October 19, 2021
Virtual
https://www.ideal.northwestern.edu/events/mini-workshop-on-statistical-and-computational-aspects-of-robustness-in-high-dimensional-estimation/

Registration deadline: October 18, 2021

Today’s data pose unprecedented challenges to statisticians. It may be incomplete, corrupted or exposed to some unknown source of contamination or adversarial attack. Robustness is one of the revived concepts in statistics and machine learning that can accommodate such complexity and glean useful information from modern datasets. This virtual workshop will address several aspects of robustness such as statistical estimation and computational efficiency in the context of modern high-dimensional data analysis. The workshop speakers are Ankur Moitra, Ilias Diakonikolas, Jacob Steinhardt and Po-Ling Loh. Please register at the webpage given below for free to participate in the virtual workshop.

September 21 – December 10, 2021
Virtual
https://www.ideal.northwestern.edu/special-quarters/fall-2021/

IDEAL – The Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning (an NSF-funded collaborative institute across Northwestern, TTIC and U Chicago) is organizing a Fall 2021 special quarter on “Robustness in High-dimensional Statistics and Machine Learning”.
The special-quarter activities include mini-workshops, seminars, graduate courses, and a reading group. The research goal is to explore several theoretical frameworks and directions towards designing learning algorithms and estimators that are tolerant to errors, contamination, and misspecification in data. Many of these activities will be virtual.

The kick-off event ( https://www.ideal.northwestern.edu/events/fall-2021-kickoff-event/ ) for this quarter will be held on Tuesday, September 21, 2021 at 3 pm Central time. We will briefly introduce the institute, the key personnel and information about the various activities during the special quarter. To find more information, or participate in the special quarter, please visit the webpage.

August 23-25, 2021
Online
https://waldo2021.github.io/

Registration deadline: August 20, 2021

This workshop aims to foster collaborations between researchers across multiple disciplines through a set of central questions and techniques for algorithm design for large data. We will focus on topics such as sublinear algorithms, randomized numerical linear algebra, streaming and sketching, and learning and testing.

July 13-14, 2021
Foundations of Data Science Institute (FODSI)
https://fodsi.us/ml4a.html

In recent years there has been increasing interest in using machine learning to improve the performance of classical algorithms in computer science, by fine-tuning their behavior to adapt to the properties of the input distribution. This “data-driven” or “learning-based” approach to algorithm design has the potential to significantly improve the efficiency of some of the most widely used algorithms. For example, it has been used to design better data structures, online algorithms, streaming and sketching algorithms, market mechanisms and algorithms for combinatorial optimization, similarity search and inverse problems. This virtual workshop will feature talks from experts at the forefront of this exciting area.

March 19, 2021
Virtual (on Gather.town and Zoom)
https://theory.cs.northwestern.edu/events/quarterly-theory-workshop-algorithms-and-their-social-impact/

The focus of this workshop will be on the societal impacts of algorithms. From designing self-driving cars to selecting the order of news posts on Facebook to automating credit checks, the use of algorithms for decision making is now commonplace. Hence it is more important than ever to consider fairness as a key aspect while designing these algorithms to prevent unwanted bias and prejudice. The speakers for this workshop are Rakesh Vohra, Michael Kearns, Samira Samadi, Steven Wu, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian.

This workshop is part of the Northwestern Quarterly Theory Workshop series that brings in theoretical computer science experts to present their perspective and research on a common theme. This particular workshop is co-organized by the IDEAL institute, as part of the IDEAL Special Quarter on Data Science and Law.