Abstract:
In the past decade, deep learning methods have achieved unprecedented performance on a broad range of
problems in various fields from computer vision to speech recognition. So far research has mainly
focused on developing deep learning methods for Euclidean-structured data. However, many important
applications have to deal with non-Euclidean structured data, such as graphs and manifolds. Such
geometric data are becoming increasingly important in computer graphics and 3D vision, sensor
networks, drug design, biomedicine, recommendation systems, and web applications. The adoption of deep
learning in these fields has been lagging behind until recently, primarily since the non-Euclidean
nature of objects dealt with makes the very definition of basic operations used in deep networks
rather elusive. In this talk, I will introduce the emerging field of geometric deep learning on graphs
and manifolds, overview existing solutions and applications as well as key difficulties and future
research directions.
(based on M. Bronstein, J. Bruna, Y. LeCun, A. Szlam, P. Vandergheynst, "Geometric deep learning:
going beyond Euclidean data", IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 34(4):18-42, 2017)
BIO:
Michael Bronstein (PhD with distinction 2007, Technion, Israel) is a professor at USI Lugano,
Switzerland and Tel Aviv University, Israel. He also serves as a Principal Engineer at Intel
Perceptual Computing. During 2017-2018 he is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at
Harvard University. Michael's main research interest is in theoretical and computational methods for
geometric data analysis. He authored over 150 papers, the book Numerical geometry of non-rigid shapes
(Springer 2008), and over 20 granted patents. He was awarded three ERC grants, Google Faculty Research
award (2016), and Rudolf Diesel fellowship (2017) at TU Munich. He was invited as a Young Scientist to
the World Economic Forum, an honor bestowed on forty world’s leading scientists under the age of
forty. Michael is a Senior Member of the IEEE, alumnus of the Technion Excellence Program and the
Academy of Achievement, ACM Distinguished Speaker, and a member of the Young Academy of Europe. In
addition to academic work, Michael is actively involved in commercial technology development and
consulting to start-up companies. He was a co-founder and technology executive at Novafora (2005-2009)
developing large-scale video analysis methods, and one of the chief technologists at Invision
(2009-2012) developing low-cost 3D sensors. Following the multi-million acquisition of Invision by
Intel in 2012, Michael has been one of the key developers of the Intel RealSense technology.