Careers in science, engineering and medicine offer opportunities to advance knowledge, contribute to the well-being of communities, and support the security, prosperity and health of the United States. However, many women do not pursue or persist in these careers, or they don’t advance to leadership positions because they face barriers, including: implicit and explicit bias; sexual harassment; unequal access to funding and resources; and pay inequity, among others. 

Brown University alumna Ashley Bear, senior program officer at The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, will join the Carney Institute for Brain Science for a conversation focused on addressing the underrepresentation of women in STEM. 

Bear is the study director of the 2020 report “Promising Practices for Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine.” The report looks at the underrepresentation of women in STEM and offers practices for addressing this issue.

The event will be moderated by Diane Lipscombe, Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani Director of the Carney Institute.

Zoom Link - Available on 4/21 at 2:00 pm

PIETER KLEER

Assistant Professor, Tilburg University

SECRETARY AND ONLINE MATCHING PROBLEMS WITH MACHINE LEARNED ADVICE

We study online selection problems in which the goal is to select a set of elements arriving online that maximize a given objective function. In our setting, we are given some (machine-learned) information regarding the optimal (offline) solution to the problem. Following a recent line of work, the goal is to incorporate this information in existing (constant-factor) approximation algorithms such that:

1. One gets an improved approximation guarantee in case the machine-learned information is accurate; and
2. One does not lose too much in the approximation guarantee of the original algorithm in case the information is highly inaccurate.

In this talk, I will illustrate these concepts using the classical secretary problem, and discuss an extension to online bipartite matching.

Joint work with Antonios Antoniadis, Themis Gouleakis, and Pavel Kolev. Appeared in NeurIPS 2020.

BIOGRAPHY

Pieter Kleer is an Assistant Professor at Tilburg University (The Netherlands) since April 1, 2021. He completed his Ph.D. at CWI (The Netherlands) supervised by Guido Schäfer, and after that was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (Germany) hosted by Kurt Mehlhorn. His research interests include algorithmic game theory, online approximation algorithms and approximate uniform sampling of combinatorial objects. Earlier this year, he received de Gijs de Leve award for his PhD thesis, which is awarded once every three years by the Dutch OR society.

Please note that this virtual event, including attendees’ Zoom video, audio and screen name, and questions or chats, will be recorded. All or portions of the event recording may be shared through Brown University’s digital channels. Individuals who do not want their identities to be captured are solely responsible for turning off their camera, muting their microphone, and/or adjusting their screen name accordingly. By attending this event, you consent to your name, voice, and/or image being recorded and to Brown University reproducing, distributing, and otherwise displaying the recording, within its sole discretion.

Data Wednesdays

The Data Science Initiative joins the Center for Computational and Molecular Biology (CCMB) every Wednesday afternoon, 4 – 5 pm during the academic year to present lecturers in various mathematical and statistical fields worldwide, as well as local researchers on Brown’s campus. The aim is to provide students, staff, faculty, and visitors with an introduction to current research topics in the fields of data science, mathematics, statistics, and computer science.

Professor Stephen Blacklow from the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School will present “Molecular Mechanisms of Signal Transduction”.  This lecture is part of the 2021 Pathobiology Graduate Program Spring Seminar Series.

Drop in on the Zoom meeting to ask members of CCV’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) team your questions about using Oscar or any other research computing topics you are interested in.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series.

Speaker:  

Description: Taraz Lee (Assistant Professor, University of Michigan)

Title: TBD

Abstract:TBD

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series.

Speaker: Mark Sabbagh (Professor - Queens University Ontario)

Title: TBD

Join the Carney Institute for the Brain Science for its External Postdoc Seminar Series (BrainExPo), featuring Lisa Scheunemann, Ph.D., an independent research fellow at Freie Universität in Berlin.

Abstract

A key function of the brain is to decide which information is relevant enough to be stored as a stable memory. Pathological perturbation of this filtering process can have catastrophic consequences for later decision making. The molecular and circuit mechanisms that gate memory formation by inhibiting the storage of irrelevant information remain yet largely elusive. I have recently identified a memory suppressor mechanism in the Drosophila (fruit fly) brain within a serotonergic circuit (specifically the SPN “Serotonergic Projection Neurons”) upstream of the fly’s memory center. This “memory checkpoint” sustains a default inhibition of memory consolidation for aversive associations controlled by phosphodiesterase (PDE)-mediated suppression of neuronal activity in the SPN. Strikingly, my studies revealed that the dedicated memory checkpoint is modulated by the mating state of female flies: memory suppression by PDE is constantly inhibiting aversive memory consolidation in virgin females and is only released after mating. This mating-dependent switch is mediated by the sex peptide, a sperm-bound peptide transferred to females during copulation. Such a mechanism could promote foraging behavior in virgin females by suppression of risk-related behavior while promoting it after mating to protect the offspring. Thus, I propose that this type of memory suppression represents an important intersection between behavioral- and memory-dependent plasticity to guarantee consolidation of relevant information and context-appropriate decision making.

Speaker: Daniel Ullman , Brown University

Title: Developing a Multi-Dimensional Model and Measure of Human-Robot Trust

Advisor: Bertram F. Malle

~ link information to the meeting sent to clps all ~

If you are not a part of the CLPS Department and would like to attend, please contact the department’s graduate student coordinator.

What is CRISPR? How does gene editing work? 

Join the Carney Institute for Brain Science for a conversation about the future of gene editing in neuroscience with Kate O’Connor-Giles, Provost’s Associate Professor of Brain Science at Brown University. 

This conversation will be moderated by Diane Lipscombe, Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani Director of the Carney Institute, and Christopher Moore, associate director of the Carney Institute.

Watch previous conversations on the Carney Institute website.

Assistant Professor Dionna Williams from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine will present “But First You Must Cross the Blood Brain Barrier: Antiretroviral Therapy Access to the Brain”.  This lecture is part of the 2021 Pathobiology Graduate Program Spring Seminar Series.

Drop in on the Zoom meeting to ask members of CCV’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) team your questions about using Oscar or any other research computing topics you are interested in.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series.

Speaker: Cydney Dupree (Assistant Professor, Yale)

Title:

Abstract:

Drop in on the Zoom meeting to ask members of CCV’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) team your questions about using Oscar or any other research computing topics you are interested in.

Drop in on the Zoom meeting to ask members of CCV’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) team your questions about using Oscar or any other research computing topics you are interested in.

Drop in on the Zoom meeting to ask members of CCV’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) team your questions about using Oscar or any other research computing topics you are interested in.

Drop in on the Zoom meeting to ask members of CCV’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) team your questions about using Oscar or any other research computing topics you are interested in.

Please join us for a half-day mini-symposium focused on chromatin and transcriptional mechanisms in human stem cell models of neurodevelopmental disease. 

This symposium will feature the following speakers: 

• Luis De la Torre-Ubieta, Ph.D., UCLA; Gene regulation in cortical development and neuropsychiatric disease
• Stormy Chamberlain, Ph.D., UConn Health; Mechanisms of repression and therapeutic approaches for Angelman syndrome
• Sofia Lizarraga, Ph.D., University of South Carolina; Counteracting epigenetic mechanisms in autism spectrum disorders
• Genevieve Konopka, Ph.D., University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center; Cell-type specific transcriptional networks related to autism

Moderated by Eric Morrow, M.D., Ph.D., Mencoff Family Associate Professor of Biology, Associate Professor of Neuroscience, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University. 

Free and open to the Brown and Lifespan communities. Please register below to attend.