers can add fake data (e.g. by creating fake user accounts), or strategically manipulate inputs to the system…

Abstract: We propose an alternative paradigm for the Internet of Things (IoT) where machine learning algorithms run locally on severely resource-constrained edge and endpoint devices without necessarily needing cloud connectivity. This enables many scenarios beyond the pale of the traditional paradigm including low-latency brain implants, precision agriculture on disconnected farms, privacy-preserving smart spectacles, etc. Towards…

Title: Strong data processing inequalities and information percolation Abstract: The data-processing inequality, that is, $I(U;Y) \le I(U;X)$ for a Markov chain $U \to X \to Y$, has been the method of choice for proving impossibility (converse) results in information theory and many other disciplines. A channel-dependent improvement is called the strong data-processing inequality (or SDPI).…

Social scientists are increasingly turning to computer-assisted text analysis as a way of understanding the digital footprints left by communities and individuals. Much of the technology that powers these approaches is borrowed from the fields of computer science and statistics; yet, social scientists have substantially different goals. We focus on the development of methods that…

Abstract: Local geometric analysis is a method to define a coordinate system in a small neighborhood in the space of distributions over a given alphabet. It is a powerful technique since the notions of distance, projection, and inner product defined this way are useful in the optimization problems involving distributions, such as regressions. It has…

Abstract: As authoritarian governments around the world develop sophisticated technologies for controlling information, many observers have predicted that these controls would be ineffective because they are easily thwarted and evaded by savvy Internet users. In Censored, Margaret Roberts demonstrates that even censorship that is easy to circumvent can still be enormously effective. Taking advantage of…

  Abstract: Targeted socio-economic policies require an accurate understanding of a country's demographic makeup. To that end, the United States spends more than 1 billion dollars a year gathering census data such as race, gender, education, occupation and unemployment rates. Compared to the traditional method of collecting surveys across many years which is costly and…