July 11, 2020
The 55th Summer School of NCSR Demokritos takes place from 13 to 17 July 2020 and goes digital for the first time in its long history.
The Summer School is a historic educational activity of Demokritos which offers, for more than 50 years, free talks and round tables to undergraduate and graduate students of the positive sciences (STEM) with technological direction. This year, all talks will be streamed online and participants will be able to watch eminent scientists through their computers.
Tuesday 14 July is dedicated to Informatics and Telecommunications during which world renowned Prof. Constantinos Daskalakis of MIT, Boston, USA will give a talk at 16.00 (Athens time) about “Learning from Biased Data”.
Abstract: A common assumption made in Machine Learning and Statistics is access to data comprising observations from the entire distribution of relevant data. At the same time, it is known that standard statistical learning methods are unreliable in the face of biased data which breaks this assumption. In this talk, we focus on bias due to truncation, wherein there is systematic omission of observations from certain parts of the relevant distribution. This might be caused by limitations of measurement devices, incorrect data collection campaigns, or legal and privacy considerations preventing the use of some data. We survey recent progress on regression and classification from truncated samples. We present a general approach, based on stochastic gradient descent, which we instantiate to make progress on a range of outstanding challenges in Statistics, yielding computationally and statistically efficient methods for truncated (non-parametric) density estimation, truncated linear, logistic and probit regression, as well as truncated compressed sensing. We provide experiments to illustrate the practicality of the framework. (Based on joint works with Themis Gouleakis, Andrew Ilyas, Vasilis Kontonis, Dhruv Rohatgi, Christos Tzamos, Manolis Zampetakis)
Speaker Bio: Constantinos Daskalakis is a Professor of Computer Science at MIT and a member of CSAIL. He works on computation theory and its interface with game theory, economics, probability theory, statistics and machine learning. He holds a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He has been honored with the ACM Doctoral Dissertation award, the Kalai Prize from the Game Theory Society, the SIAM outstanding paper prize, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Simons investigator award, the Bodossaki Foundation Distinguished Young Scientists Award, and the Nevanlinna prize from the International Mathematical Union.
A round table discussion will follow on Artificial Intelligence & Ethics with IIT, NCSR Demokritos colleagues who will present different aspects of their work.
Round Table Moderator: Dr. Dimitris Kyriazanos
Panellists: Dr. Xenia Ziouvelou, Dr. George Giannakopoulos, Alexandros Nousias
To attend Prof. Daskalakis’s keynote speech and the round table discussion register freely here.
Registration for the NCSR Demokritos Summer School here.
