Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Lester Mackey @lestermackey.bsky.social · 8d

Could this be our future? (Sound on)

Reposted by Lester Mackey

Elizabeth Wood, PhD @lizbwood.bsky.social · 18d

You can read more in our post at www.jurabio.com/blog/leavs; preprint forthcoming.

@jura.bsky.social @eliweinstein.bsky.social @mgollub.bsky.social @highvariance.bsky.social

LeaVS: Accelerating learning for biological AI — JURA Bio, Inc.

A fundamental lesson of modern AI is that scale is essential: training bigger models on bigger datasets unlocks new capabilities. A fundamental lesson of AI engineering is that scaling up isn't trivia...

www.jurabio.com

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

Microsoft Research @msftresearch.bsky.social · 27d

The Microsoft Research Undergraduate Internship Program offers 12-week internships in our Redmond, NYC, or New England labs for rising juniors and seniors who are passionate about technology. Apply by October 6: msft.it/6015scgSJ

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Lester Mackey @lestermackey.bsky.social · 23d

If you're an undergraduate interested in interning with me or one of my amazing colleagues at Microsoft Research New England this summer, please apply here: msft.it/6015scgSJ

Reposted by Lester Mackey

Rocío Mercado Oropeza @rociomer.bsky.social · Sep 10

Tomorrow we're excited to host @sarahalamdari.bsky.social at Chalmers for the AI4Science seminar and hear about generative models for protein design! Talk at 3pm CEST. 🤩

For more info, including details on how to join virtually, please see psolsson.github.io/AI4ScienceSe...

@smnlssn.bsky.social

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

Nancy Baym @nancybaym.bsky.social · Jul 28

We may have the chance to hire an outstanding researcher 3+ years post PhD to join Tarleton Gillespie, Mary Gray and me in Cambridge MA bringing critical sociotechnical perspectives to bear on new technologies.

jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/jo...

Search Jobs | Microsoft Careers

https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/job/1849026/Principal-Researcher-–-Sociotechnical-Systems-–-Microsoft-Research

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

Kevin K. Yang 楊凱筌 @kevinkaichuang.bsky.social · Jul 25

In 1965, Margaret Dayhoff published the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure, which collated the 65 proteins whose amino acid sequences were then known.

Inspired by that Atlas, today we are releasing the Dayhoff Atlas of protein sequence data and protein language models.

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

Annabelle Michael Carrell @ab-carrell.bsky.social · Jul 19

So you want to skip our thinning proofs—but you’d still like our out-of-the-box attention speedups? I’ll be presenting the Thinformer at two ICML workshop posters tomorrow!

Catch me at Es-FoMo (1-2:30, East hall A) and at LCFM (10:45-11:30 & 3:30-4:30, West 202-204)

Annabelle Michael Carrell @ab-carrell.bsky.social · Jul 14

Your data is low-rank, so stop wasting compute! In our new paper on low-rank thinning, we share one weird trick to speed up Transformer inference, SGD training, and hypothesis testing at scale. Come by ICML poster W-1012 Tuesday at 4:30!

Lester Mackey @lestermackey.bsky.social · Feb 18

New guarantees for approximating attention, accelerating SGD, and testing sample quality in near-linear time

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

arXiv stat.ML Machine Learning @statml-bot.bsky.social · Jul 4

Jikai Jin, Lester Mackey, Vasilis Syrgkanis: It's Hard to Be Normal: The Impact of Noise on Structure-agnostic Estimation https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02275 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02275 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.02275

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Lester Mackey @lestermackey.bsky.social · Jul 15

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

Ferenc Huszár @inference.vc · Jul 12

Off to ICML next week?

Check out my student Annabelle’s paper in collaboration with @lestermackey.bsky.social and colleagues on low-rank thinning!

New theory, dataset compression, efficient attention and more:

arxiv.org/abs/2502.12063

Low-Rank Thinning

The goal in thinning is to summarize a dataset using a small set of representative points. Remarkably, sub-Gaussian thinning algorithms like Kernel Halving and Compress can match the quality of unifor...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

Annabelle Michael Carrell @ab-carrell.bsky.social · Jul 14

Your data is low-rank, so stop wasting compute! In our new paper on low-rank thinning, we share one weird trick to speed up Transformer inference, SGD training, and hypothesis testing at scale. Come by ICML poster W-1012 Tuesday at 4:30!

