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SUMMARY:IC Colloquium: Automatic differentiation for dummies
DTSTART:20190121T161500
DTEND:20190121T173000
DTSTAMP:20260508T053631Z
UID:c00f119feb9d83e088980730046103981aa693da63da97c2a457073c
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:By: Simon Peyton Jones - Microsoft Research (Cambridge)\nVideo
  of his talk\n\nAbstract:\nAutomatic differentiation (AD) is clearly cool.
  And it has become useful (as well as cool) recently\, because it essentia
 lly implements the back-propagation step that is key to learning in neural
  networks\; and it is used extensively in many other machine learning cont
 exts. But as well as been cool and useful\, AD is also mysterious. There a
 re forward and backward variants (the latter being mind-bending)\; there a
 re tapes and mutation\, delimited continuations\, and more.  It all makes
  me feel stupid.\n\nIn this talk\, I’ll explain a simple and elegant app
 roach to AD from first principles\, based on work by Conal Elliot. We’ll
  end up with an AD algorithm that takes 10 lines of code\; that works for 
 forward and backward AD\; that works for matrix computations\; and that is
  a source-to-source transformation whose output can be efficiently compile
 d without needing a runtime trace.\n\nBio:\nSimon Peyton Jones\, FRS\, gra
 duated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1980. After two years in industry
 \, he spent seven years as a lecturer at University College London\, and n
 ine years as a professor at Glasgow University\, before moving to Microsof
 t Research (Cambridge) in 1998. Simon’s main research interest is in fun
 ctional programming languages\, their implementation\, and their applicati
 on. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional 
 language Haskell\, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Has
 kell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation
  of functional languages.  He is particularly motivated by direct applica
 tion of principled theory to practical language design and implementation 
 — that is one reason he loves functional programming so much. Simon is c
 hair of Computing at School\, the grass-roots organisation that was at the
  epicentre of the 2014 reform of the English computing curriculum.\n\nMore
  information\n 
LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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