Alina Ene, Junior Faculty Fellow, Gives 4/11 Wed@Hariri/Meet Our Fellows Talk

3:00 PM – 4:30 PM on Wednesday, April 11, 2018
Refreshments & networking at 2:45 PM
Hariri Institute for Computing
111 Cummington Mall, Room 180

The Hariri Institute for Computing continues its 2017-2018 “Meet Our Fellows” series, which will showcase the Institute’s 2017 Junior Faculty Fellows and Graduate Student Fellows.

Meet Our Fellows/Junior Faculty Fellow Presentation
Alina Ene
Junior Faculty Fellow, Hariri Institute for Computing
Assistant Professor, Computer Science (CAS)

With an introduction by Abraham Matta, Professor of Computer Science.

Faster and Distributed Submodular Function Optimization

Abstract: Many applications in machine learning involve huge amounts of data with a very rich structure. The scale and complexity of the data makes learning very challenging from a computational and modeling perspective; to learn the most from our data, we need both powerful models and efficient algorithms for those models, and it is not a priori clear that these two competing goals can be reconciled. In this talk, we explore some of the modeling and algorithmic challenges arising in applications. We consider learning tasks with a rich combinatorial structure that can be modeled as submodular optimization problems, and we design faster and distributed algorithms for these problems with provable guarantees.

Bio: Alina Ene was selected as an Institute Junior Faculty Fellow beginning in Fall 2017. Alina is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Boston University. Her research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms, the mathematical aspects of combinatorial optimization topics such as submodularity and graphs, and their applications to machine learning. Prior to joining BU, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick, a Faculty Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science, and a postdoc in the Center for Computational Intractability at Princeton University. Alina obtained her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013. She graduated with a BSE degree in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2008, with High Honors in Computer Science.