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Workshop
Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences
Atilim Gunes Baydin · Juan Carrasquilla · Shirley Ho · Karthik Kashinath · Michela Paganini · Savannah Thais · Anima Anandkumar · Kyle Cranmer · Roger Melko · Mr. Prabhat · Frank Wood

Sat Dec 14 08:00 AM -- 06:30 PM (PST) @ West 109 + 110
Event URL: https://ml4physicalsciences.github.io/ »

Machine learning methods have had great success in learning complex representations that enable them to make predictions about unobserved data. Physical sciences span problems and challenges at all scales in the universe: from finding exoplanets in trillions of sky pixels, to finding machine learning inspired solutions to the quantum many-body problem, to detecting anomalies in event streams from the Large Hadron Collider. Tackling a number of associated data-intensive tasks including, but not limited to, segmentation, 3D computer vision, sequence modeling, causal reasoning, and efficient probabilistic inference are critical for furthering scientific discovery. In addition to using machine learning models for scientific discovery, the ability to interpret what a model has learned is receiving an increasing amount of attention.

In this targeted workshop, we would like to bring together computer scientists, mathematicians and physical scientists who are interested in applying machine learning to various outstanding physical problems, in particular in inverse problems and approximating physical processes; understanding what the learned model really represents; and connecting tools and insights from physical sciences to the study of machine learning models. In particular, the workshop invites researchers to contribute papers that demonstrate cutting-edge progress in the application of machine learning techniques to real-world problems in physical sciences, and using physical insights to understand what the learned model means.

By bringing together machine learning researchers and physical scientists who apply machine learning, we expect to strengthen the interdisciplinary dialogue, introduce exciting new open problems to the broader community, and stimulate production of new approaches to solving open problems in sciences. Invited talks from leading individuals in both communities will cover the state-of-the-art techniques and set the stage for this workshop.

Author Information

Atilim Gunes Baydin (University of Oxford)
Juan Carrasquilla (Vector Institute)

Juan Carrasquilla is a full-time researcher at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto, Canada, where he works on the intersection of condensed matter physics, quantum computing, and machine learning - such as combining quantum Monte Carlo simulations and machine learning techniques to analyze the collective behaviour of quantum many-body systems. He completed his PhD in Physics at the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy and has since held positions as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University and the Perimeter Institute, as a Visiting Research Scholar at Penn State University, and was a Research Scientist at D-Wave Systems Inc. in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Shirley Ho (Flatiron institute)

Shirley Ho is a group leader and acting director at Flatiron Institute at Simons foundation, a research professor of physics and an affiliated faculty at Center for Data Science at NYU. Ho also holds associate (adjunct) professorship at Carnegie Mellon University and visiting appointment at Princeton University. She was a senior scientist at Berkeley National Lab from 2016-2018 and a Cooper-Siegel Development chair professor at Carnegie Mellon University before that. Ho was a Seaborg and Chamberlain Fellow from 2008-2011 at Berkeley Lab, after receiving her PhD in Astrophysics from Princeton University in 2008 under supervision of David Spergel. Ho graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Physics and a B.A. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. A cited expert in cosmology, machine learning applications in astrophysics and data science,her interests are using deep learning accelerated simulations to understand the Universe, and other astrophysical phenomena. She tries her best to balance her love for the Universe, the machine and life especially during these crazy times.

Karthik Kashinath (LBNL)
Michela Paganini (Facebook AI Research)
Savannah Thais (Princeton University)
Anima Anandkumar (NVIDIA / Caltech)

Anima Anandkumar is a Bren professor at Caltech CMS department and a director of machine learning research at NVIDIA. Her research spans both theoretical and practical aspects of large-scale machine learning. In particular, she has spearheaded research in tensor-algebraic methods, non-convex optimization, probabilistic models and deep learning. Anima is the recipient of several awards and honors such as the Bren named chair professorship at Caltech, Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship, Young investigator awards from the Air Force and Army research offices, Faculty fellowships from Microsoft, Google and Adobe, and several best paper awards. Anima received her B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 2004 and her PhD from Cornell University in 2009. She was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT from 2009 to 2010, a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research New England in 2012 and 2014, an assistant professor at U.C. Irvine between 2010 and 2016, an associate professor at U.C. Irvine between 2016 and 2017 and a principal scientist at Amazon Web Services between 2016 and 2018.

Kyle Cranmer (New York University)

Kyle Cranmer is an Associate Professor of Physics at New York University and affiliated with NYU's Center for Data Science. He is an experimental particle physicists working, primarily, on the Large Hadron Collider, based in Geneva, Switzerland. He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering in 2007 and the National Science Foundation's Career Award in 2009. Professor Cranmer developed a framework that enables collaborative statistical modeling, which was used extensively for the discovery of the Higgs boson in July, 2012. His current interests are at the intersection of physics and machine learning and include inference in the context of intractable likelihoods, development of machine learning models imbued with physics knowledge, adversarial training for robustness to systematic uncertainty, the use of generative models in the physical sciences, and integration of reproducible workflows in the inference pipeline.

Roger Melko (University of Waterloo / Perimeter Institute)
Mr. Prabhat (LBL/NERSC)
Frank Wood (University of British Columbia)

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