Uploaded October 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Uri Shalit
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Title:
Causality-inspired machine learning
Abstract:
We will discuss two recent projects where ideas from causal inference have inspired us to find new approaches to problems in machine learning. First, we show how using the idea of independence of cause and mechanism (ICM) can be used to help learn predictive models that are stable against a-priori unknown distributional shifts. Then we will present recent work where we show how a robust notion of model calibration ties into learning models that generalize well out-of-domain in both theory and practice.
Speaker Bio:
Uri Shalit is a senior lecturer (assistant professor) at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, in the areas of statistics and information systems. Uri's research is currently focused on three subjects: The first is applying machine learning to the field of healthcare, especially in terms of providing physicians with decision support tools based on big health data. The second subject Uri is interested in is the intersection of machine learning and causal inference, especially the problem of learning individual-level effects. Finally, Uri is working on bringing ideas from causal inference into the field of machine learning, focusing on problems in robust learning, transfer learning and interpretability.
Previously, Uri was a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. David Sontag’s Clinical Machine Learning Lab in NYU and then MIT. He completed his PhD studies at the Center for Neural Computation at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the guidance of Prof. Gal Chechik and Prof. Daphna Weinshall.
Uri Shalit
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Title:
Causality-inspired machine learning
Abstract:
We will discuss two recent projects where ideas from causal inference have inspired us to find new approaches to problems in machine learning. First, we show how using the idea of independence of cause and mechanism (ICM) can be used to help learn predictive models that are stable against a-priori unknown distributional shifts. Then we will present recent work where we show how a robust notion of model calibration ties into learning models that generalize well out-of-domain in both theory and practice.
Speaker Bio:
Uri Shalit is a senior lecturer (assistant professor) at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, in the areas of statistics and information systems. Uri's research is currently focused on three subjects: The first is applying machine learning to the field of healthcare, especially in terms of providing physicians with decision support tools based on big health data. The second subject Uri is interested in is the intersection of machine learning and causal inference, especially the problem of learning individual-level effects. Finally, Uri is working on bringing ideas from causal inference into the field of machine learning, focusing on problems in robust learning, transfer learning and interpretability.
Previously, Uri was a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. David Sontag’s Clinical Machine Learning Lab in NYU and then MIT. He completed his PhD studies at the Center for Neural Computation at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the guidance of Prof. Gal Chechik and Prof. Daphna Weinshall.








![AI/ML Seminar Series: Joe Marino (2/1/2021)
UCI AI/ML Seminar Series
https://cml.ics.uci.edu/aiml/
Joe Marino
PhD Student
Computation and Neural Systems
California Institute of Technology
Connecting Variational Autoencoders Back to the Brain
Unsupervised machine learning has recently dramatically improved our ability to model and extract structure from data. One such approach is deep latent variable models, which includes variational autoencoders (VAEs) [Kingma & Welling, 2014; Rezende et al., 2014]. These models can be traced back to the Helmholtz machine [Dayan et al., 1995], which, in turn, was inspired by ideas from theoretical neuroscience [Mumford, 1992]. In the intervening years, neuroscientists have further developed these ideas into a popular theory: predictive coding [Rao & Ballard, 1999; Friston, 2005]. Yet, the machine learning community remains largely unaware of these connections. In this talk, I discuss the links between modern deep latent variable models and predictive coding, yielding several striking implications for the correspondences between machine learning and neuroscience. This motivates a more nuanced view in connecting these fields, including the search for backpropagation in the brain.
Bio:
Joe Marino is a PhD candidate in the Computation & Neural Systems program at Caltech, advised by Yisong Yue. His work focuses on improving probabilistic models and inference techniques, using neuroscience-inspired ideas, within the areas of generative modeling and reinforcement learning. AI/ML Seminar Series: Joe Marino (2/1/2021)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/iVz6uwD7i6A/mqdefault.jpg)

![Interaction-Centric AI: Designing Useful and Usable AI Applications
Juho Kim
Associate Professor, KAIST; Chief Scientist, Ringle
Abstract:
AI-powered services and applications are introduced at a rapid pace and massive scale across various domains. Remarkable model performance, however, does not necessarily translate to an improved user experience. I argue that human-AI interaction should be considered a first-class object in designing AI-powered systems. In this talk, I will present a few novel interactive systems that use AI to support complex real-life tasks. I will discuss how we considered human-AI interaction in designing these systems, what tensions we encountered and how we addressed them, and how to design better AI-powered systems for real-world users. My ultimate proposal is that we need a fundamental shift to “interaction-centric AI”—an approach to systematically designing and engineering human-AI interaction that overcomes the limitations of the model- and data-centric views.
Bio:
Juho Kim [juhokim.com] is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at KAIST, affiliate faculty in the Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI at KAIST, and a director of KIXLAB (the KAIST Interaction Lab) [kixlab.org]. His research in human-computer interaction and human-AI interaction focuses on building interactive and intelligent systems that support interaction at scale, with the goal of improving the ways people learn, collaborate, discuss, make decisions, and take action online. He earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2015, M.S. from Stanford University in 2010, and B.S. from Seoul National University in 2008. In 2015-2016, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor and a Brown Fellow at Stanford University. He is a recipient of KAIST’s Songam Distinguished Research Award, Grand Prize in Creative Teaching, and Excellence in Teaching Award, as well as 14 paper awards from ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, ACM Learning at Scale, ACM IUI, ACM DIS, and AAAI HCOMP. He is currently spending his sabbatical year at Ringle Inc., a startup building an online language tutoring platform, to transfer his research on automatically analyzing and diagnosing learners’ English proficiency into a real product. Interaction-Centric AI: Designing Useful and Usable AI Applications](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/j0v1Cr74kN8/mqdefault.jpg)