Please join us on Friday at 1 PM via ZOOM to hear Dr. Lester Mackey speak on....
Title: Doing Some Good with Machine Learning
Contact the colloquium coordinators (Kristen Roland -rolandke- or Nadun Dissanayake - nadunkul) for zoom information.
Abstract: This is the story of my assorted attempts to do some good with machine learning. Through its telling, I’ll highlight several models of organizing social good efforts, describe half a dozen social good problems that would benefit from our community's attention, and present both resources and challenges for those looking to do some good with ML.
Lester Mackey is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, where he develops machine learning methods, models, and theory for large-scale learning tasks driven by applications from climate forecasting, healthcare, and the social good. Lester moved to Microsoft from Stanford University, where he was an assistant professor of Statistics and, by courtesy, of Computer Science. He earned his PhD in Computer Science and MA in Statistics from UC Berkeley and his BSE in Computer Science from Princeton University. He co-organized the second place team in the Netflix Prize competition for collaborative filtering, won the Prize4Life ALS disease progression prediction challenge, won prizes for temperature and precipitation forecasting in the yearlong real-time Subseasonal Climate Forecast Rodeo, received best paper and best student paper awards from the ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation and the International Conference on Machine Learning, and was elected to the COPSS Leadership Academy.