Han Liu, Princeton University, to Give DSI Colloquium Lecture on 3/24

11:00 AM – 1:00 PM on Friday, March 24, 2017
Reception to follow
Hariri Institute for Computing
111 Cummington Mall, Room 180

Blessing of Massive Scale
Han Liu
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Operations Research & Financial Engineering
Princeton University

Abstract: This talk introduces a phenomenon that significant statistical benefit may be obtained by increasing the problem scale.  To illustrate this phenomenon, Liu introduces two case studies. The  first one shows the benefit of “large sample size” using a semiparametric graph estimation problem. The second one shows the  benefit of  “large dimensionality” using a semiparametric spatial graph estimation problem. The procedures for both problems are very suitable for distributed computation, thus are enabled by modern computational architecture.

Han LiuBio:
Han Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University, where he leads the Statistical Machine Learning (SMiLe) Laboratory. He received the joint PhD in Statistics and Machine Learning from the Machine Learning Department at the Carnegie Mellon University (under the co-supervision of Larry Wasserman and John Lafferty). He has broad research interests, ranging from modern data science to artificial general intelligence. Specifically, his theoretical research includes combinatorial inference, statistical optimization, and computational lower bounds. His applied research includes brain science, genomics, and computational finance. Han Liu is the recipient of many prestigious research awards including the Tweedie New Researcher Award (from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics), the Noether Young Scholar Award (from the American Statistical Association), the NSF CAREER Award (from the Division of Mathematical Sciences), and the Howard B Wentz Award (from Princeton SEAS), and has received numerous best paper awards including the Best Paper Prize in Continuous Optimization in the 5th ICCOPT and the Best Overall Paper Award honorable mention in the 26th ICML. He was also invited as a keynote speaker in the 2016 INFORMS Optimization Society Conference.