The MIT Statistics and Data Science Center hosts guest lecturers from around the world in the weekly Statistics and Data Science seminar series (formerly the Stochastics and Statistics Seminars).
Fall 2025
Sep 5 – Robert Nowak (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Function Space Perspectives on Neural Networks
Sep 12 – Shay Moran (Technion)
Characterizations of Uniform Learnability: Vapnik-Chervonenkis, Natarajan, and Daniely-Shalev Shwartz Dimensions
Sep 19 – Benjamin Recht (University of California, Berkeley)
The Irrational Decision
Sep 26 – No Seminar
Oct 3 – Yuejie Chi (Yale University)
Transformers Learn Generalizable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Gradient Descent
Oct 10 – Weijie Su (University of Pennsylvania)
Do Large Language Models (Really) Need Statistical Foundations?
Oct 17– Navid Azizan (MIT)
Hard-Constrained Neural Networks
Oct 24 – Stefan Wager (Stanford University)
Learning to Price Electricity for Optimal Demand Response
Oct 31 – Vardan Papyan (University of Toronto)
Attention Sinks: A ‘Catch, Tag, Release’ Mechanism for Embeddings
Nov 7 – Tatsunori Hashimoto (Stanford University)
Back to the future – data efficient language modeling
Nov 14 – Sewoong Oh (University of Washington)
Nov 21 – Christos Thrampoulidis (University of British Columbia)
Dec 5 – Michael Albergo (Harvard University)