TTIC

Wednesday, March 11th at 12:00 pm: Talks at TTIC presents Andy Yang of Notre Dame with a talk titled "Understanding Transformers Using Formal Language Theory." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

Happy #InternationalWomensDay to the faculty, students, postdocs, and staff who make TTIC such a welcoming community and drive progress in #computerscience!

A new graduate-level course at TTIC on #MachineLearning for #AlgorithmDesign, taught by Avrim Blum and Dravyansh Sharma, examines the theoretical foundations of data-driven algorithm design. Lecture notes and course materials are available here: buff.ly/FD4fesj

This week marks the conclusion of the TTIC-sponsored 4th-grade coding class at Emmett Louis Till Math & Science Academy, a 20-week program exploring Scratch, ML/AI concepts, #robotics, and #Python with Imagicharms, in partnership with Code Your Dreams!

Friday, March 6th at 11am: Research at TTIC presents Greg Shakhnarovich with a talk titled "Efficient extraction of visual information." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

At TTIC and IDEAL, Dravyansh Sharma is advancing the theory behind modern #AI, developing rigorous, data-driven guarantees for hyperparameter optimization and deep networks, and bridging the gap between theory and real-world practice.

Read the full highlight: buff.ly/fg88gwn

Thursday, March 5th at 11:00 am: Talks at TTIC presents Ankit Goyal of NVIDIA with a talk titled "Foundations of Generalist Robot Learning in the Era of Foundation Models." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

TTIC's Young Researcher Seminar Series presents Jun-Ting (Tim) Hsieh of MIT @mitmath.bsky.social with a talk titled "Explicit Almost-Optimal ε-Balanced Codes via Free Expander Walks." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

Thank you to Milind Tambe @milindtambe-ai.bsky.social of Harvard University for presenting at TTIC yesterday, "Generative #AI for Global Social Impact: Towards Solving the Deployment Bottleneck," as part of our Distinguished Lecture Series!

Join us for PhD candidate Jiahao Li's thesis defense, titled "Efficient 3D Content Reconstruction and Generation." Please join us on Wednesday, March 4th at 9:30am in Room 530, 5th floor.

Tuesday, March 3rd at 11:00 am: Talks at TTIC presents Natalie Collina @ncollina.bsky.social of the University of Pennsylvania with a talk titled "Learning and Incentives in Human-AI Interaction." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

Join us for PhD candidate Xiao Lu's thesis defense titled "Computational Modeling of Antibody-Antigen Complexes: PLM-Based and MSA-Based Approaches." Tuesday, March 3rd from 9:00 - 10:00 am. Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

Friday, February 27th at 10:00am: Talks at TTIC presents Andrew Wagenmaker of UC Berkeley with a talk titled "Physical Agents that Learn from Experience." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

Friday, February 27th at 11am: Research at TTIC presents Madhur Tulsiani with a talk titled "List Decoding Expander-Based Codes (up to capacity, in near-linear time)." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

REMINDER: Thursday, February 26th at 11AM: TTIC's Distinguished Lecture Series presents Milind Tambe @milindtambe-ai.bsky.social of Harvard University with a talk titled "Generative AI for Global Social Impact: Towards Solving the Deployment Bottleneck." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

Explore cutting-edge research on TTIC’s YouTube channel, featuring regular talks on #ML, #Algorithms, #ComputerVision, #Speech, #Robotics, and #ComputationalBiology from TTIC faculty and leading researchers around the world: youtube.com/@ttic_connect

Students at TTIC receive not only stellar faculty and administrative support but also peer support! Student-led advice sessions, student body funds for social outings, and TGIF gatherings are just some of the ways students stay connected. Learn more about student life at TTIC: ttic.edu/student-life

Friday, February 20th at 11am: Research at TTIC presents Zhewei Sun with a talk titled "How do language models perceive creative language: A deep dive into generation and multilingual adaptation of novel slang." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

Thursday, February 26th at 11AM: TTIC's Distinguished Lecture Series presents Milind Tambe @milindtambe-ai.bsky.social of Harvard University with a talk titled "Generative AI for Global Social Impact: Towards Solving the Deployment Bottleneck." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

Today, we recognize the United Nations International Day of Women and Girls in Science and celebrate the pursuit of scientific knowledge, discovery, and education across the global research community.

Friday, February 13th at 11am: Research at TTIC presents Karen Livescu with a talk titled "Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency (for models of natural language)." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

February is #BlackHistoryMonth!

NeurIPS Tutorial New Frontiers of Hyperparameter Optimization: Recent advances and open challenges in theory and practice Machine learning algorithms operate on data, and for any task the most effective method depends on the data at hand. Hyperparameter optimization and algorithm selection are therefore crucial to…

The video of the NeurIPS tutorial by TTIC postdoc Dravy Sharma, co-led with Nina Balcan (CMU) and Colin White (Meta), is now available! Watch here: buff.ly/Suqc0eg #NeurIPS #MLTheory

Monday, February 9th at 11:30am: Talks at TTIC presents Gokul Swamy of Carnegie Mellon University with a talk titled "Efficient Interactive Learning: Learning More From Less." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

Friday, Feb. 6th at 11:00am: Research at TTIC presents Jingyan Wang with a talk titled "A/B Testing Recommendation Algorithms under Data Sharing: A Bandit View on Decision Making." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

Thank you to Hyde Park Academy for hosting TTIC as we explored data and privacy during a Theory of Knowledge class session!

Friday, Jan. 30 at 11AM: Research at TTIC presents Nicholas Tomlin @nickatomlin.bsky.social with a talk titled "Training Language Models with User Simulators." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

Join us for PhD candidate David Yunis's thesis defense titled "From the loss landscape to diverse feature learning in neural networks." Please join us in Room 530 on Friday, January 30th at 10am.

2025 marked many milestones for TTIC: Avrim Blum became Interim President, David McAllester was named our first Professor Emeritus, and we hosted our largest Summer Workshop Program ever (8 workshops, 686 attendees). See our 2025 in review: buff.ly/69XOG3X

52 Places to Go in 2026 Our list for the new year features an eclipse, a revolution and a tiger reserve. What’s on yours?

Thinking about life at TTIC? You’ll be living in Hyde Park, Chicago—just named one of the New York Times’ 52 Places to Go in 2026: