All events
Monday, May 1, 2017
Computational Challenges in Machine Learning
Workshop | May 1 – 5, 2017 every day | Calvin Laboratory (Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing)
Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing
The aim of this workshop will be to bring together a broad set of researchers looking at algorithmic questions that arise in machine learning. The primary target areas will be large-scale learning and algorithms for Bayesian estimation.
Organizers:
Santosh Vempala (Georgia Institute of Technology; chair), David Blei (Columbia University), Katherine Heller (Duke University), John Langford... More >
Dissertation Talk: Provably Secure Computing using Certified Software and Trusted Hardware
Presentation | May 1 | 11 a.m.-12 p.m. | 531 Cory Hall
Rohit Sinha
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS)
Security-critical applications constantly face threats from exploits in lower computing layers
such as the OS and Hypervisor, or even attacks from malicious datacenter insiders.
This dissertation explores building cloud applications with provable security guarantees,
including only these hardware primitives (i.e. nearly zero software) in the trusted computing base.
$K$-theory seminar: The Chern Character in twisted $K$-theory
Seminar | May 1 | 11:10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. | Evans Hall, 740 and then 959
German Stefanich, UC Berkeley
We will recall the construction of the (equivariant) Chern character in $K$-theory and proceed to construct its twisted version.
The Future of Western Democracies: Defending Freedom and Open Societies
Lecture | May 1 | 12-1 p.m. | Moses Hall
Ralf Fücks, President of the Heinrich Böll Foundation
In his most recent book “In Defense of Freedom – How We Can Win the Battle for Our Open Societies”, Ralf Fuecks analyses the reasons behind racism, nationalism, and the collapse of the political center. We are in the midst of a crisis of liberal democracy. The widespread fear of economic decline, unchecked globalization, and uncontrolled migration is resulting in increasingly nationalist rhetoric... More >
Armenian in New York City: A Fascinating History
Lecture | May 1 | 12-2 p.m. | 270 Stephens Hall
Harold Takooshian, Professor of Psychology & Urban Studies; Director of the Organizational Leadership Program, Fordham University
Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES), Armenian Studies Program
The Armenian diaspora has a fascinating history in the USA. In New York City, this includes some notable facts across the past two centuries--a rich history of triumph, scandal, tragedy, achievement despite adversity, with such colorful notables as Kristapor der Seropian, M. Vartan Malcom, Raymond Damadian, Nicholas Kristoff, Haik Kavookjian.
Harold Takooshian, PhD, is on the faculty of... More >
Graduate Student Seminar
Seminar | May 1 | 12-1:30 p.m. | 489 Minor Hall
Rachel Albert, PhD Candidate (O’Brein Lab); Paul Cullen (Flanagan Lab)
Neuroscience Institute, Helen Wills
Rachel Albert's talk title is:
Latency Requirements for Foveated Rendering
&
Paul Cullen's talk title is:
Under Pressure: Understanding Glaucoma through the Lens of Astrocyte Reactivity
Anthropology on the Frontlines: Honoring the work of Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Conference/Symposium | May 1 | 1-7 p.m. | Alumni House
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, Dean of Education, UCLA; Juan Thomas Ordóñez, Professor of Anthropology, Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá; Naomar Monteriro Almeida-Filho, Chancellor, Federal University Southern Bahia, Brazil; Sherry Ortner, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UCLA; Kimberly Theidon, Professor of Anthropology, Fletcher School of Diplomacy; Francisco J. Ferrándiz, Spanish National Research Council; Donald Boström, Investigative Journalist, Sweden; Michael Montgomery, Center for Investigative Reporting; Dr. Jorge Pérez Ávila, Former Director, Pedro Khori Institute, Havana; Meira Waiss, Professor Emerita of Antropology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Gail Kligman, Assoc. Provost, Professor of Sociology, UCLA
Nicholas B. Dirks, Professor of Anthropology, Chancellor, UCB
Department of Anthropology, Center for Latin American Studies, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Humanities Research Institute, Center for Law and Society
The Anthropology department is hosting an international conference with special guests to honor the life and work of Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes during May 1st and 2nd. Several of our own UCB Anthropology PhD alumni and other distinguished anthropologists, social scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, investigative journalists will also be speaking at the two day event.
