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IDSS Distinguished Seminar – Conflict in Networks: The Rise and Fall of Empires

MIT Building 32, Room 141 The Stata Center (32-141), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

Abstract In the study of war, a recurring observation is that conflict between two opponents is shaped by third parties. The actions of these parties are in turn influenced by other proximate players. These considerations lead us to propose a model of conflict in a network. We study the influence of resources, technology, and the…

Computational Social Science: Exciting Progress and Future Challenges

MIT Building 32, Room 141 The Stata Center (32-141), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

 Abstract The past 15 years have witnessed a remarkable increase in both the scale and scope of social and behavioral data available to researchers, leading some to herald the emergence of a new field: “computational social science.” In this talk I highlight two areas of research that would not have been possible just a…

Machine Learning and Causal Inference

MIT Building 32, Room 141 The Stata Center (32-141), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

Abstract: This talk will review a series of recent papers that develop new methods based on machine learning methods to approach problems of causal inference, including estimation of conditional average treatment effects and personalized treatment assignment policies. Approaches for randomized experiments, environments with unconfoundedness, instrumental variables, and panel data will be considered. Bio: Susan Athey…

IDSS Distinguished Seminar – Essential Concepts of Causal Inference: A Remarkable History

MIT Building 32, Room 141 The Stata Center (32-141), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

  Abstract I believe that a deep understanding of cause and effect, and how to estimate causal effects from data, complete with the associated mathematical notation and expressions, only evolved in the twentieth century. The crucial idea of randomized experiments was apparently first proposed in 1925 in the context of agricultural field trails but quickly…

Regularized Nonlinear Acceleration

MIT Building 32, Room 141 The Stata Center (32-141), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

We describe a convergence acceleration technique for generic optimization problems. Our scheme computes estimates of the optimum from a nonlinear average of the iterates produced by any optimization method. The weights in this average are computed via a simple linear system, whose solution can be updated online. This acceleration scheme runs in parallel to the…

Comparison Lemmas, Non-Smooth Convex Optimization and Structured Signal Recovery

MIT Building 32, Room 141 The Stata Center (32-141), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

In the past couple of decades, non-smooth convex optimization has emerged as a powerful tool for the recovery of structured signals (sparse, low rank, finite constellation, etc.) from possibly noisy measurements in a variety applications in statistics, signal processing and machine learning. While the algorithms (basis pursuit, LASSO, etc.) are often fairly well established, rigorous…

Quantum Limits on the Information Carried by Electromagnetic Radiation

MIT Building 32, Room 141 The Stata Center (32-141), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

In many practical applications information is conveyed by means of electromagnetic radiation and a natural question concerns the fundamental limits of this process. Identifying information with entropy, one can ask about the maximum amount of entropy associated to the propagating wave. The standard statistical physics approach to compute entropy is to take the logarithm of…

Social Network Experiments – Nicholas Christakis (Yale University)

MIT Building 32, Room 141 The Stata Center (32-141), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

The Institute of Data, Systems, and Society host monthly talks by academic and industry leaders from around the world for the IDSS Distinguished Lecture series.

Regularized Nonlinear Acceleration

MIT Building 32, Room 141 The Stata Center (32-141), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

We describe a convergence acceleration technique for generic optimization problems. Our scheme computes estimates of the optimum from a nonlinear average of the iterates produced by any optimization method. The weights in this average are computed via a simple linear system, whose solution can be updated online. This acceleration scheme runs in parallel to the…

The Maps Inside Your Head

MIT Building 32, Room 141 The Stata Center (32-141), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

How do our brains make sense of a complex and unpredictable world? In this talk, I will discuss an information theory approach to the neural topography of information processing in the brain. First I will review the brain's architecture, and how neural circuits map out the sensory and cognitive worlds. Then I will describe how…


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