CDS Speaker Seminar Series
Get a glimpse at what’s in store for this semester’s lectures!
Throughout the year, CDS community members have opportunities to attend talks by researchers in the field of data science. Organized by professors, faculty fellows, and PhD students, the speaker seminar series offers insight into topics from natural language processing to politics. To get a glimpse at what’s in store for this semester’s lectures, read about each seminar below. For more information on upcoming speakers or to join a seminar mailing list, check out their linked website!
The MaD Seminar is a CDS signature series that brings in specialists in the fields of Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Machine Learning. The seminars are held in Auditorium Hall 150 at 60 5th Avenue on Thursdays from 2:00 pm — 3:00 pm.
“The Math and Data seminar has a phenomenal and diverse slate of speakers this semester, coming from physics, statistics, computer science, and mathematics,” said seminar organizer and Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Data Science Jonathan Niles-Weed. “I think these different perspectives on theoretical aspects of data science are one reason that the MaD seminar attracts people from across the CDS community.”
This year’s speakers have so far included Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell Sarah Dean on “Participation Dynamics in Learning Systems” and Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University Brice Menard on “Opening the Neural Network Black Box.”
Minds, Brains, and Machines Colloquium
NYU Minds, Brains, and Machines is an initiative that focuses on work at the intersection of natural (human and animal) and machine intelligence. The program supports research within this area from various schools at NYU including Psychology, CDS, the Center for Neural Science, and the Flatiron Institute. Their colloquium series invites speakers from NYU as well as further afield to discuss research in this area. The current directors of the initiative are CDS Assistant Professor of Psychology and Data Science Brenden Lake and CDS affiliated professor Todd Gureckis.
The NLP and Text-as-Data Seminar Speaker highlights researchers working in Natural Language Processing in a variety of areas across Computer Science and Linguistics. “The series provides an opportunity for attendees to see cutting-edge NLP and other text-as-data work from the fields of social science, computer science and other related disciplines,” says their website. The series is held at the 7th-floor open space at CDS on Thursdays from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm. Organized by CDS Professors Arthur Spirling, Sam Bowman, He He, and Tal Linzen, the NLP and Text-as-Data Speaker Series is open to anyone affiliated with NYU.
Lunch Seminars are informal gatherings of CDS-affiliated researchers to discuss data science-related topics. This semester’s speakers have included PhD Student from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems Maximilian Dax and Associate Professor of Biostatistics at NYU School of Global Public Health Yang Feng.
“The CDS lunch seminar aims to provide diverse grounds for intellectual exchange around data science,” said CDS Faculty Fellow Marco Morucci who organizes the series with another CDS Faculty Fellow Ravid Shwartz-Ziv. “We host speakers from all disciplines and professional avenues that can show us just how many exciting and varied questions, problems, and applications there are for data science methods and tools. The lunch seminar has always been an avenue for the many visitors hosted by CDS to showcase their work, and we always welcome talks by visiting scholars.”
The Lunch Seminar takes place weekly at the 7th-floor open space at CDS on Wednesdays from 12:30 pm — 2:00 pm. Please reach out to Marco and/or Ravid if you are interested in giving a talk!
The Math and Democracy Seminar explores how the mathematical sciences intersect with democracy. “The Math and Democracy Seminar features research that applies tools from the quantitative sciences to the challenges of working toward a just democratic society,” said founding organizer and Visiting Academic at CDS Ben Blum-Smith. “This semester we are looking forward to talks on new methods for detecting partisan gerrymandering, new statistical approaches to auditing close elections, and the first data-based approach to operationalizing the legally important, but amorphous, idea of a community that shares political interests.”
Upcoming talks are scheduled with Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University Sunoo Park on “Scan, Shuffle, Rescan: Two-Prover Election Audits With Untrusted Scanners” and Associate Professor at San José State University Marion Campisi on “The Geometry and Election Outcome (GEO) Metric.”
By Meryl Phair
