Decision-making permeates every aspect of human and societal development, from individuals' daily choices to the complex decisions made by communities and institutions.
Central to effective decision-making is the discipline of optimization, which seeks th ...
Distributed learning is the key for enabling training of modern large-scale machine learning models, through parallelising the learning process. Collaborative learning is essential for learning from privacy-sensitive data that is distributed across various ...
Modern optimization is tasked with handling applications of increasingly large scale, chiefly due to the massive amounts of widely available data and the ever-growing reach of Machine Learning. Consequently, this area of research is under steady pressure t ...
The field of biometrics, and especially face recognition, has seen a wide-spread adoption the last few years, from access control on personal devices such as phones and laptops, to automated border controls such as in airports. The stakes are increasingly ...
In this thesis, we study two closely related directions: robustness and generalization in modern deep learning. Deep learning models based on empirical risk minimization are known to be often non-robust to small, worst-case perturbations known as adversari ...
This paper offers a new algorithm to efficiently optimize scheduling decisions for dial-a-ride problems (DARPs), including problem variants considering electric and autonomous vehicles (e-ADARPs). The scheduling heuristic, based on linear programming theor ...
While momentum-based accelerated variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work, we first show that th ...
In light of the challenges posed by climate change and the goals of the Paris Agreement, electricity generation is shifting to a more renewable and decentralized pattern, while the operation of systems like buildings is increasingly electrified. This calls ...
In this paper, we present a new parameterization and optimization procedure for minimizing the weight of ribbed plates. The primary goal is to reduce embodied CO2 in concrete floors as part of the effort to diminish the carbon footprint of the construction ...
Machine learning has provided a means to accelerate early-stage drug discovery by combining molecule generation and filtering steps in a single architecture that leverages the experience and design preferences of medicinal chemists. However, designing mach ...
As large, data-driven artificial intelligence models become ubiquitous, guaranteeing high data quality is imperative for constructing models. Crowdsourcing, community sensing, and data filtering have long been the standard approaches to guaranteeing or imp ...
Surrogate-based optimization is widely used for aerodynamic shape optimization, and its effectiveness depends on representative sampling of the design space. However, traditional sampling methods are hard-pressed to effectively sample high-dimensional desi ...
Reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for learning to adapt to new environments. In RL, the prediction error is an important component that compares the expected and actual rewards. Dopamine plays a critical role in encoding these prediction errors. In my ...
In this paper, we study sampling from a posterior derived from a neural network. We propose a new probabilistic model consisting of adding noise at every pre- and post-activation in the network, arguing that the resulting posterior can be sampled using an ...
Human babies have a natural desire to interact with new toys and objects, through which they learn how the world around them works, e.g., that glass shatters when dropped, but a rubber ball does not. When their predictions are proven incorrect, such as whe ...
In the past few years, Machine Learning (ML) techniques have ushered in a paradigm shift, allowing the harnessing of ever more abundant sources of data to automate complex tasks. The technical workhorse behind these important breakthroughs arguably lies in ...
Motivation is a multifaceted phenomenon that we explore within the framework of decision-making. Through this cognitive process, actions are directed towards specific goals by performing a trade-off between the cost and benefit of an action. The dorsomedia ...
Throughout history, the pace of knowledge and information sharing has evolved into an unthinkable speed and media. At the end of the XVII century, in Europe, the ideas that would shape the "Age of Enlightenment" were slowly being developed in coffeehouses, ...
Data-driven approaches have been applied to reduce the cost of accurate computational studies on materials, by using only a small number of expensive reference electronic structure calculations for a representative subset of the materials space, and using ...
Image information about the state of a building after an earthquake, which can be collected without endangering the post-earthquake reconnaissance activities, can be used to reduce uncertainties in response predictions for future seismic events. This paper ...
