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Invited Talk Mar 2, 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM CST Ballroom A

Theory and Systems for Weak Supervision

Christopher Ré
Christopher (Chris) Ré is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University who is affiliated with the Statistical Machine Learning Group and Stanford AI Lab. His recent work is to understand how software and hardware systems will change as a result of machine learning along with a continuing, petulant drive to work on math problems. Research from his group has been incorporated into scientific and humanitarian efforts, such as the fight against human trafficking, along with products from technology and enterprise companies. He cofounded a company, based on his research into machine learning systems, that was acquired by Apple in 2017. More recently, he cofounded SambaNova systems based, in part, on his work on accelerating machine learning. He received a SIGMOD Dissertation Award in 2010, an NSF CAREER Award in 2011, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2013, a Moore Data Driven Investigator Award in 2014, the VLDB early Career Award in 2015, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2015, and an Okawa Research Grant in 2016. His research contributions have spanned database theory, database systems, and machine learning, and his work has won best paper at a premier venue in each area, respectively, at PODS 2012, SIGMOD 2014, and ICML 2016.
If you want to build a high-quality machine learning product, build a large, high-quality training set. At first glance, this seems as useful as the statement “if you want to be rich, get a lot of money.” However, a key idea driving our work is that new theoretical and systems concepts including weak supervision, automatic data augmentation policies, and more, can enable engineers to build training sets more quickly and cost effectively. Along with state-of-the-art results on benchmarks, these concepts have allowed our group and collaborators to build a range of state-of-the-art applications including patient-care monitoring on electronic health records, automatic triage systems for radiologists, and enabling cardiologists to spot rare abnormalities in video MRI—along with widely used products from Apple and Google. This talk describes the theoretical and systems challenges that such applications create.
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Invited Talk Mar 3, 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM CST Ballroom A

The Emerging Role of Cryptography in Trustworthy AI

Shafi Goldwasser
Shafi Goldwasser is the Director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, and a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. She is also the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Goldwasser received a BS in applied mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979, and MS and PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley in 1984. Goldwasser was the recipient of ACM Turing Award for 2012. She was also the recipient of the Gödel Prize in 1993 and another in 2001 for her work on interactive proofs and connections to approximation, and was awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (1996), the RSA award in mathematics (1998), the ACM Athena award for women in computer science (2008), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science (2010), the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (2011), the Barnard College Medal of Distinction (2016), and the Suffrage Science Award (2016). She is a member of the AAAS, ACM, NAE, NAS, Israeli Academy of Science, London Mathematical Society, and Russian Academy of Science
Cryptography and Machine Learning have shared a curious history: a scientific success for one often provided an example of an impossible task for the other. Today, the goals of the two fields are aligned. Cryptographic models and tools can and should play a role in ensuring the trustworthiness of AI and machine learning and address problems such as privacy of training input, model verification and tracing modified models. I will discuss this development with its challenges and opportunities.
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