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

montage2013.jpg FoD 2017.jpg

Previous years - all the talks since we started talking, in 2002.