Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

Microsoft Researcher Tapped for Opening Keynote at ISC 2017 

FRANKFURT, Germany, Feb. 23 -- The organizers of the ISC High Performance conference are very pleased to introduce data scientist, Prof. Dr. Jennifer Tour Chayes, the managing director and co-founder of Microsoft Research New England and Microsoft Research New York City, as the ISC 2017 conference keynote speaker. Her talk will be titled “Network Science: From the Massive Online Networks to Cancer Genomics.”

She will be speaking at 9 am, which is right after the opening session on Monday, June 19. This year’s ISC High Performance conference will be held at Messe Frankfurt from June 18 – 22, and will be attended by over 3,000 HPC community members, including researchers, scientists and business leaders.

In her keynote abstract, Chayes sets up her topic as follows:

“Everywhere we turn these days, we find massive data sets that are appropriately described as networks. In the high tech world, we see the Internet, the World Wide Web, mobile phone networks, a variety of online social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, and massive online networks of users and products like Netflix and Amazon. In economics, we are increasingly experiencing both the positive and negative effects of a global networked economy. In epidemiology, we find disease spreading over our ever growing social networks, complicated by mutation of the disease agents. In biomedical research, we are beginning to understand the structure of gene regulatory networks, with the prospect of using this understanding to manage many human diseases.”

Chayes is one of the inventors of the field of graphons, which are graph functions now widely used for machine learning of massive networks. She will briefly introduce some of the models she and her collaborator are using to describe these networks, the processes they are studying on the networks, the algorithms they have devised for the networks, and finally, methods to indirectly infer latent network structure from measured data as well as some of the processes, methods and algorithms they are using to derive insights from those networks.

“I'll discuss in some detail two particular applications: the very efficient machine learning algorithms for doing collaborative filtering on massive sparse networks of users and products, like the Netflix network; and the inference algorithms on cancer genomic data to suggest possible drug targets for certain kinds of cancer,” explains Chayes.

She joined Microsoft Research in 1997, when she co-founded the Theory Group. She is the co-author of over 135 scientific papers and the co-inventor of more than 30 patents. Her research areas include phase transitions in discrete mathematics and computer science, structural and dynamical properties of self-engineered networks, graph theory, graph algorithms, algorithmic game theory, and computational biology.

Chayes holds a BA in biology and physics from Wesleyan University, where she graduated first in her class, and a PhD in mathematical physics from Princeton. She did postdoctoral work in the Mathematics and Physics Departments at Harvard and Cornell. She is the recipient of the NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Sloan Fellowship, the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, and the ABI Women of Leadership Vision Award. She has twice been a member of the IAS in Princeton. Chayes is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Fields Institute, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Mathematical Society, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the winner of the 2015 John von Neumann Award, the highest honor of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In 2016, Chayes received an Honorary Doctorate from Leiden University.

2017 Conference Registration Opens March 1

The organizers are also pleased to announce that the early-bird registration for this year’s conference and exhibition will open March 1. By registering early, attendees will be able to save money and secure their choice of hotels. For ISC 2017 partner hotels and special rates, please look at Frankfurt Hotels under Travel & Stay.

About ISC High Performance

First held in 1986, ISC High Performance is the world’s oldest and Europe’s most important conference and networking event for the HPC community. It offers a strong five-day technical program focusing on HPC technological development and its application in scientific fields, as well as its adoption in commercial environments.

Over 400 hand-picked expert speakers and 150 exhibitors, consisting of leading research centers and vendors, will greet attendees at ISC High Performance. A number of events complement the Monday – Wednesday keynotes, including the Distinguished Speaker Series, the Industry Track, The Machine Learning Track, Tutorials, Workshops, the Research Paper Sessions, Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) Sessions, Research Poster, the PhD Forum, Project Poster Sessions and Exhibitor Forums.


Source: ISC High Performance

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