SIAM Student Chapter Seminar: Difference between revisions

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__NOTOC__
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*'''When:''' Fridays at 1 PM unless noted otherwise
*'''When:''' Fridays at 1:30 PM unless noted otherwise
*'''Where:''' 9th floor lounge (we will also broadcast the virtual talks on the 9th floor lounge with refreshments)
*'''Where:''' 9th floor lounge (we will also broadcast the virtual talks on the 9th floor lounge with refreshments)
*'''Organizers:''' Yahui Qu, Peiyi Chen, Shi Chen and Zaidan Wu
*'''Organizers:''' Yahui Qu, Peiyi Chen and Zaidan Wu
*'''Faculty advisers:''' [http://www.math.wisc.edu/~jeanluc/ Jean-Luc Thiffeault], [http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~swright/ Steve Wright]  
*'''Faculty advisers:''' [http://www.math.wisc.edu/~jeanluc/ Jean-Luc Thiffeault], [http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~swright/ Steve Wright]  
*'''To join the SIAM Chapter mailing list:''' email [mailto:siam-chapter+join@g-groups.wisc.edu siam-chapter+join@g-groups.wisc.edu].
*'''To join the SIAM Chapter mailing list:''' email [mailto:siam-chapter+join@g-groups.wisc.edu siam-chapter+join@g-groups.wisc.edu].
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*'''Passcode:  281031'''
*'''Passcode:  281031'''


== Fall2023 ==
== Spring 2025 ==
 
{| class="wikitable"
{| class="wikitable"
|+
|+
!Date
|Date
!Location
|Location
!Speaker
|Speaker
!Title
|Title
|-
|-
|9/29
|03/07
|Zoom and VV911
|9th floor
|Solly Parenti (JPMorgan Chase & Co.)
|Ang Li
|What is ... a software engineering interview?
|Applying for postdocs and different industry jobs ... at the
same time
|-
|-
|10/13
|04/04
|Zoom and VV911
|9th floor
|Xiaopeng Li (Columbia University)
|Borong Zhang
|Convergence of the Momentum Method for Semi-Algebraic Functions with Locally Lipschitz Gradients
|Stochastic Multigrid Minimization for Ptychographic Phase Retrieval
|-
|-
|10/20
|04/11
|VV911
|903
|Yingxin Zhao (UBS Investment Bank)
|Ian McPherson
|Industry talk from UBS quant
|Convergence Rates for Riemannian Proximal Bundle Methods
|-
|-
|10/27
|04/25
|Zoom and VV911
|903
|Evan Sorensen (Columbia University)
|Weidong Ma
|Applying for postdocs: it’s not just about how many papers you have
|A topic in kernel based independence testing
|-
|11/10
|VV911
|Jiayin Lu (Harvard University)
|Computational geometry: Voronoi tessellation, Delaunay triangulation, and their fun applications
|-
|11/17
|VV911
|Thomas Chandler (UW-Madison)
|
|}
|}


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==Abstracts==
==Abstracts==


'''September 29, Solly Parenti (JPMorgan Chase & Co.):''' I'll share my experiences going through a bunch of software engineering interviews, as well as how I learned how to program and my thoughts on industry jobs.
'''March 7th, Ang Li (UW-Madison)''': I will share my experience with postdoc and industry job applications. This talk might be helpful for those who haven’t decided between academia and industry or are considering different paths within industry since I made my own decision quite late.
 
'''October 13, Xiaopeng Li (Columbia University):'''  We propose a new length formula that governs the iterates of the momentum method when minimizing differentiable semi-algebraic functions with locally Lipschitz gradients. It enables us to establish local convergence, global convergence, and convergence to local minimizers without assuming global Lipschitz continuity of the gradient, coercivity, and a global growth condition, as is done in the literature. As a result, we provide the first convergence guarantee of the momentum method starting from arbitrary initial points when applied to principal component analysis, matrix sensing, and linear neural networks.
 
