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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Tess Malone, Communications Officer
Summary Sentence: Title: Machines, Brains, Humans — and Other Computational Enigmas
Full Summary: No summary paragraph submitted.
Santosh Vempala compressedTITLE: Machines, Brains, Humans — and Other Computational Enigmas
ABSTRACT:
Computation — well-defined sequences of state changes — is universal. In this talk, we discuss recent struggles with understanding three aspects of it: (1) How does the brain create, recall, and associate memories? (Will you remember this abstract?) (2) How to measure the complexity of human computation? (Think adding in your head or playing chess) (3) What concepts/functions can (and cannot) be provably learned by deep neural networks? (This one might be worth some $$. )They all have a common answer — I don’t know. I’ll describe some surprises, several hypotheses, and a sea of challenges.
This abstract was generated by a recurrent NN; please excuse output errors.
BIO:
Santosh Vempala is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Vempala attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1997 under Professor Avrim Blum. In 1997, he was awarded a Miller Fellowship at Berkeley. Subsequently, he was a professor at MIT in the Mathematics Department until he moved to Georgia Tech in 2006. His main work has been in the area of theoretical computer science, with particular activity in the fields of algorithms; randomized algorithms; computational geometry; and computational learning theory, including the authorship of books on random projection and spectral methods. In 2008, he co-founded the Computing for Good (C4G) program at Georgia Tech. Vempala has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Sloan Fellowship. He was named Fellow of ACM “for contributions to algorithms for convex sets and probability distributions” in 2015.
