Rising Stars in Machine Learning Talk Features Adji Bousso Dieng from Columbia University

The University of Maryland Center for Machine Learning continues its Rising Stars in Machine Learning program on Monday, Sept. 30 with an hour-long talk on "Learning with Deep Probabilistic Generative Models.”

The talk will be given by Adji Bousso Dieng, a doctoral student in statistics at Columbia University. Her research involves combining probabilistic graphical modeling and deep learning to design models that are expressive and powerful enough to capture meaningful representations of high-dimensional structured data, such as text. She also researches ways to create algorithms for those models.

Dieng is one of three speakers chosen to present their work this fall at the University of Maryland as part of the Rising Stars in Machine Learning program, which supports up-and-coming female researchers as they pursue new scientific and academic opportunities.

Dieng has “played a big organizational part in various machine learning communities, which is increasingly important as ML grows,” says John Dickerson, an assistant professor of computer science and core member of the Center for Machine Learning.

Dickerson says that in addition to her extensive and impressive published works, he is excited about her recent research, which explores a new method that embeds both topics and words.

“In [her papers], she develops a method that marries traditional topic models and word embeddings, which have been used in myriad applications in the last few years,” says Dickerson. “Her method embeds both topics and words in the space, and those two papers show some exciting exploratory results that deal with some known problems with topic models.”

The third and final Rising Star in Machine Learning scheduled to speak this fall is Gintare Karolina Dziugaitem, a research scientist at Element AI. She will give her talk on Oct. 21.

The UMD Center for Machine Learning, supported in part by financial and technology leader Capital One, is part of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.

–Story by Colleen Curran

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WHAT: Rising Stars in Machine Learning Seminar Series

WHEN: Monday, Sept. 30, from 11 a.m. to noon

WHERE: Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering, Room 4105