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Dimitris Papailiopoulos,  Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison (Electrical and Computer Engineering & Computer Sciences (by courtesy)), will deliver a talk entitled 'Overcoming the Challenges of Distributed Learning' at  the Technical University of Crete on July 31st, 2018.

Abstract:
In this talk, I will highlight a few key challenges that limit our capacity to effectively deploy machine learning solutions in real distributed systems. I will first focus on communication bottlenecks during model training, and discuss how they lead to poor speedup gains when scaling out to hundreds of compute nodes.  I will present theoretical insights which suggest that we can only overcome these challenges either by building new classes of neural networks, or by designing novel training algorithms that require far less communication. We will then focus on issues of robustness and discuss how model training is susceptible to hardware failures and adversarial attacks. I will explain how simple algebraic ideas, borrowed from coding theory, can be used to enable robust distributed training. I will conclude with several open problems that lie in the intersection of machine learning, optimization, and distributed
systems.

Short CV:
Dimitris Papailiopoulos is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Sciences (by courtesy) at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison, a faculty fellow of the Grainger Institute for Engineering, and a faculty affiliate at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. Between 2014 and 2016, Dimitris was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley and a member of the AMPLab. His research interests span machine learning, information theory, and distributed systems, with a current focus on communication-avoiding training algorithms and coding-theoretic techniques for robust large-scale machine learning. Dimitris earned his Ph.D. in ECE from UT Austin in 2014, under the supervision of Alex Dimakis. In 2007, he received his ECE Diploma and in 2009 his M.Sc. degree from the Technical University of Crete, in Greece. In 2015, Dimitris received the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Young Author Best Paper Award. In 2018, he co-founded and was Program co-Chair for SysML, a new conference that targets research at the intersection of machine learning and systems.