Festival of Doubt
The AI group at Victoria University runs an informal discussion series called the Festival of Doubt, for staff, students and the curious. We use AI at VUW, #fod-talks to communicate (on Slack). We also have a low volume mailing list. Currently we meet at 1pm most Thursdays in CO431 Nb: Anyone who is in the "AI group" can edit these wiki pages, as can any VUW academic staff. If you'd like to change anything here but find you can't, email "jobs@ecs..." and ask to be put in that group's list.2019
| Date | Person | Topic |
| 22/1 | Alex Telfar | Differentiable games |
| 29/1 | Will Browne | Learning to navigate |
| 5/2 | Marcus Frean | evolving swapping 'dances' |
| 12/2 | Kurt Wan-Duo Ma | Neural ODEs |
| 19/2 | Matt O'Connor | graph signal processing |
| 21/3 | Davis Cooper | optimal transport for generative models |
| 25/4 | Holiday | |
| 2/5 | Bastiaan Kleijn | Disentanglement with VAEs |
| 9/5 | Alex Telfar | A definition of disentanglement |
| 16/5 | Peter Alexander | Risk and safety in AI research |
| 23/5 | Murugaraj Odiathevar | One class classification |
| 30/5 | Andrew Chen | Towards Practical and Ethical Video Analytics Systems |
| 6/6 | Radek Hes | Linear style transfer |
| 13/6 | Valerie, Kerian, Brandon | ICML2019 |
| 20/6 | Matt O'Connor | |
| 27/6 | Will Browne | Relational NNs |
| 4/7 | Marcus Frean | More swapping tech |
| 11/7 | Alex Telfar | Exploration Strategies for Reinforcement Learning |
| 18/7 | Paul Teal | Normalising flows, worked example |
| 25/7 | Bastiaan Kleijn | ? |
| 1/8 | Davis Cooper | "Differentiable Sorting using Optimal Transport: The Sinkhorn CDF and Quantile Operator" |
| 8/8 | Felix Yan | Variational Autoencoders and Nonlinear ICA |
| 15/8 | Daniel Braithwaite | representation learning with GANs |
| 22/8 | Stephen Marsland | "something interesting" |
| 29/8 | discuss | https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.10652 ? |
| 05/9 | Peter Alexander | An overview of normalising flows |
| 12/9 | all (lead by Alex) | continued discussion of normalising flows |
| 19/9 | all | Watched the vid: "Learning Representations Using Causal Invariance" by Leon Bottou. |
| 26/9 | all | continued with the video / paper we started last time: Invariant risk minimization. |
| 3/10 | Alexander Telfar | The value function polytope |
| 10/10 | Stephen Marsland | MothNet |
| 17/10 | Marcus Frean (and Alex) | A discussion of energy based models |
Previous years - all the talks since we started talking, in 2002.