“The Market Effects of Algorithms” | Lindsey Raymond (Microsoft Research)

Speaker: Joanna Wysocka, StanfordHost: Yadira Soto Feliciano & Eliezer CaloTitle: "Human development and evolution through the lens of gene regulation." The Mayer LectureThe Biology Colloquium is a weekly seminar held throughout the academic year — featuring distinguished speakers in many areas of the biological sciences from universities and institutions worldwide. More information on speakers, their affiliations, and titles of their talks will be added as available. Unless otherwise stated, the Colloquium will be held live in Stata 32-123 (Kirsch auditorium) Contact Margaret Cabral with questions.

A vinyl listening session hosted by Grammy Award-Winner Miguel Zenón and Lewis Music Library Department Head Avery Boddie.This event will introduce listeners to leading pioneers and musicians of jazz as well as the most influential albums of the genre spanning the past 100 years. Listeners will learn the societal influences and historical contexts which influenced each album. Several key artists covering different time periods will be examined, as will their unique musical styles, creative practices, and lasting contributions to the genre.

Speaker: Samuel Mundy (Princeton University)Title: Vanishing of Selmer groups for Siegel modular formsAbstract:Let $\pi$ be a cuspidal automorphic representation of $Sp_{2n}$ over $\mathbb{Q}$ which is holomorphic discrete series at infinity, and $\chi$ a Dirichlet character. Then one can attach to $\pi$ an orthogonal $p$-adic Galois representation $ho$ of dimension $2n+1$. Assume $ho$ is irreducible, that $\pi$ is ordinary at $p$, and that $p$ does not divide the conductor of $\chi$. I will describe work in progress which aims to prove that the Bloch--Kato Selmer group attached to $ho\otimes\chi$ vanishes, under some mild ramification assumptions on $\pi$; this is what is predicted by the Bloch--Kato conjectures.The proof uses "ramified Eisenstein congruences" by constructing $p$-adic families of Siegel cusp forms degenerating to Klingen Eisenstein series of nonclassical weight, and using these families to construct ramified Galois cohomology classes for the Tate dual of $ho\otimes\chi$.

Dr. Thomas Serre, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science at Brown University's Carney Center for Computational Brain Science, to speak as part of the Quest for Intelligence and CBMM seminar series.Title: Aligning deep networks with human vision will require novel neural architectures, data diets and training algorithmsAbstract: Recent advances in artificial intelligence have been mainly driven by the rapid scaling of deep neural networks (DNNs), which now contain unprecedented numbers of learnable parameters and are trained on massive datasets, covering large portions of the internet. This scaling has enabled DNNs to develop visual competencies that approach human levels. However, even the most sophisticated DNNs still exhibit strange, inscrutable failures that diverge markedly from human-like behavior—a misalignment that seems to worsen as models grow in scale.In this talk, I will discuss recent work from our group addressing this misalignment via the development of DNNs that mimic human perception by incorporating computational, algorithmic, and representational principles fundamental to natural intelligence. First, I will review our ongoing efforts in characterizing human visual strategies in image categorization tasks and contrasting these strategies with modern deep nets. I will present initial results suggesting we must explore novel data regimens and training algorithms for deep nets to learn more human-like visual representations. Second, I will show results suggesting that neural architectures inspired by cortex-like recurrent neural circuits offer a compelling alternative to the prevailing transformers, particularly for tasks requiring visual reasoning beyond simple categorization.

Writing a journal article can be a daunting task, characterized by frustration instead of progress. This four-part workshop series will breakdown the task of writing an empirical journal article into manageable pieces so that you can move your project forward. Led by WCC lecturer Adrienne Tierney, Ed.D, we will discuss how to approach each section and how to use writing as a problem-solving tool in creating a meaningful paper that conveys your research clearly and effectively. We encourage you to attend all sessions of the series, but you are also welcome to sign up for separate sessions.Part 1. Getting Started: Creating a Plan and Drafting an IntroductionTuesday, February 11th, 4:00-5:30pmPart 2. Getting to the Data: Methods and ResultsTuesday, February 18th, 4:00-5:30pmPart 3. Interpreting Your Findings: DiscussionTuesday, February 25th, 4:00-5:30pmPart 4. From Paper to Publication: Revision and SubmissionTuesday, March 4th, 4:00-5:30pm