This career talk with Ben Vigoda from Analog Devices Lyric Labs hosted by the Physics Department might be of interest to some members of the group. Best wishes, -Martin ---------- Forwarded message ---------- *Physics Department Career Event: Talk and Open Round-Table Q&A Session* *Title:* Startups, Industrial Labs, and Transforming Machine Intelligence through the Physics of Stochastic Computation *Speaker:* Ben Vigoda, director of Analog Devices Corporate Labs and entrepreneur *Location and Time:* Jefferson 250, Thursday, Dec. 12, 5:00pm-6:00pm All undergrads, grad students, post-docs, and others from physics, engineering, astronomy (and beyond) are welcome. *Please RSVP at:* https://harvard.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_bKk31tij5FB3Ta5 The Harvard Physics Department hosts Ben Vigoda, director of Analog Devices Corporate Labs and entrepreneur, for a career talk and open round-table question-and-answer session for those with an interest in startups and/or industrial research. The types of career options that will be discussed include opportunities at the cutting edge of statistical machine learning techniques and applications, probabilistic programming languages, data analytics and modeling, novel compiler and processor architectures, and cloud-based high-performance computing platforms. *What We Do:* At our industrial labs we create startups. Most of these startups are internal new businesses for Analog Devices, Inc. and at least one currently is an external startup. Much of our research and development revolves around developing a new approach to computing based on Bayesian inference, and includes innovation in statistical machine learning, probabilistic programming languages, compilers, applications, novel integrated circuit approaches, and cloud computing platforms. Our first probability processor hardware demonstrates orders of magnitude wins on machine learning and statistical inference benchmarks. We are developing open-source probability programming languages that help enable rapid prototyping and development of statistical machine learning applications. We will demonstrate some applications that we are building on top of the probability processing stack. *Bio:* Ben Vigoda is the director of Analog Devices Lyric Labs, a corporate research labs located in Kendall Square, Cambridge that grew from the acquisition by Analog Devices of Lyric Semiconductor, Inc. As CEO, Vigoda raised over $25M in venture capital funding and government research contracts while also contributing to the company's technology development. Lyric was selected as one of the 50 Most Innovative Companies by Technology Review in 2010. The company's work on probability processors has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Wired Magazine, Scientific American, EE Times and was #1 on slashdot. Vigoda developed the technical foundations for Lyric during his PhD work with Prof. Neil Gershenfeld at the Center for Bits and Atoms in the MIT Media Lab, and subsequently while a Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Research Labs. While a PhD student, he learned a lot about how to create a startup as part of the process of winning the MIT 50k Entrepreneurship Competition and Harvard New Venture Competition. He earned his undergraduate degree in physics from Swarthmore College and has worked at the Santa Fe Institute on alternative models of computation and at Hewlett Packard Labs, where he helped transfer academic research projects to product divisions, including a toner level sensor that made its way into every HP Laserjet printer. He has also worked on some other interesting projects, including programming the automated design of DNA-based nano-tile structures, building a virtual juggling system that toured for years with the Flying Karamazov Brothers, and co-founding Design That Matters, a not-for-profit that collaborates with universities and volunteer engineers to design new products and services for the poor in developing countries. -- *Gamelan Labs, Inc. in Kendall Square* Want to work with MIT and Harvard physics PhDs and get in on the ground floor of a growing science-based startup in Kendall Square? Gamelan Labs is a new startup company initially funded by several million dollars in DARPA contracts. We are developing a new approach to data analytics based on probabilistic programming languages (PPL) http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/04/probabilistic-programming.html. Under the hood, probabilistic programs are solved by a range of inference algorithms to estimate the posterior distribution over the variables in a model. Understanding these systems requires mathematical sophistication and physical intuition, and a background in physics helps a lot. We also have to get the software to work at large scale. Obviously it's going to help if you think that activities like programming and playing with Amazon EC2 are fun. We hire people who are smart and nice and like to hack.