Talk Series: Representations

I used to give talks at my workplace(s) semi regularly on a variety of technical topics. This is something I particularly enjoyed doing and so did the small but engaged attendees based on their feedback. Over the last several weeks, I’ve been thinking of resuming this. And that’s when another thought occurred to me. Nw that we’re all working remotely, this is going to be done online. Further, the topics I cover are generic enough. So why not make it more accessible — both in terms of content as well as reach?

I’ll be giving a public lecture of sorts roughly once a month probably the 3rd weekend, starting from Saturday, the 21st November. They are going to be longish, about 90 minutes each. Longer if more of you attend and/or ask too many questions. (I do love engaging conversations!) I promise to make it interesting and fun, and insightful even, hopefully!

You can also subscribe to this calendar.

If you so wish, you can get on to this Slack Workspace as well.

Theme and Topics

A couple of years ago at my current workplace, I started a talk series. I called it somewhat whimsically as just: “Representations”. I’ll explain this in some detail in the first session, but briefly: the way information is represented plays a crucial role in how we understand it, draw inferences, do computations on it, and organize it. A good representation makes all of these efficient.

A child can add 573 to 287 (chocolates) with minimal effort. Imagine you doing DLXXIII + CCLXXXVII (Hint: the answer is DCCCLX). If basic arithmetic doesn’t cut it for you, think about data structures. Data structures are ways of representing information such that search and retrieval are efficient. Indexes and other storage models are representations that help your database queries run fast. Good feature vectors help in classifying Cats vs Dogs, and detecting spam emails. (But then it’s the huge amount of legitimate email we get which is the bigger problem!)

In short, from Mathematics to Biology to Computer Science, representations are terribly important. I’ll cover certain topics from fields of my interest such as Graph Theory, Algorithms, Distributed Systems, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, possibly some Mathematics, and other stuff that catches my fancy. I do not consider myself an expert on any of these by the way. (You have been warned!) I hope to have some insightful and engaging conversations with all of you, and hopefully we’ll all learn something together!

(Originally posted on my website.)