'''October 20, Yingxin Zhao (UBS Investment Bank):'''In this talk, I will give an overview of the different job roles at Investment Banking, share my career path as an interest rate quant starting from graduate program to Executive Director over the past 12 years at UBS and give a few tips on quant job interviews. At the end of the seminar, I am happy to take printed copies of your CVs and email back my review feedback later.


'''October 27, Evan Sorensen (Columbia University):''' When applying for postdocs, I’ve often heard that nothing is more important than your research. While there is much truth to this, I have found that being a successful candidate takes so much more than just producing quality research. I will talk about lessons learned from applying to research-focused postdocs and give practical advice for how to increase your visibility and status in the community. This talk will address both people on the job market now as well as those planning to apply in future years.
'''April 4th, Borong Zhang (UW-Madison)''': In this talk, we introduce a novel stochastic multigrid minimization method designed for ptychographic phase retrieval. By reformulating the inverse problem as the iterative minimization of a quadratic surrogate that majorizes the original objective function, our approach unifies a range of iterative algorithms, including first-order methods and the well-known Ptychographic Iterative Engine (PIE). By efficiently solving the surrogate problem using a multigrid method, our method delivers significant improvements in both convergence speed and reconstruction quality compared to conventional PIE techniques.


'''November 10, Jiayin Lu (Harvard University):''' I will discuss some computational geometry work related to Voronoi tessellation and Delaunay triangulation. Voronoi tessellation is a beautiful and simple mathematical concept. Given a set of discrete points in space, locations in the space are associated with the closest point in the point set.  
'''April 11th, Ian McPherson (Johns-Hopkins):''' Nonsmooth convex optimization is a classically studied regime with a plethora of different optimization algorithms being developed in order to solve them. Of these methods, proximal bundle methods have been created and used within the Euclidean setting for decades - attempting to mimic the dynamics of the proximal point method. While practitioners have enjoyed very robust convergence results with respect to choice of parameters, it was not until the late 2020s that we have had theoretical results giving non-asymptotic guarantees - recovering optimal convergence rates. Within the past few years, the first Riemannian Proximal Bundle Methods have been proposed, again lacking non-asymptotic guarantees. Within this talk, we discuss how we are able to both generalize proposed methods and lift the non-asymptotic rates to the Riemannian setting. Moreover, we will do so without access to exponential maps or parallel transports. In addition, to our knowledge these are the first theoretical guarantees for non-smooth geodesically convex optimization in the Riemannian setting, without access to either exponential maps and parallel transports. The work presented is joint work with Mateo Diaz and Benjamin Grimmer.


It has important applications in science and engineering. Material scientists can generate Voronoi diagrams on atomistic systems, and analyze the Voronoi cell geometries to study material properties and predict material failure. However, as systems grow in size (e.g. millions of particles), the computational demands increase, necessitating efficient and scalable computational solutions. I will discuss our recent work on the multithreaded parallel computation of the Voronoi diagrams.  
'''April 25th, Weidong Ma (Univeristy of Pennsylvania)''': Testing the independence of random vectors is a fundamental problem across many scientific disciplines. In this talk, I will first introduce several widely used methods for independence testing, including distance covariance (DC), the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), and their applications. Most of these methods lack tractable asymptotic distributions under the null hypothesis (i.e., independence), making their use rely on computationally intensive procedures such as permutation tests or bootstrap methods.


A closely related geometry concept is the Delaunay triangulation, which is the duality graph of Voronoi tessellation. It can be constructed by connecting points sharing Voronoi cell walls. It can be used for geometry meshing, which has applications in computer graphics and numerical simulations using the finite element method. I will discuss our recent work on multithreaded geometry meshing in 2D.  
To address this, I will present our recent work aimed at reducing the computational cost of independence testing.  We propose a modified HSIC test, termed HSICskb, which incorporates a bandwidth adjustment where one kernel’s bandwidth shrinks to zero as the sample size grows. We establish a Gaussian approximation result for our test statistic, which allows us to compute the p-value efficiently.