Dissertation Talk: Optomechanical Dynamics in Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers
Lecture | May 1 | 2-3 p.m. | Cory Hall, 540AB (DOP Center)
S. Adair Gerke, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley
String-Math Seminar: Geometry behind the shuffle conjecture
Seminar | May 1 | 2-3 p.m. | 402 LeConte Hall
Erik Carlsson, UC Davis
The original "shuffle conjecture" of Haglund, Haiman, Loehr, Ulyanov, and Remmel predicted a striking combinatorial formula for the bigraded character of the diagonal coinvariant algebra in type A, in terms of some fascinating parking functions statistics. I will start by explaining this formula, as well as the ideas that went into my recent proof of this conjecture with Anton Mellit, namely the... More >
Northern California Symplectic Geometry Seminar: Contact and symplectic foliations/Skeleta of Weinstein manifolds
Seminar | May 1 | 2:30-5 p.m. | Stanford University Mathematics Department, 384H/383N
Alvaro del Pino/Laura Starkston, ICMAT, University of Madrid/Stanford University
In dimension 3, every foliation... More >
Deepak Rajan - Distributed-memory branch-and-bound tree search for stochastic Mixed-Integer Programs (MIPs)
Seminar | May 1 | 3:30-5:30 p.m. | 3108 Etcheverry Hall
Deepak Rajan, University of California Berkeley
Industrial Engineering & Operations Research
In this talk, I present and compare two frameworks for distributed-memory branch-and-bound (B&B) tree search.
Physical Mechanisms of Cell Organization on Micron Length Scales
Seminar | May 1 | 4-5 p.m. | 106 Stanley Hall
Michael Rosen, UT Southwestern Medical Center
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Department of Chemistry
IB Finishing Talk: Breaking the rules: phylogeny, not life history, explains dental eruption sequence in mammals
Seminar | May 1 | 4-5 p.m. | 2040 Valley Life Sciences Building
Tesla Monson, UCB (Hlusko Lab)
Student Algebraic Geometry Seminar: A conjecture in Diophantine geometry, via model theory
Seminar | May 1 | 4-5 p.m. | 891 Evans Hall
Michael Wan, UC Berkeley
In 2011, Jonathan Pila published an unconditional proof of the André-Oort conjecture in Diophantine geometry, in the Annals. A simplified, vague form of the statement is as follows: if X is an irreducible affine complex variety, and X contains a Zariski dense set of “special points”, then X is a “special variety”.
Pila’s proof uses the theory of o-minimality from model theory, a... More >
Dissertation Talk: Safe and Interactive Autonomy: Control, Learning, and Verification
Seminar | May 1 | 4-5 p.m. | 250 Sutardja Dai Hall
Dorsa Sadigh, UC Berkeley
Seminar 271, Development: Mechanism Design meets Development: Selective Trials for Technology Diffusion
Seminar | May 1 | 4:10-5:30 p.m. | 648 Evans Hall
Pascaline Dupas, Stanford
Dissertation Talk: Parallel Machine Learning Using Concurrency Control
Seminar | May 1 | 5-6 p.m. | 465H Soda Hall
Xinghao Pan, EECS
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS)
Many machine learning algorithms iteratively process datapoints and transform some global model parameters. It has become increasingly impractical to serially execute such iterative algorithms as processor speeds fail to catch up to the explosive growth in dataset sizes.
To address these problems, the machine learning community has turned to two parallelization strategies: bulk synchronous... More >
Entrepreneurial Toastmasters Club Meeting
Meeting | June 6, 2016 – August 14, 2017 every Monday | 6:20-7:20 p.m. | 373 Soda Hall
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS)
Toastmasters International is a non-profit educational organization that develops communication and leadership skills through public speaking.
Arts + Design Mondays: The Future of Media in the Trump Era, with Dave Pell and Guests
Lecture | May 1 | 6:30 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Dave Pell is a writer, angel investor, and founder of NextDraft, a curated compilation of daily news and analysis. He has degrees from UC Berkeley and Harvard University and has written for numerous media sites, including Gizmodo, NPR, Medium, and Forbes.
