Statistics in the Era of Computation

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Presidential Lectures

A free public lecture series featuring curated, high-level scientific talks by leading scientists and mathematicians. Explore groundbreaking research across neuroscience and autism science, physics, biology, and mathematics and computer science.

<h4>This lecture is part of the Folding the Future: The Structural Biology Revolution Presidential Lecture Series in Biology.</h4><h4> </h4>

The foundation of modern statistics arose during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, long before the availability of large-scale computers and pseudorandom number generators. This has led statistics to place significant focus on mathematical derivations and asymptotic results rather than on computational constraints and 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 and 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 and let us focus on describing actual data and the complex, real-world phenomena we truly want to model statistically.

Cho is the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics and a professor of computer science and data science at New York University, as well as the co-founder and CEO of Ortet. He is also a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and 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 and 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 and a postdoctoral fellow under Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal. He earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from Aalto University. Cho has extensively served the machine learning community, acting as a conference program chair for ICLR, NeurIPS and ICML, and 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<ul><li>You must be 18+ to attend this event</li><li>Registration will close at 2:00 p.m. the day of the event</li><li>Please only register yourself and use your complete first and last name as it appears on your photo ID when filling in the form.</li><li>Tickets under the same name do not count as registrations for others and 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.</li><li>Please note that the Simons Foundation will never ask for credit card information or require payment for registration to our free public events. </li></ul> BUILDING ENTRY PROTOCOL<ul><li>Provide valid photo ID</li><li>Present your digital or printed Eventbrite ticket confirmation; make sure it is for the correct event and that the name on it matches your ID.</li><li>Limited seating is available for this in-person event and is on a first-come, first-served basis.</li><li>All attendees must be pre-registered. Walk-in entry will be denied.</li><li>We follow the latest health and safety guidelines from local, state, and federal authorities and update our protocols accordingly. </li></ul>SCHEDULEDoors 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 and offers accessible seating to visitors with special access needs.

<a href="https://www.simonsfoundation.org/sf-events/?type=simons-foundation-lectures" title="https://www.simonsfoundation.org/sf-events/?type=simons-foundation-lectures" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Presidential Lectures</a> are free public colloquia at the Simons Foundation centered on four main themes: Biology, Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Neuroscience and Autism Science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are intended to foster discourse and drive discovery among the broader NYC-area research community. We invite anyone interested in the topic to join us for this weekly lecture series.

Statistics in the Era of Computation

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

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Statistics in the Era of Computation

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

Good to know

Location

Simons Foundation

How do you want to get there?

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