Machine Learning

What is machine learning? Why is it important? Is it true that we should be worried about Skynet and the looming singularity?

If you’ve ever wondered about these questions, you have two options: ask Siri, or join Professor Mark Schmidt and UBC Science to learn about machine learning, how it affects you, why it matters to industry, and what researchers at UBC are learning about it.  

Doors open at 6 PM, and the talk will begin at 6:30 PM. Light refreshments will be served. 

Mark Schmidt has been an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia since 2014. His research focuses on developing faster algorithms for large-scale machine learning, with an emphasis on methods with provable convergence rates and that can be applied to structured prediction problems. From 2011 through 2013 he worked at the École normale supérieure in Paris on inexact and stochastic convex optimization methods. He finished his M.Sc. in 2005 at the University of Alberta working as part of the Brain Tumor Analysis Project, and his Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of British Columbia working on graphical model structure learning with L1-regularization. He has also worked at Siemens Medical Solutions on heart motion abnormality detection, with Michael Friedlander in the Scientific Computing Laboratory at the University of British Columbia on semi-stochastic optimization methods, and with Anoop Sarkar at Simon Fraser University on large-scale training of natural language models.

This is the first UBC Computer Science alumni-industry lecture of 2016. Stay tuned for more lectures through the year. 

For more information about this event, please contact John Andru, Associate Director, Development & Alumni Engagement, Faculty of Science, UBC, at john.andru@ubc.ca. 

Details

Where: C300 Theatre, UBC Robson Square – 800 Robson Street, Vancouver

When: February 17, 6–8:30PM