Organizers
Organizers: Samuel Kaski and Jaakko Lehtinen
Talks
Inferring Cognitive Simulators From Data
Abstract: I will discuss the intriguing problem of inferring parameters of cognitive simulator models from user interaction data. The parameters can include the goals, interests and capabilities of the user, which become disentangled in the inference.
Speaker: Samuel Kaski
Negative Frequency-Dependent Selection Dictates the Fate of Bacteria
Abstract: In recent work we discovered that negative frequency-dependent selection (NFDS) acting on accessory genes appears as the dominating evolutionary force of populations of Streptococcus pneumoniae, which is a major human pathogen. This discovery was greatly facilitated by the recent advances in ABC inference brought by Bayesian optimization which has accelerated model fitting by several orders of magnitude. I will discuss the biological basis of the NFDS principle and show emerging evidence that it is commonly dictating the fate of bacteria also in ubiquitous organisms such as Escherichia coli.
Speaker: Jukka Corander
Why Learn Something You Know?
Abstract: Much of science can be seen as a search of mathematical models that predict observable quantities based on other observable quantities: future positions of stars based on their past positions, incidence of cancer based on biological health measurements, etc. Unlike handcrafted models derived from first principles employed in e.g. physics, many modern machine learning and AI techniques approach the same issue from a different perspective: fixing a highly powerful but general (not problem-specific) model, and setting its parameters based on data. Results are dramatic but often uninterpretable – we do not know precisely how the model comes to its conclusions. In this overview talk, I’ll present thoughts on combining the two approaches, along with recent exciting examples.
Speaker: Jaakko Lehtinen
Flash Talks
Simulator-Based Inference in Robotics
Speaker: Ville Kyrki
Optimizing Technologies with Bayesian Inference
Speaker: Milica Todorovic
ABC and Model Selection
Speaker: Henri Pesonen