[Forum SIS] 6th Seminar D2 Seminar Series FDS - 29th October 2.30-4 pm

[datascience a unifi.it]

Dear all,

We are happy to present the sixth Seminar of the "D2 Seminar Series"
launched by the FDS. The Seminar will be held online Friday 29TH OF
OCTOBER 2021, from 2.30-4 PM.
The seminar will be held by Giulia Iori from the Department of Economics
of the City University of London and Massimo Fornasier from the
Department of Mathematics of the Technical University of Munich. 

Register in advance for this webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_B20LTH2CR1SrVYCcD0Eqlw

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing
information about joining the webinar.

We hope to see you there! You are invited to invite also your students,
PhDs and colleagues who may be interested in the Seminar (you find a
Flyer with all the info attached).

Kind Regards,
Florence Center for Data Science

----------------
SPEAKER: Giulia Iori - Department of Economics of the City University of
London
Title: _Performance-based research funding: Evidence from the largest
natural experiment worldwide_

Abstract: The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the main UK
government policy on public research in the last 30 years. The primary
aim of this policy is to promote and reward research excellence through
competition for scarce research resources. Surprisingly, and despite the
severe criticisms, little has been done to systematically evaluate its
effects. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of the REF 2014. We
exploit a large database that contains all publications in Economics,
Business, Management, and Finance available in Scopus since 2001. We use
a synthetic control method to compare the performance of each of the
universities from the UK with counter-factual similar units in terms of
past research constructed using data for US universities. We find a
significant positive increase, relative to the control group, in the
number of published papers, and in the proportion of papers
published in highly ranked journals within the Economics/Econometrics
area and the Business, Management and Finance area. Both Russell and
non-Russell Group universities benefited from the REF, with the Russell
Group universities experiencing an overall significant increase in the
number of publications and number of publications in top journals, and
the non-Russell group experiencing a significant increase in the
proportion of publications in top journals in all areas. Interestingly,
the non-Russell group experienced a comparatively stronger increase in
the proportion of top publications in Economics/Econometrics while the
Russell Group experienced a comparatively stronger increase in the
proportion of top publications in Business, Management and Finance.
However, we see an insignificant effect when we focus on per-author
output measures indicating that growth in output was mostly achieved by
an increase in the number of research active academics rather than an
overall increase in research productivity.

SPEAKER: Massimo Fornasier - Department of Mathematics of the Technical
University of Munich
Title: _Consensus-based optimization_

Abstract: Consensus-based optimization (CBO) is a multi-agent
metaheuristic derivative-free optimization method that can globally
minimize nonconvex nonsmooth functions and is amenable to theoretical
analysis. In fact, optimizing agents (particles) move on the
optimization domain driven by a drift towards an instantaneous consensus
point, which is computed as a convex combination of particle locations,
weighted by the cost function according to Laplace's principle, and it
represents an approximation to a global minimizer. The dynamics are
further perturbed by a random vector field to favor exploration, whose
variance is a function of the distance of the particles to the consensus
point. Based on an experimentally supported intuition that CBO always
performs a
gradient descent of the squared Euclidean distance to the global
minimizer, we show a novel technique for proving the global convergence
to the global minimizer in mean-field law for a rich class of objective
functions. We further present formulations of CBO over compact
hypersurfaces. We conclude the talk with a few numerical experiments,
which show that CBO scales well with the dimension and is extremely
versatile.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.15130.pdf to appear in Found. Comput. Math.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.11994.pdf appeared in M3AS
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.11988.pdf appeared in J. Mach. Learn. Rech
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.00420.pdf to appear in SIAM J. Opt.
-------------- parte successiva --------------
Un allegato HTML è stato rimosso...
URL: <http://www.stat.unipg.it/pipermail/sis/attachments/20211022/5b91378a/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- parte successiva --------------
Un allegato non testuale è stato rimosso....
Nome:        6th Seminar - FDS.pdf
Tipo:        application/pdf
Dimensione:  1346082 bytes
Descrizione: non disponibile
URL:         <http://www.stat.unipg.it/pipermail/sis/attachments/20211022/5b91378a/attachment-0001.pdf>