LANS Seminar

Seminar Title: Adaptive algorithms for data summarization

Speaker:Robert Webber, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of California San Diego

Date: Thursday, October 2, 2025

Time: 2:30 PM-3:30 PM (Virtual)

Location: Hybrid, Bldg. 240, Conference Room 4301

Host: Srini Eswar

Description: Clustering, low-rank approximation, and nonnegative matrix factorization are all
summarization problems based on selecting a small number of prototypes from a large data set. We
provide a unified formulation of these problems and many others. Natural algorithms for solving these problems include adaptive search, which is a greedy deterministic selection rule, and adaptive
sampling, which is a randomized selection rule based on distances to existing prototypes. We evaluate the utility of the two approaches theoretically and empirically, pointing out when each approach is preferable.

Bio: Robert J. Webber is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California San Diego. He is interested in randomized numerical methods and their applications to data science and scientific computing.

Please note that the meeting URL for this event can be seen on the cels-seminars website which requires an Argonne login.