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Computer Science

Seminar

Big Boxes, Not Black Boxes: What we can compute about LLMs, and what it may say about AGI

Zohar Ringel · Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Wed, Oct 7 · 18:00 UTC

Deep networks are often thought of as black boxes. Their ability to encompass vast swathes of knowledge indeed makes them hard to explain. Yet many of their behaviours — generalization under overparametrization, grokking, OOD failures, neural scaling laws — recur across architectures and scales, and each, however surprising, can be reproduced and explained in controlled settings. I will review these efforts to identify and explain the universal phenomena of deep learning, and suggest that an LLM may amount to a sum of such tractable sub-phenomena, interpolative in nature. Finally, leaving scientific rigor aside, I'll argue that what separates this prosaic picture from the apparent magic of LLMs may well be the industrial scale of compute and human labour behind it, and that AGI in its deeper extrapolative sense may be much further away than claimed.

Deep Learning+2
Grant

Engineering Research Initiation (ERI)

U.S. National Science Foundation

Closes in 2 days

NSF support for new engineering investigators at eligible non-R1 institutions to initiate research programs, build capacity and advance their careers.

Grant

Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (MFAI)

U.S. National Science Foundation

Closes in 2 days

· Eligibility not stated

NSF support for interdisciplinary collaborations developing mathematical and theoretical foundations for explainable, reliable, sustainable and trustworthy artificial intelligence.

Seminar

The environmental impacts of scientific computing

Loïc Lannelongue, Anica Araneta · University of Cambridge

Mon, Oct 12 · 11:00 UTC · Online

Scientific computing has environmental impacts that extend beyond the growing use of artificial intelligence. This seminar examines how research computing affects the environment, how researchers can measure and reduce those effects, and how funders are responding. It also asks whether efficiency alone provides an adequate strategy. The speakers introduce Green DiSC, a certification scheme for sustainable computing, and the Environmentally Sustainable Computational Science community forum. The discussion connects practical choices in computational research with community approaches to sustainability and concludes with questions. It is suitable for researchers and software developers without prior knowledge of sustainable computing.

sustainable computing+2

Opportunities

Job

NLP & Behavioral Evaluation / Long-Range Language Understanding

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems · Saarbrücken, Germany

Closes in 6 days

Lead the behavioural-evaluation component of Mariya Toneva’s ERC BrainAlign project. The postdoc will develop tasks and a gamified platform to collect human understanding of full narratives and books, then evaluate brain-aligned language models against those data. The role combines NLP, machine learning and cognitive science, with collaboration across computational and neuroimaging teams. This vacancy belongs to the September 2026 Max Planck Postdoc Program call, which accepts applications until 13 October 2026 at 12:00 CEST through the official application platform.

Grant

ERC Starting Grant

European Research Council

Closes in 7 days

ERC-2027-STG call, opened 22 July 2026. Supports early-career researchers of any nationality to build their own teams and pursue frontier research in any field, with grants of up to EUR 1.5 million for 5 years (additional funding possible for relocation or major costs).

Job

Junior Research Associate (JRA) for FY2027

RIKEN · Japan

Closes

RIKEN offers approximately 60 part-time research appointments for doctoral students enrolled at Japanese graduate schools. Students conduct research with a RIKEN host through an eligible graduate-school, joint-research or research-collaboration agreement. Fields span mathematics, computing, physics, chemistry, life science, medical science and engineering. Appointments begin in April or October 2027. The stated monthly salary is JPY 250,000 before tax, with adjustments possible for reduced working days. Candidate materials are due at 13:00 Japan time on 16 October 2026; recommendations follow on 23 October and the RIKEN supervisor’s plan on 6 November.

Job

Doctoral Student Programme 2027-1

CERN · Geneva, Switzerland

Closes

CERN offers doctoral research placements in applied physics, engineering and computing, undertaken in collaboration with the student’s university. Contracts last 12–36 months and carry a net monthly allowance of CHF 3,907. The ideal start date is 1 April 2027. Applicants must have started or be about to start doctoral study, with their university supporting research that contributes to their thesis. English or French proficiency and nationality of an eligible CERN Member or Associate Member State are required. The current call excludes Pakistani, Lithuanian, Latvian, Cypriot and Croatian nationals because the applicable national ceilings have been reached. Applications close on 16 October 2026 at 23:59 Geneva time.

SC26 connects researchers and practitioners developing high-performance computing, networking, storage and scientific data analysis. The programme includes research presentations, tutorials and workshops at McCormick Place in Chicago, 15–20 November 2026. Registration is open, with early rates through 14 October. A digital participation option is available through the official registration page.

Early bird ends Oct 14
Conference

SIAM Conference on Mathematics of Data Science (MDS26)

Salt Lake City, United States

Nov 16–20, 2026

Researchers and practitioners will discuss mathematical foundations of data science, including high-dimensional geometry, dimensionality reduction, scalable algorithms, uncertainty and machine learning. The conference takes place in person at the Salt Palace Convention Center on 16–20 November 2026. Registration is open, with early rates through 19 October; abstract and travel-support deadlines have passed. Registration also covers the co-located SIAM Imaging Science and Data Mining conferences.

Early bird ends Oct 19
Conference

NeurIPS 2026

France, and virtual

Dec 6–13, 2026

The Fortieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems brings together interdisciplinary machine-learning research through peer-reviewed sessions, invited talks, demonstrations, tutorials, workshops, and an exposition.

