Upcoming Events
Events from previous semesters can be found here.
- Thursday, September 12, 2019: MLBytes + IBM: The Frontiers of Computation, Dr. Mark Ritter
- Ahmadieh Family Grand Hall (Gross Hall 330), 4.30pm-5.30pm
- Classes of computational problems remain difficult or unsolved despite the incredible gains in hardware capability described by Moore's law. With CMOS scaling approaching its apex, what are the potential future technologies that could continue driving performance improvements and even solve some intractable problems? In this talk, Mark will explore both biologically-inspired technology and quantum technology as two new non-Von Neumann computational paradigms that offer promise to expand the frontiers of computation. Machine learning algorithms, including deep learning, are, at their core, based on decades-old ideas inspired by neuroscience. Some previously unsolved problems have been cracked, but even deep learning research seems to be reaching the point of diminishing returns. After a brief overview of the key breakthroughs, Mark will point to some features that, if understood, may yield new inspiration to advance our algorithms toward more powerful ones.
- Thursday, September 19, 2019: MLBytes + Twitter: A Deep Dive into Twitter's Timeline, Dr. Satanjeev Bano
- Ahmadieh Family Grand Hall (Gross Hall 330), 4.30pm-5.30pm
- Machine learning impacts everything at Twitter, from showing the most relevant content to users to promoting healthier conversations, highlighting trends, and delivering catered advertisements. In this talk, Satanjeev will present one of the largest applications of ML at Twitter: ranking the main feed of Tweets by the relevance of the Tweets to the viewer. He will present the dimensions of the ML problem: the goals, the metrics to optimize for, the features they use, and the network architecture they have developed. The talk will focus on the practical application of ML, and lessons learned delivering ML-based products to millions of users every day.
- Thursday, September 26, 2019: MLBytes + Infinia ML: Document Matching with Neural Networks, John Bralich
- Ahmadieh Family Grand Hall (Gross Hall 330), 4.30pm-5.30pm
- Search engines are used daily across the world. Given a search term, how can relevant results be returned? This talk discusses information retrieval: specifically, the case where the query is a long text document and relevant documents must be selected from a collection of long text documents. Approaches for accomplishing this task will be reviewed, including bag-of-words, TF-IDF, and neural network-based solutions. Practical considerations for implementation will also be discussed.
- Thursday, October 24, 2019: MLBytes + Wall Street Journal: AI in the Newsroom, Kabir Seth
- Ahmadieh Family Grand Hall (Gross Hall 330), 4.30pm-5.30pm
- The Wall Street Journal newsroom and Dow Jones are heavily invested in AI and machine learning initiatives, including natural language processing and deep learning. The talk will describe how AI is being used in the newsroom for the 2020 elections. Furthermore, Kabir will walk through examples of how he approaches business problems that can be solved with AI and machine learning at the Wall Street Journal.
- Saturday & Sunday, November 2-3, 2019: Duke Datathon
- Datathon returns. Attack a dataset and come up with an analysis and visualization while racing against the clock. Top teams will win prizes, and all students will have the opportunity to interact with industry and academic sponsors.
- Thursday, November 7, 2019: MLBytes + Wovenware: Using ML to Prevent Mosquito-Borne Diseases, Leslie De Jesus
- Ahmadieh Family Grand Hall (Gross Hall 330), 4.30pm-5.30pm
- Machine learning seems to be everywhere, across industries and affecting many aspects of daily living. Aside from the practical applications of machine learning in business, new solutions are being put into action to help environmental causes that can improve the lives of people and the planet. Leslie De Jesus will explain how one such solution is being created by Wovenware for the Puerto Rico Science, Technology, & Research Trust, which is working to help prevent the spread of mosquito-borne diseases, such as Zika and Dengue Fever, in Puerto Rico and eventually around the world, by automating the identification and classification of various species of mosquitoes. The end goal is to use AI to streamline the process through which researchers can uncover insights and correlate specific mosquito populations to environmental conditions, helping them identify and isolate mosquitoes that are resistant to FDA-approved insecticides.
- Thursday, November 14, 2019: MLBytes + Freenome: Dr. Joyce Liu
- Ahmadieh Family Grand Hall (Gross Hall 330), 4.30pm-5.30pm
- Despite the public health emphasis on population-level cancer screening in recent decades, adherence remains lower than desired, and cancer is often detected too late for successful treatment. In this talk, we will present Freenome’s multiomics platform that detects key biological signals from blood. The platform integrates assays for cell-free DNA, methylation, and proteins with advanced computational biology and machine learning techniques to understand additive signatures for early cancer detection. Furthermore, we will present biological insights revealed by latent representations from factor analysis and convolutional neural networks of genomic and proteomic data. These methods can be applied to other cancer types to learn biologically meaningful latent representations and to shed light on immune processes involved in cancer biology.