Orchard View Room – Page 22

What do oil spills, air pollutants, and ocean acoustics have in common? Detection, tracking and classification of environmental signals

Environmental studies frequently involve understanding complex between interactive components which may be challenging to detect, quantify or analyze using traditional methods. Furthermore, the interactions between the components themselves might be challenging to model or empirically estimate. For example, a fundamental bottleneck to fingerprinting petroleum sampled from an oil-rich region lies …

Optimization and Equilibrium in Energy Economics

We look at models of competition and risk within the context of power system markets. We demonstrate when social optima exist, what properties on risk measures and contracts are needed, and how to solve these problems in large scale practical settings. We look at specific structures that give rise to …

Learning Subspaces by Pieces and Algorithms for Ordinal Embedding

Speaker: Daniel Pimentel-Alarcon Title: Learning subspaces by pieces Abstract: We love subspaces. We observe a phenomenon and try to find a line that explains it. We get our hands on some data, and try to find a subspace that fits it. But in many relevant applications, data is missing, and …

Whither Speech Recognition? Deep Learning to Deep Thinking

Whither speech recognition? is the title of a well-known paper written by J. R. Pierce in 1969 which unfortunately stopped Bell Labs from continuing speech recognition research for several years at the beginning of the 1970s. Even though 45 years have passed since then and we have actually observed various …

Learning Large-Scale Poisson DAG Models based on OverDispersion Scoring

We address the question of identifiability and learning algorithms for large-scale Poisson Directed Acyclic Graphical (DAG) models. We define general Poisson DAG models as models where each node is a Poisson random variable with rate parameter depending on the values of the parents in the underlying DAG. First, we prove …

The Rhythm of Speech

Two spoken sentences are never identical, even if they contain the same textual material. Basic to the study of how speakers differ is the ability to (automatically) parse the sentences and align the relevant utterances, to locate the times when the phonemes of one speaker align with the (same) phonemes …

An Introduction to the Enigma and the Cryptanalysis Against It

The Enigma cipher machine was a series of encryption devices used before and during WWII. The Enigma had an enormous key space, one that the Nazis were sure the Allies would never be able to exhaust over, and because of this the Nazis were totally confident of the device’s security …

Sparse Inverse Problems: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications

A common prior in modern statistical signal processing is that an observed signal is the noisy measurement of a few weighted sources. For example, the image of a collection of point sources of light can be parameterized by their locations and intensities. The goal of superresolution is to remove the …

The Geometry of Positive Semidefinite Rank

I will first define positive semidefinite rank and mention some of its applications. We study the set of matrices of given psd rank. This set is semialgebraic. As a first step to giving a semialgebraic description, we describe its boundary. This is ongoing work with Kaie Kubjas and Richard Robinson.

A Topic Modeling Approach to Learning Preference-Behavior from Pairwise Comparisons

The recent explosion of web analytics tools has enabled us to collect an immense amount of partial preferences for large sets of items such as products from Amazon, movies from Netflix, or restaurants from Yelp, from a large and diverse population of users through transactions, clicks, etc. Modeling, learning, and …