Early bird ends Oct 30
Conference

AAAI-27

Montreal, Canada

Feb 16–23, 2027

The 41st Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence at the Palais des Congres de Montreal, featuring technical papers, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, and competitions to promote AI research and scientific exchange.

Early bird ends Dec 15
Seminar

Asynchronous Methods on AMD GPU-Based Systems

Katarzyna Swirydowicz · Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)

Fri, May 8 · 13:00 UTC · In person

Katarzyna Swirydowicz uses an asynchronous solver on an AMD system to examine the practical implementation of computational linear algebra across CPUs and GPUs. The talk introduces the relevant computational ideas, programming models, and software tools, then considers how algorithmic structure interacts with hardware capabilities. This case study illustrates both the opportunities and implementation challenges of asynchronous methods for large-scale scientific computing on GPU-accelerated systems.

Video

Graph matching algorithms attempt to find the best correspondence between the nodes of two networks. These techniques have been used to match individual neurons in nanoscale connectomes -- in particular, to find pairings of neurons across hemispheres. However, since graph matching techniques deal with two isolated networks, they have only utilized the ipsilateral (same hemisphere) subgraphs when performing the matching. Here, we present a modification to a state-of-the-art graph matching algorithm which allows it to solve what we call the bisected graph matching problem. This modification allows us to leverage the connections between the brain hemispheres when predicting neuron pairs. Via simulations and experiments on real connectome datasets, we show that this approach improves matching accuracy when sufficient edge correlation is present between the contralateral (between hemisphere) subgraphs. We also show how matching accuracy can be further improved by combining our approach with previously proposed extensions to graph matching, which utilize edge types and previously known neuron pairings. We expect that our proposed method will improve future endeavors to accurately match neurons across hemispheres in connectomes, and be useful in other applications where the bisected graph matching problem arises.

Podcast episode

Live from ICM 2026: What Is Math For in the Age of AI?

The Joy of Why

Published Thu, Sep 3

Recorded live at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, this episode brings hosts Janna Levin and Steven Strogatz together with Akshay Venkatesh, Ravi Vakil and Alex Kontorovich. They examine what recent AI-generated proofs demonstrate, how machine assistance may change mathematical research, and what proof, creativity, understanding and storytelling contribute to the discipline. The recording took place on 26 July 2026; Quanta published the episode on 3 September 2026.

Seminar

Practical Matrix Multiplication

Oded Schwartz · Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Thu, Sep 18, 2025 · 16:15 UTC

Matrix multiplication underpins scientific computing and artificial intelligence, yet practical numerical libraries and hardware accelerators commonly retain the classical cubic-time algorithm despite decades of subcubic theoretical advances. This talk reviews the effort to make faster multiplication algorithms useful in practice. It examines why arithmetic complexity alone does not determine performance: some algorithms require enormous matrices or incur large hidden constants, while communication costs, numerical stability and the match between software and hardware create additional obstacles. The historical perspective connects asymptotic algorithm design to actual performance and power consumption.

Video

New and updated

Grant

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) — FY 2027 competition

U.S. National Science Foundation

Closes

Supports research-based graduate degrees with three funded years over a five-year fellowship: an annual $37,000 stipend plus a $16,000 institutional education allowance, subject to funding. The displayed deadline is the first subject deadline: Life Sciences on 19 October 2026. Computing, materials, psychology and social sciences are due 20 October; engineering 22 October; chemistry, geosciences, mathematics, physics and astronomy 23 October. All applications are due at 8 pm Eastern Time. Reference letters are due 16 October at 8 pm Eastern Time.

Supports research on agentic, self-improving systems that generate and optimize kernels and end-to-end workloads on AWS Trainium. Topics include generative AI for kernel optimization, performance debugging and profiling, correctness and integrity evaluation, and supervised or reinforcement learning of open-source models for kernel and system optimization. Proposed research should connect generation, evaluation and learning loops and explain plans for open-source contributions. Use the ARA proposal template; four pages excluding appendices are encouraged. Decisions are expected in February 2027. Applications close on 4 November 2026 at 11:59pm Pacific Time.

Seminar

Fast NN Prediction with No Statistical Tradeoff

Samory Kpotufe · Princeton University

Thu, Nov 29, 2018 · 19:30 UTC

Fast computation often trades statistical accuracy for speed. In nearest-neighbor prediction, achieving optimal accuracy generally requires the number of neighbors to grow as a root of the sample size, creating a corresponding computational burden even with fast search. This talk shows how bias or variance corrections after data quantization or subsampling, together with black-box fast-search techniques, can retain accuracy while reducing prediction-time computation to O(log n). The analysis explains how much quantization or subsampling is compatible with optimal accuracy. Extensive experiments on large datasets from several domains test these theoretical insights. The talk draws on work with N. Verma and L. Xue.

Video
Seminar

Spectral Partitioning for Metrics (And NNs Too)

Alex Andoni · Columbia University

Thu, Nov 29, 2018 · 22:00 UTC

This talk establishes a general reduction from nonlinear spectral gaps of metric spaces to data-dependent space partitions in the form of locality-sensitive hashing. The reduction yields an approach to high-dimensional approximate near-neighbor search and a data structure for any d-dimensional norm whose query algorithm makes a sublinear number of probes. Its approximation factor is O(log d), improving on the square-root-of-d factor available from the generic approach based on John’s ellipsoid. The presentation connects spectral properties, geometric partitions, and efficient approximate search. Joint work with Assaf Naor, Aleksandar Nikolov, Ilya Razenshteyn, and Erik Waingarten.

Video

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