This event is part of The Future of Cultural Criticism, a series featuring some of the most innovative and incisive commentators on culture,... More >
Admission to this event is free
The Future of Media in the Trump Era: Dave Pell, moderated by Deirdre English
Lecture | May 1 | 6:30 p.m. | Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Osher Theater
Townsend Center for the Humanities, Arts + Design
Dave Pell is the founder and editor of NextDraft, a curated compilation of daily news and analysis. Deirdre English is former editor-in-chief of Mother Jones magazine.
The Great American Eclipse: Benjamin Dean Astronomy Lectures
Lecture | May 1 | 7:30-9 p.m. | California Academy of Sciences, Planetarium
55 Music Concourse Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118
Dr. Laura Peticolas, Space Science Laboratory, UC Berkeley
For the first time since 1918, there will be a total solar eclipse crossing the United States from the Pacific to the Atlantic on August 21, 2017. Dr. Peticolas will provide an overview of the eclipse, describe research that will result during this eclipse, and invite members of the audience to participate in gathering images for the Eclipse Megamovie.
$12 Members, $15 General, $12 Seniors
Reservations: Members: $12, General $15, Seniors $12. Seating is limited and advanced ticketing is required. To reserve a place today, buy a member or non-member ticket online or over the phone at 1-877-227-1831. Tickets go on sale April 25. Buy tickets online or by calling California Academy of Sciences at 877-227-1831
The Great American Eclipse
Exhibits and Ongoing Events
Guerra Civil at 80
Exhibit - Artifacts | September 1, 2016 – July 1, 2017 every day | Bancroft Library, 2nd floor corridor between The Bancroft Library and Doe Library
Marking the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the exhibition Guerra Civil @ 80 features selections from The Bancroft Library's Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Bay Area Post records and photographic collections, along with posters, books, pamphlets, and other ephemera. A visual and textual display of the struggle to defend the Second Spanish Republic, the... More >
War Ink: California Veterans Exhibit
Exhibit - Photography | November 1, 2016 – May 1, 2017 every day | Doe Library, Brown Gallery (east wing)
Photographs from the celebrated War Ink Project will be on display in Berkeley’s Doe Library in November. The exhibit features striking images of tattoos that express the impact of combat experiences on California veterans. Jason Deitch, co-creator of War Ink and a Cal veteran, hopes the display will “bridge the divide between the veterans and civilian communities.” The project is “both exhibit... More >
Designs from a Distance
Exhibit - Artifacts | January 30 – May 19, 2017 every day | 210 Wurster Hall
Environmental Design, College of
CLOSES May 19. This exhibit features design and planning projects on six continents by architects based in the San Francisco Bay Area and held by the Environmental Design Archives.
Literatura de Cordel in Moffitt Library
Exhibit - Artifacts | February 16 – June 30, 2017 every day | Moffitt Undergraduate Library
This exhibition highlights a collection of Brazilian chapbooks or Literatura
de Cordel in the Moffitt Library. These chapbooks are still produced for
mass consumption in the Northeastern Brazil. These are called literature de
cordel as they are hung from a cord in the book-stands so that the consumers
can browse them and select them according to their desires. There are
several themes that... More >
Teachers at the Center: The Story of the National Writing Project
Exhibit - Artifacts | April 17 – September 1, 2017 every day | Bancroft Library, Rowell Cases, second floor corridor between The Bancroft Library and Doe Library
The National Writing Project is a professional development
network for teachers of writing at all levels, from early
childhood to university. Drawing from the newly available
National Writing Project records and other Bancroft Library
collections, this exhibition explores the history of the
organization from its origins within the Graduate School of
Education at UC Berkeley to its present... More >
New Favorites: Collecting in the Bancroft Tradition
Exhibit - Artifacts | April 21 – September 1, 2017 every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday & Friday | 10 a.m.-4 p.m. | Bancroft Library, Gallery
For the first time in many years The Bancroft Library presents
an exhibition of recent additions to its major collections. The
exhibition also includes recently rediscovered masterpieces
carefully collected in years past. Gold-Rush-era memoirs
and advertisements, early editions of William Langland and
Jane Austen, “branded” books from 18th c. Mexico, and David Johnson’s photographs of the... More >
