[Statlist] ETH-FDS with ETH AI Center Seminar talk with Stefan Steinerberger, UW Seattle -- 11 May 2026, ETH Zurich, HG F 3 at 17:15

[Maurer Letizia]

ETH Foundations of Data Science (ETH-FDS), in association with ETH AI Center, announces and invites you to the following talk in our seminar series:

„Particle Dynamics and Dimensionality Reduction“

by Stefan Steinerberger, UW Seattle

Date and Time (Zurich):  Monday, 11 May 2026, 17:15 - 18.15
Place:               HG F 3

Abstract: Dimensionality reduction, moving data from very high dimensions to intermediate dimensions, is well-established. It is not too difficult to accurately map n points into ~log(n) dimensions. The problem becomes a lot more difficult if one insists that the high-dimensional data be embedded into 2 dimensions which is what researchers in the biomedical fields need. Moreover, there are algorithms (most prominently tSNE and UMAP) that "semi-successfully" do this: they tend to work (though they also tend to fail on very simple examples). An added difficulty is that it is difficult to assess from the output when they work. I will argue that these algorithms reduce to understanding an attraction-repulsion functional acting on a large number of particles; this viewpoint immediately suggests new ideas and algorithms as well as a few benchmark problems.

Seminar websites: https://math.ethz.ch/sfs/news-and-events/data-science-seminar.html, https://math.ethz.ch/sfs/eth-foundations-of-data-science.html

Organisers: A. Bandeira, H. Bölcskei, P. Bühlmann, J. Peters, F. Yang

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