Statistics In The Era Of Computation | NYC Tech Events - GarysGuide

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Asian Tech Week
Nov 16 - Nov 20

Statistics In The Era Of Computation

With Kyunghyun Cho (Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics, New York University).

	Nov 18 (Wed) @ 06:00 PM FREE
	Simons Foundation, Gerald D Fischbach Auditorium, 160 5th Avenue

Registration for this advanced lecture will close at 2 p.m. the day of the event. Review the complete list of entrance requirements below.

This lecture is part of the Folding the Future: The Structural Biology Revolution Presidential Lecture Series in Biology.

The foundation of modern statistics arose during the late 19th & early 20th centuries, long before the availability of large-scale computers & pseudorandom number generators. This has led statistics to place significant focus on mathematical derivations & asymptotic results rather than on computational constraints & algorithms.

In this Presidential Lecture, Kyunghyun Cho will imagine how statistics can be approached differently in this era of large-scale computing. He will discuss how to train a statistical estimation algorithm - rather than manually design it - using one of the simplest statistical quantities: standard deviation. He will then describe how this idea of training an estimator can be applied more generally to a broad set of statistical quantities. Using such a learned estimator & a prior distribution over problem instances, he will close the loop by defining a new notion of identifiability called computational identifiability. This new perspective on statistics, he will argue, will free us from worrying about inference & let us focus on describing actual data & the complex, real-world phenomena we truly want to model statistically.

Cho is the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics & a professor of computer science & data science at New York University, as well as the co-founder & CEO of Ortet. He is also a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research & an associate member of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea. In 2021, Cho co-founded Prescient Design. Following its acquisition by Genentech later that year, he served as an executive director of frontier research & a senior fellow at Genentech until January 2026.

A prominent researcher in artificial intelligence, Cho previously worked as a research scientist at Facebook AI Research & a postdoctoral fellow under Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal. He earned his M.Sc. & Ph.D. from Aalto University. Cho has extensively served the machine learning community, acting as a conference program chair for ICLR, NeurIPS & ICML, & as a founding editor-in-chief of Transactions on Machine Learning Research. In 2021, he received the Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Engineering.

REGISTRATION REQUIREMENTS

You must be 18+ to attend this event
Registration will close at 2:00 p.m. the day of the event
Please only register yourself & use your complete first & last name as it appears on your photo ID when filling in the form.
Tickets under the same name do not count as registrations for others & each ticket must be registered under an individual attendee's name. If you have a guest you would like to bring with you to this event, please send them the link to register so they can sign up on their own.
Please note that the Simons Foundation will never ask for credit card information or require payment for registration to our free public events.

BUILDING ENTRY PROTOCOL

Provide valid photo ID
Present your digital or printed Eventbrite ticket confirmation; make sure it is for the correct event & that the name on it matches your ID.
Limited seating is available for this in-person event & is on a first-come, first-served basis.
All attendees must be pre-registered. Walk-in entry will be denied.
We follow the latest health & safety guidelines from local, state, & federal authorities & update our protocols accordingly.
SCHEDULE

Doors open: 5:30 p.m. (No entrance before 5:30 p.m.)

Lecture: 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. (Admittance closes at 6:20 p.m.)

The Gerald D. Fischbach Auditorium complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act & offers accessible seating to visitors with special access needs.

Presidential Lectures are free public colloquia at the Simons Foundation centered on four main themes: Biology, Physics, Mathematics & Computer Science, & Neuroscience & Autism Science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists & mathematicians & are intended to foster discourse & drive discovery among the broader NYC-area research community. We invite anyone interested in the topic to join us for this weekly lecture series.