STOC 2014 Workshop on Efficient Distribution Estimation

   Saturday, May 31, 2014, Columbia University

   Organizers: Ilias Diakonikolas, Gregory Valiant

    Speakers: Costis Daskalakis, Ilias Diakonikolas, Ronitt Rubinfeld, Rocco Servedio, Gregory Valiant, Paul Valiant

The broad question of how to infer information or accurately estimate properties of a distribution based on random samples is of fundamental importance across the sciences. Additionally, questions in this vein have rich mathematical structure, requiring tools and intuitions from probability, combinatorics, analysis, and information theory. This question is also distinctly computational in nature; at the end of the day, the goal is to describe algorithms - efficient from both a computational and information theoretic standpoint - and understand the behavior of these algorithms. The recent flood of data, especially from the biological sciences, has provided fresh perspective on some of these problems, and offers the tantalizing possibility that new theoretical developments may very quickly find their way into meaningful practical applications.

The goal of this workshop is to introduce the broad CS theory community to central problems and techniques in this area of distributional property estimation, and discuss some new directions and opportunities for future work that lie between computation and statistics.

Workshop Schedule