Plenary Speakers

NameDateTalkAbstract
Gil ZussmanWednesday March 19th 2025TBD
Jessika TrancikThursday March 20th 2025TBD
Elad HazanThursday March 20thThursday Beyond Transformers: Neural Architectures Inspired by Dynamical SystemsCan we build neural architectures that go beyond Transformers by leveraging principles from dynamical systems? In this talk, I will introduce a novel approach to sequence modeling that draws inspiration from the emerging paradigm of online control to achieve efficient long-range memory, fast inference, and provable robustness.
At the core of this approach is a new method for learning linear dynamical systems through spectral filtering. This method eliminates the need for learned convolutional filters, remains invariant to system dimensionality, and offers strong theoretical guarantees—all while achieving state-of-the-art performance on long-range sequence tasks.
I will present theoretical insights, empirical results on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks, and recent advancements in fast sequence generation and provable length generalization. The talk will be self-contained and accessible to researchers across STEM disciplines—no prior background in control theory or sequence prediction is required.
Daniel KammenFriday March 21st 2025Power Systems Research and Deployment for the Just Energy TransitionThe UN Agenda 2030 was approved unanimously by UN member states in 2015 to guide humanity towards sustainable development. It contains 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), encompassing areas from hunger and poverty to sustainable consumption and energy production and expounds a more universal character relative to the predecessor Millenium Development Goals (MDGs). The operationalization of the SDGs has been the focus of increasing research interest, ranging from monitoring and data collection for SDG indicator measurement to the quantitative study of SDG interlinkages. In this talk I will focus on the central role of on-grid (utility-scale) and off-grid energy in enabling and meeting a wide range of the SDG targets from the perspective of energy access, productive uses of energy, and both human and ecological health and justice.