Uploaded November 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Jamie Kass is visiting OIST from 2024-10-13 until 2024-10-20 through the "Theoretical Sciences Visiting Program" (TSVP). Find out more about the TSVP on the program website:
oist.jp/visiting-program.
Title: Running a University Lab in Japan as a Foreigner, and Other Things I’m Still Learning How To Do
Abstract: I am a biologist who took a meandering path to my academic career, starting in New York City, and with pitfalls along the way, but with some hard work managed to make it to Japan, land a postdoc at OIST (4 years with the Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit), and then get a faculty position at Tohoku University. Hired as the first tenure-track Associate Professor in my department in 2023, I now run an international lab with undergrads, master's students, and doctoral students. Making everything work smoothly is a learning process, especially while I'm still adjusting to work life as a professor in a traditional public university in Japan. I'd like to talk a bit about how I got here (and how you can too!), what I learned along the way, and what I am still trying to get right. I'd also like to briefly discuss my research on biodiversity modeling.
Profile: Jamie M. Kass is tenure-track Associate Professor and PI of the Macroecology Lab at the Graduate School of Life Sciences at Tohoku University. He is an ecologist who researches large-scale patterns and processes in biodiversity, focusing on the development and application of models that make predictions of species' ranges and biodiversity indices over space and time. The Macroecology Lab is a fully bilingual environment (Japanese and English) and currently has 16 members, including undergraduates, graduate students, and professors that together represent 7 countries. Dr. Kass spent 4 years at OIST as a postdoctoral researcher (2019-2023) working with Prof. Evan Economo in the Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit. He is originally from New York City, USA and has lived in Japan for ~6 years.
#OIST #OIST_TSVP #ecology #biodiversity #modeling #Theoretical #Science #VisitingProgram #Okinawa #TSVP
Jamie Kass is visiting OIST from 2024-10-13 until 2024-10-20 through the "Theoretical Sciences Visiting Program" (TSVP). Find out more about the TSVP on the program website:
oist.jp/visiting-program.
Title: Running a University Lab in Japan as a Foreigner, and Other Things I’m Still Learning How To Do
Abstract: I am a biologist who took a meandering path to my academic career, starting in New York City, and with pitfalls along the way, but with some hard work managed to make it to Japan, land a postdoc at OIST (4 years with the Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit), and then get a faculty position at Tohoku University. Hired as the first tenure-track Associate Professor in my department in 2023, I now run an international lab with undergrads, master's students, and doctoral students. Making everything work smoothly is a learning process, especially while I'm still adjusting to work life as a professor in a traditional public university in Japan. I'd like to talk a bit about how I got here (and how you can too!), what I learned along the way, and what I am still trying to get right. I'd also like to briefly discuss my research on biodiversity modeling.
Profile: Jamie M. Kass is tenure-track Associate Professor and PI of the Macroecology Lab at the Graduate School of Life Sciences at Tohoku University. He is an ecologist who researches large-scale patterns and processes in biodiversity, focusing on the development and application of models that make predictions of species' ranges and biodiversity indices over space and time. The Macroecology Lab is a fully bilingual environment (Japanese and English) and currently has 16 members, including undergraduates, graduate students, and professors that together represent 7 countries. Dr. Kass spent 4 years at OIST as a postdoctoral researcher (2019-2023) working with Prof. Evan Economo in the Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit. He is originally from New York City, USA and has lived in Japan for ~6 years.
#OIST #OIST_TSVP #ecology #biodiversity #modeling #Theoretical #Science #VisitingProgram #Okinawa #TSVP





![Florian Yger: A Geometric Adventure in Machine Learning (TSVP Talk at OIST)
[Title]
Florian Yger - A Geometric Adventure in Machine Learning: Learning with Invariances, Structures, and Prior Knowledge (TSVP Talk at OIST)
[Description]
Florian Yger is visiting OIST from 2024-05-20 until 2024-08-15 through the Theoretical Sciences Visiting Program (TSVP). Find out more about the TSVP on the program website:
https://www.oist.jp/visiting-program.
Abstract: In this presentation, we embark on a journey through the landscapes of machine learning, focusing on the role of representation learning. Traditional approaches often restrict themselves to Euclidean spaces, yet many real-world data, such as graphs and covariances, defy this simplistic framework. We explore how embracing non-Euclidean geometries—specifically curved spaces like Riemannian manifolds—unlocks new possibilities in understanding and predicting structured data. This framework allows for the incorporation of prior knowledge such as constraints and invariances into machine learning algorithms.
Central to our exploration is the Fréchet averaging problem, a fundamental tool that generalizes the well-know average to metric spaces. From this cornerstone, we derive many extensions ranging from graph averaging to dimensionality reduction on Riemannian manifolds. We illustrate their practical implications through numerical experiments on biomedical data.
Motivated by challenging applications, this presentation not only highlights the limitations of Euclidean-centric approaches but also underscores the potential of geometry-aware representation learning. Join us as we navigate this geometric adventure into the curved realm of geometry-aware representation learning.
Profile: Florian Yger is an associate professor at Université Paris-Dauphine since 2015, teaching Data Analysis and Machine Learning in the department MIDO. Within the LAMSADE, he is part of the team MILES which focuses on trustworthy Machine Learning and Explainable AI. From 2014 to 2015, he was a JSPS postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Sugiyama at Tokyo University. He received his PhD in Computer science from LITIS, Université de Rouen under the supervision of Alain Rakotomamonjy in 2013. He contributes to the problem of representation learning with a particular interest in the representation of structured data (graphs, covariance matrices,…) and the development of learning algorithm for non-Euclidean spaces. This work has many applications ranging from signal processing (EEG signals and Brain Computer Interface) and to image processing (Paintings for art style recognition). More recently, within MILES teams, he addresses the questions of trust, explainability and interpretability in machine learning models with a focus counterfactual reasoning on data. He recently started studying the interplay between computational social choice and machine learning in the context of voter’s opinion aggregation. He is a visiting researcher at RIKEN AIP, Japan since 2017, is a member of the Prairie (PaRis Artificial Intelligence Research InstitutE) where he holds a junior chair, and an Affiliate of the Theoretical Sciences Visiting Program (TSVP) at OIST.
#OIST #OIST_TSVP #MachineLearning #Geometry #Manifolds #Theoretical #Science #VisitingProgram #Okinawa #TSVP Florian Yger: A Geometric Adventure in Machine Learning (TSVP Talk at OIST)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KlU1mS1xr3I/mqdefault.jpg)




