Young Researchers Workshop

Schedule
Info for speakers
Poster session info
Travel info

Schedule

Thursday, October 6

Evening reception 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Liquid State Brewing Co., 620 West Green Street, Ithaca, NY

Friday, October 7

Start Day in G10 Biotechnology Building

Breakfast and Sign-in 8:15 AM -- 8:45 AM

Welcome and Speakers (3) 8:45 AM – 10:00 AM Session chair: Jamol Pender (abstracts can be found here)

Yiding Feng, Microsoft Research New England--Batching and Optimal Multi-stage Bipartite Allocations
Rohan Ghuge, University of Michigan--The Power of Adaptivity for Stochastic Submodular Cover
Sophie Yu, Decision Sciences Area, The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University--Random graph matching at Otter's tree-counting constant in polynomial time

Coffee Break 10:00 AM -- 10:30 AM

Speakers (4) 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Session Chair: Omar El Housni (abstracts can be found here)

Sean Sinclair, School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, Cornell University--Sequential Fair Allocation: Achieving the Optimal Envy-Efficiency Tradeoff Curve
Bailey Flanigan, Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Department--The impact of altruism on elections
Yeganeh Alimohammadi, Stanford, MS&E--Using Network Structure to Estimate Epidemics
Leonard Boussioux,MIT, Operations Research Center--Multimodality, models, algorithms, and applications to sustainability

Lunch 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

Speakers (4) 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM Session Chair: Manxi Wu (abstracts can be found here)

Yunzong Xu, MIT IDSS--Bypassing the Monster: A Faster and Simpler Optimal Algorithm for Contextual Bandits Under Realizability
Yichun Hu, Cornell School of ORIE--Fast Rates for Contextual Linear Optimization
Bento Natura, London School of Economics--Interior point methods are not worse than Simplex
Yujia Jin, Stanford, Management Science and Engineering--The Complexity of Optimizing Single and Multi-player Games

Transition to Physical Sciences Building 2:30 PM – 3:00 PM

Poster Session I 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM (See below for a full list of poster presenters and topics)

Poster Session II 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM (See below for a full list of poster presenters and topics)

Tear Down/Wrap Up 5:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Dinner at Statler Terrace Restaurant 5:30 PM -- 8:00PM

Saturday, October 8

G10 Biotechnology Building

Breakfast and Sign-in 8:15 AM -- 9:00 AM

Speakers (4) 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM Session Chair: Christina Lee Yu (abstracts can be found here)

Maxine Yu, Department of ORFE at Princeton University--Strategic Decision-Making in the Presence of Information Asymmetry: Provably Efficient RL with Algorithmic Instrument
Yuling Yan, Princeton University--Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Offline Zero-Sum Markov Games
Wenlong Mou, UC Berkeley, Department of EECS--Statistical theory for reinforcement learning: Oracle inequalities, Markov chains, and stochastic approximation
Michael Huang, USC Marshall School of Business--Policy Evaluation And Learning In Small-data, Weakly-coupled Settings

Coffee Break 10:30 AM -- 11:00 AM

Speakers (4) 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM Session Chair: Ruihao Zhu (abstracts can be found here)

Alireza Fallah, MIT--Privacy Mechanisms for Data Markets
Daniel Alabi, Computer Science Department and Data Science Institute, Columbia University--Hypothesis Testing for Differentially Private Linear Regression
Shuangning Li, Harvard University Department of Statistics--Random Graph Asymptotics for Treatment Effect Estimation under Network Interference
Ruoqi Shen, University of Washington, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering--Proximal Framework in Sampling: Structured Logconcave Sampling with a Restricted Gaussian Oracle

Talks are approximately 20 minutes long with questions, leaving a couple of minutes to switch to the next speaker (like the INFORMS model). Please bring your own device to connect to Cornell’s G10 Bio Tech space; a laptop is usually best as USB-C or HDMI connectors will be available on site. Technical assistance will be available to help connect your laptop to the projector and handle any technical problems. We recommend that you also bring your slides on a USB as a backup. (abstracts can be found here)

Poster Session Information

The Friday, October 7^th Poster session will be held from 3 – 5:30 PM in the Baker Atrium and Baker Portico spaces in the Physical Sciences building. Participants can either bring physical copies of posters with them, or bring a digital copy on USB drive and pay to print locally at Cornell University’s Mann Library. Posters should be at most 36" x 48” (inches).

Poster Session I (3pm-4pm, Friday)

