Video: https://vimeo.com/161102509 Natural language promises an efficient and flexible means for humans to communicate with robots, whether they are assisting the physically or cognitively impaired, or performing disaster mitigation tasks as our surrogates. Recent advancements have given rise to robots that are able to interpret natural language commands that direct …
Video: https://vimeo.com/163595515 Urvashi Oswal – Block CUR Decomposition: Matrix Approximation using Groups of Columns A common problem in large-scale data analysis is approximating a matrix using a combination of specifically sampled rows and columns. Unfortunately, in many real-world environments, the ability to sample specific individual rows or columns of the …
Video : https://vimeo.com/182451507 We propose the combinatorial inference to explore the global topological structures of graphical models.In particular, we conduct hypothesis tests on many combinatorial graph properties including connectivity, hub detection, perfect matching, etc. Our methods can be applied to any graph property which is invariant under the deletion of …
Design and analysis of tractable methods for estimation of structured models from massive high-dimensional datasets has been a topic of research in statistics, machine learning and engineering for many years. Regularization, the idea of simultaneously optimizing a data fidelity term (loss) and a structure-promoting term (regularizer), is a widely used …
The worldwide value of illegal logging is 30-100 billion USD annually and within a number of key producer countries an estimated 50-90% of the forestry is illegal. Approximately 80% of the worldwide illegal logging is controlled by organized crime. Rapid, accurate, and inexpensive wood identification is an important factor in …
There’s a popular folk question about the card game Set: how many cards can you have on the table before there’s necessarily a legal play? The answer, which is pretty tricky to work out, and which is larger than most people expect, is 20. This is one case of a …
Distributed optimization methods consist of two key aspects: communication and computation. More specifically, at every iteration (or every several iterations) of a distributed algorithm, each node in the network requires some form of information exchange with its neighboring nodes (communication) and the computation of a (sub)-gradient (computation). The standard way …
Optimization algorithms play a fundamental role in analyzing the vast amount of data available today. Due to the need for fast optimization algorithms, there has been recent interest in understanding the mechanisms which enable optimization algorithms to converge quickly. We gain insight into these algorithms by leveraging techniques from control …
Dimension reduction is the process of embedding high-dimensional data into a lower dimensional space to facilitate its analysis. In the Euclidean setting, one fundamental technique for dimension reduction is to apply a random linear map to the data. The question is how large the embedding dimension must be to ensure …
For stochastic control problems with uncountable state and action spaces, the computation of optimal policies is known to be prohibitively hard. In this talk, we will present conditions under which finite models obtained through quantization of the state and action sets can be used to construct approximately optimal policies. Under …