Lastly, I will show some other fun applications of these geometry concepts: (1) The generation of insect wing patterns, and (2) Making colorful, mosaic style art.  
To assess statistical efficiency, we also conduct a local power analysis of the standard bootstrap-based HSIC test—an independently interesting contribution—and compare it with our HSICskb test. Finally, I will demonstrate the application of our method to real data, exploring the relationship between age and personal traits.


==Past Semesters==
==Past Semesters==
*[[SIAM Spring 2023]]
*[[SIAM Seminar Fall 2024|Fall 2024]]
*[https://wiki.math.wisc.edu/index.php/SIAM_Spring_2024 Spring 2024]
*[[SIAM Fall 2023|Fall 2023]]
*[[SIAM Spring 2023|Spring 2023]]
*[[SIAM Seminar Fall 2022|Fall 2022]]
*[[SIAM Seminar Fall 2022|Fall 2022]]
*[[Spring 2022 SIAM|Spring 2022]]
*[[Spring 2022 SIAM|Spring 2022]]

Latest revision as of 04:41, 21 April 2025


Spring 2025

Date Location Speaker Title
03/07 9th floor Ang Li Applying for postdocs and different industry jobs ... at the

same time

04/04 9th floor Borong Zhang Stochastic Multigrid Minimization for Ptychographic Phase Retrieval
04/11 903 Ian McPherson Convergence Rates for Riemannian Proximal Bundle Methods
04/25 903 Weidong Ma A topic in kernel based independence testing


Abstracts

March 7th, Ang Li (UW-Madison): I will share my experience with postdoc and industry job applications. This talk might be helpful for those who haven’t decided between academia and industry or are considering different paths within industry since I made my own decision quite late.

April 4th, Borong Zhang (UW-Madison): In this talk, we introduce a novel stochastic multigrid minimization method designed for ptychographic phase retrieval. By reformulating the inverse problem as the iterative minimization of a quadratic surrogate that majorizes the original objective function, our approach unifies a range of iterative algorithms, including first-order methods and the well-known Ptychographic Iterative Engine (PIE). By efficiently solving the surrogate problem using a multigrid method, our method delivers significant improvements in both convergence speed and reconstruction quality compared to conventional PIE techniques.

April 11th, Ian McPherson (Johns-Hopkins): Nonsmooth convex optimization is a classically studied regime with a plethora of different optimization algorithms being developed in order to solve them. Of these methods, proximal bundle methods have been created and used within the Euclidean setting for decades - attempting to mimic the dynamics of the proximal point method. While practitioners have enjoyed very robust convergence results with respect to choice of parameters, it was not until the late 2020s that we have had theoretical results giving non-asymptotic guarantees - recovering optimal convergence rates. Within the past few years, the first Riemannian Proximal Bundle Methods have been proposed, again lacking non-asymptotic guarantees. Within this talk, we discuss how we are able to both generalize proposed methods and lift the non-asymptotic rates to the Riemannian setting. Moreover, we will do so without access to exponential maps or parallel transports. In addition, to our knowledge these are the first theoretical guarantees for non-smooth geodesically convex optimization in the Riemannian setting, without access to either exponential maps and parallel transports. The work presented is joint work with Mateo Diaz and Benjamin Grimmer.

April 25th, Weidong Ma (Univeristy of Pennsylvania): Testing the independence of random vectors is a fundamental problem across many scientific disciplines. In this talk, I will first introduce several widely used methods for independence testing, including distance covariance (DC), the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), and their applications. Most of these methods lack tractable asymptotic distributions under the null hypothesis (i.e., independence), making their use rely on computationally intensive procedures such as permutation tests or bootstrap methods.

To address this, I will present our recent work aimed at reducing the computational cost of independence testing. We propose a modified HSIC test, termed HSICskb, which incorporates a bandwidth adjustment where one kernel’s bandwidth shrinks to zero as the sample size grows. We establish a Gaussian approximation result for our test statistic, which allows us to compute the p-value efficiently.

To assess statistical efficiency, we also conduct a local power analysis of the standard bootstrap-based HSIC test—an independently interesting contribution—and compare it with our HSICskb test. Finally, I will demonstrate the application of our method to real data, exploring the relationship between age and personal traits.

Past Semesters