Past Events

Speaker: Van Thinh Nguyen, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Seoul National University, South Korea  

Abstract: 

CANDIDATE: Matthew Baxter

Arun Moorthy (of Trent University) will be providing a talk on the process of analyzing seized drugs and discuss some of the interesting mathematical modeling and statistical inference (and basic computing) problems that one encounters in the analysis of forensic evidence. Arun will also discuss and reflect on their experience working in a large multidisciplinary research team at a national laboratory, transitioning between research areas, and the challenge of disseminating actionable solutions to community stakeholders.   We hope to see you there!  

Join us for a presentation provided by Dr Rohan Alexander, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and the Department of Statistical Sciences (University of Toronto)  

This presentation, aimed at a broad spectrum of researchers, highlights the latest advancements in the acceleration of first-order optimization algorithms, a field that currently attracts the attention of many research teams worldwide. First-order methods, such as gradient descent or stochastic gradient, have gained significant popularity. The seminal development in this area can be attributed to Yurii Nesterov, who proposed a class of accelerated gradient methods in 1983 that demonstrated faster global convergence rates than gradient descent.

Dr. Speagle will provide an overview of Nested Sampling, a complementary framework to Markov Chain Monte Carlo approaches that is designed to estimate marginal likelihoods (i.e. Bayesian evidences) and posterior distributions. He will start by discussing some of the technical details and history behind the approach, focusing on its motivation, formulation, and execution (the Past).

Join the Credit Management and Banking Operations division from Canadian Tire Bank for a discussion (with pizza!) on what they do and how your background in math, stats or computer science could be the perfect fit for a career as a data scientist.  Enjoy casual conversation with data scientists and managers, as they discuss a variety topics in the areas of data extraction, machine-learning model development and general analytics workflow, with examples of how it’s being used within the bank.  Questions about a day in the life of a CTB data scientist?

Speaker: Esha Saha (University of Waterloo) Talk Title: Applications of Random Features in Predicting Epidemics and Function Approximation

SPEAKER: Dr. Messoud Efendiyev (from Helmholtz Center Munich)   TALK TITLE: "Effect of Degeneracy on Dynamics of PDEs"