Adit Radhakrishnan	Wide and Deep Neural Networks Achieve Consistency in Classification
Aditi Laddha	Socially Fair Network Design via Iterative Rounding
Arielle Anderer	Multi-Armed Bandit Algorithms with Time-to-Event Data: An application to Clinical Trials
Carlos Martinez	Public Transit Design and Transportation Justice
Chen Cheng	How Many Labelers Do You Have? A Closer Look at Gold-Standard Labels
Chenghuai Li	The Blockchain Newsvendor: Value of Freshness Transparency and Smart Contracts
Connor Lawless	Cluster Explanation via Polyhedral Descriptions
Haoyue Wang	Linear Regression with Partially Mismatched Data: Local Search with Theoretical Guarantees
Hemeng Li	Modeling Volunteer Response in Emergency Medical Services
Jason Gaitonde	The Price of Anarchy in Strategic Queuing Systems
Jiawei Zhao	ZerO Initialization: Initializing Neural Networks with only Zeros and Ones
Jingyan Wang	Modeling and Correcting Bias in Sequential Evaluation
Kwassi Joseph Dzahini	Stochastic trust-region algorithm in random subspaces
Leann Thayaparan	UMOTEM: A Method to Jointly Predict and Optimize Tree Ensembles
Lexiao Lai	Lyapunov stability of the subgradient method with constant step size
Matthew Ford	Automatic Differentiation for Gradient Estimators in Simulation
Meichun Lin	Uncertain Search with Knowledge Transfer
Miaolan Xie	High Probability Complexity Bounds for Line Search Based on Stochastic Oracles
Mik Zlatin	New and Improved Approximation Algorithms for Steiner Tree Augmentation Problems
Mingda Qiao	Online Pen Testing
Mingxi Zhu	How Small Amount of Data Sharing Benefits Distributed Optimization and Learning
Moise Blanchard	Universal learning: when is regression possible?
Neha Sharma	Structuring Online Communities
Nisha Chandramoorthy	On the generalization of learning algorithms that do not converge
Qinyi Chen	Fair Assortment Planning
Rachitesh Kumar	Single-Leg Revenue Management with Advice
Renbo Zhao	Multiplicative Gradient Method: When and Why It Works?
Sajad Khodadadian	Federated Reinforcement Learning: Linear Speedup Under Markovian Sampling
Shengyi He	Adaptive Importance Sampling for Efficient Stochastic Root Finding and Quantile Estimation
Tyler Sam	TBA
Vassilis Digalakis	Slowly varying regression under sparsity
Xingyu Bai	Asymptotic Optimality of Semi-Open-Loop Policies in Markov Decision Processes with Large Lead Times

Poster Session II (4pm-5pm, Friday)

Anand Kalvit	Dynamic Learning in Large Matching Markets
Arnab Auddy	Orthogonally Decomposable Tensors in Statistics
Gabriele Dragotto	Mathematical Programming Games
Giorgia Ramponi	Active Exploration for Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Hassan Mortagy	Reusing Combinatorial Structure: Faster Iterative Projections over Submodular Base Polytopes
Kan Xu	Learning across bandit in high dimension via robust statistics
Lisa Hillas	Designing Service Menus for Bipartite Queueing Systems
Masatoshi Uehara	Provably Efficient Reinforcement Learning in POMDPs
Mayleen Cortez-Rodriguez	To Treat or not to Treat, That is the Question
Noemie Perivier	The Power of Greedy for Online Matching on the Line
Qian Xie	Sharp Tradeoffs of Envy and Throughput in Warehouse Inventory Management
Qimeng (Kim) Yu	Strong valid inequalities for a class of concave submodular minimization problems under cardinality constraints
Qing Feng	Phase Transition in Learning and Earning under Price Protection
Raaz Dwivedi	Counterfactual inference in sequential experiments
Sara Fridovich-Keil	Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks
Shengding Sun	Aggregations of quadratic inequalities and hyperplane hidden convexity
Shuvomoy Das Gupta	BnB-PEP: A Unified Methodology for Constructing Optimal Optimization Methods
Tinghan (Joe) Ye	Taxi Routing Optimization
Tobia Marcucci	Shortest paths in graphs of convex sets
Varun Suriyanarayana	Joint Replenishment with Rejection Limits
X.Y. Han	Survey Descent: A Multipoint Generalization Of Gradient Descent For Nonsmooth Optimization
Xiaohe Luo	An Entirely Novel Perspective on Choosing Stepsizes for SGD: Entropy Minimization for Optimization of Expensive, Unimodular Functions
Xuezhou (Jack) Zhang	Representation Transfer in Rich Observation Reinforcement Learning
Xujia Liu	Stochastic Replenishment Systems with Multi-Item Inventory Constraints
Xumei Xi	Geometry and Algorithms in Misspecified Gaussian Mixtures
Yongchun Li	Best Principal Submatrix Selection for the Maximum Entropy Sampling Problem: Scalable Algorithms and Performance Guarantees
Yueyang Liu	Nonstationary bandit learning via predictive sampling
Yueyang Zhong	Behavior-Aware Queues with Strategic Customers and Strategic Servers
Yunbei Xu	Bayesian Design Principles for Frequentist Bandit and Reinforcement Learning
Zhe (Jimmy) Zhang	Efficient Methods for Nested Optimization
Zhe Du	Learning to Control Markov Jump Systems in Real-Time

Travel Information

Airplane and Bus

Ithaca Airport: The best option for flying would be arriving at the Ithaca airport. It is only three miles away from Cornell campus, and an easy taxi/uber/lyft ride to get to and from. Many hotels provide shuttle service to and from the airport as well as around town.

Syracuse Airport: While Syracuse has a lot more flight options, it is a bit over an hour lyft/uber ride to get from Syracuse to Ithaca. You can rent a car via this link.

Other nearby airports (less than an hour drive) are Elmira and Binghamton. Both are quite small.

NYC Airports: The last option would be flying into any of the major NYC airports and taking a bus to Ithaca. This is the longest option, as most buses from NYC to Ithaca take about 4.5 hours. Some options on buses include:

-Cornell Campus to Campus: Most comfortable option that leaves from the Cornell Club in midtown NYC and drops you off right on Cornell campus in Ithaca.

-OurBus: Has options leaving from either the George Washington Bridge or Port Authority to downtown Ithaca. From downtown it is a short cab ride to get to Ithaca.