Begin forwarded message: From: Monica Wolf &lt;mwolf(a)mit.edu&gt; To: &quot;chezpierre(a)mit.edu&quot; &lt;chezpierre(a)mit.edu&gt; Subject: Chez Pierre Seminar - Monday, 3/9/15 Date: March 5, 2015 at 10:06:30 AM EST Hi Everyone, The next Chez Pierre Seminar will be held Monday, March 9, 2015, at 12:00 noon in the MIT Duboc Room, 4-331. Pizza and soda will be available prior to the talks at 11:45am. Pankaj Mehta – Boston University “Deep Learning and the Variational Renormalization Group” Deep learning is a broad set of techniques that uses multiple layers of representation to automatically learn relevant features directly from structured data. Recently, such techniques have yielded record-breaking results on a diverse set of difficult machine learning tasks in computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. In this talk, I will give a "gentle" introduction to Deep Learning and show that deep learning is intimately related to one of the most important and successful techniques in theoretical physics, the renormalization group (RG). I will present an exact mapping from the variational renormalization group, first introduced by Kadanoff, and deep learning architectures based on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and illustrate these ideas using the nearest-neighbor Ising Model in one and two-dimensions. Date: 3/9/2015 Talk: 12:00pm Room: 4-331, Duboc Room Lunch: 11:45am (As always remember to dispose of your plates and cups in the trash containers when you leave the Duboc Room, thanks!) Host: Senthil Todadri Chez Pierre seminars are usually scheduled for Mondays at noon in the MIT Duboc Room, 4-331. Seminar speakers, titles and abstracts will be posted on the Chez Pierre website at: http://web.mit.edu/physics/cmt/chezp.html <http://web.mit.edu/physics/cmt/chezp.html> . Upcoming Chez Pierre Seminars: March 16, 2015 – Luz Martinez-Miranda, University of Maryland March 23, 2015 – No Seminar – Spring Break April 6, 2015 – Jak Chakhalian, University of Arkansas April 13, 2015 – TBA April 20, 2015 – No Seminar – Patriot’s Day Holiday April 27, 2015 – David Hsieh, California Institute of Technology May 4, 2015 – TBA May 11, 2015 – Peter Abbamonte - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Enjoy your day, Monica Monica Wolf Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139 Administrative Assistant Condensed Matter & Biophysics Experimental Physics 13-2029 617-253-4829 Fax: 617-258-6883