David Dynerman Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a technique for discovering the 3D structures of small molecules. To perform this 3D reconstruction a large number of 2D images taken from unknown microscope positions must be correctly positioned back in 3D space. Although these microscope positions are unknown, the common lines of …
Among the many popular techniques for reconstructing evolutionary trees from molecular sequences, so-called distance-matrix methods are typically the fastest. This speed stems from a straightforward, intuitive approach: repeated merging of the closest clusters of sequences. However, unlike more elaborate techniques such as maximum likelihood, distance-matrix methods only exploit empirical correlations …
Victor’s Abstract: How we used system programming techniques to tune convex optimization solvers. I demonstrate how understanding the hardware can influence the runtime of Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF). ————————————- Gautam’s Abstract: Most metric learning methods are characterized by diverse loss functions and projection methods, which naturally begs the question: is …
Predictions in modern statistical inference problems can be increasingly understood in terms of discrete structures such as arrangements of objects in computer vision, phonemes in speech recognition, parses in natural language processing, or molecular structures in computational biology. For example, in image scene understanding one needs to jointly predict discrete …
Nikhil’s Abstract —————————— In applications ranging from communications and image processing to genetics, signals can be modeled as lying in a union of subspaces. Under this model, signal coefficients that lie in certain subspaces are active or inactive together. The potential subspaces are known in advance, but the particular set …
Song’s abstract —————————- We consider a probabilistic version of classical 0-1 packing problem, where we have a set of items with random weights and a random knapsack capacity. The objective is to choose a set of items that maximizes profit while ensuring the probability that the knapsack constraint is satisfi ed …
Gongguo ——————————– Title: Going off the grid with limited data Most of the recent activity on sparse signal recovery has focused on signals with sparse representations in finite discrete dictionaries. However, signals encountered in applications such as imaging, radar, sonar, sensor array, communication, seismology, and remote sensing are usually specified …
Aggregating data from a large number of users is integral part of the business model of many companies. As a result, people are increasingly concerned about privacy of their data. In this talk, I will present a few privacy-preserving algorithms for aggregating data from a large number of users at …
The statement that price aggregates dispersed information has been a longstanding feature underscoring the importance of markets. Yet, formalizing how exactly price may incorporate individually held information has been a challenging task. I present one particular approach to information aggregation through price. The framework is a double auction mechanism modeled …
Profesor Wright’s abstract: GROUSE is an incremental algorithm for subspace identification based on incomplete information, proposed and studied by Laura Balzano, Rob Nowak, and Ben Recht at Madison. This talk discusses recent results on the local convergence behavior of GROUSE, showing an expected linear convergence rate. Stronger results are possible …