Lester Mackey @lestermackey.bsky.social · Feb 18

New guarantees for approximating attention, accelerating SGD, and testing sample quality in near-linear time

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

arxiv stat.ML @arxiv-stat-ml.bsky.social · Jul 4

Jikai Jin, Lester Mackey, Vasilis Syrgkanis
It's Hard to Be Normal: The Impact of Noise on Structure-agnostic Estimation
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02275

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

NeurIPS Conference @neuripsconf.bsky.social · Jul 2

NeurIPS is seeking additional ethics reviewers this year. If you are able and willing to participate in the review process, please sign up at the form in the link:
neurips.cc/Conferences/...
Please share this call with your colleagues!

2025 Call For Ethics Reviewers

If you are able and willing to participate in the review process, please sign up at this form. Feel free to share this call with your colleagues.

neurips.cc

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

λ³🎲 @cubiclogic.bsky.social · Jun 20

Shunichi Amari has been awarded the 40th (2025) Kyoto Prize in recognition of his pioneering research in the fields of artificial neural networks, machine learning, and information geometry

www.riken.jp/pr/news/2025...

甘利俊一栄誉研究員が「京都賞」を受賞

甘利俊一栄誉研究員（本務：帝京大学先端総合研究機構特任教授）は、人工ニューラルネットワーク、機械学習、情報幾何学分野での先駆的な研究が評価され、第40回（2025）京都賞（先端技術部門　受賞対象分野：情報科学）を受賞しました。

www.riken.jp

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Lester Mackey @lestermackey.bsky.social · May 1

If you’d like to expand your analysis to support equal weighted kernel thinning coresets, have a look at Low-Rank Thinning (arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12063); that bounds kernel thinning MMD directly in terms of eigenvalue decay

arxiv.org

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Lester Mackey @lestermackey.bsky.social · May 1

Very cool!

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

a doctor of public heath (DrPH) @drrwby.bsky.social · Mar 11

🏆 I'm delighted to share that I've won a 2025 COPSS Emerging Leader Award! 😃 And congratulations to my fellow winners! 🙌🏽

Check out how each of us is improving and advancing the profession of #statistics and #datascience here: tinyurl.com/copss-emerging-leader-award

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

Theresa Kim, PhD, MS @tyk314.net · Mar 14

Congratulations to the 2025 #COPSS Awardees, @ericjdaza.com, @lucystats.bsky.social, @lestermackey.bsky.social, and all of you. I hope to congratulate you at #JSM2025 in Nashville with @amstatnews.bsky.social. God I hope to go. #rstats #statssky

a doctor of public heath (DrPH) @drrwby.bsky.social · Mar 11

🏆 I'm delighted to share that I've won a 2025 COPSS Emerging Leader Award! 😃 And congratulations to my fellow winners! 🙌🏽

Check out how each of us is improving and advancing the profession of #statistics and #datascience here: tinyurl.com/copss-emerging-leader-award

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

NeurIPS Conference @neuripsconf.bsky.social · Mar 10

NeurIPS 2025 is soliciting self-nominations for reviewers and ACs. Please read our blog post for details on eligibility criteria, and process to self-nominate:

Self-nomination for reviewing at NeurIPS 2025 – NeurIPS Blog

Communications Chairs 2025 2025 Conference

blog.neurips.cc

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Lester Mackey @lestermackey.bsky.social · Mar 8

Thanks Arthur!

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Lester Mackey @lestermackey.bsky.social · Mar 8

Thanks Michele!

Reposted by Lester Mackey

Michele Guindani @mguindani.bsky.social · Mar 8

Congratulations to @lestermackey.bsky.social for receiving the 2025 COPSS Award! 🎉👏

Lester is currently the Chair of the Section on Bayesian Statistical Sciences (SBSS) of the American Statistical Association.

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

Konstantin Klemmer @kklmmr.bsky.social · Feb 26

Off to #AAAI25! We're presenting #SatCLIP (w/ @marccoru.bsky.social, @estherrolf.bsky.social, @calebrob6.bsky.social & @lestermackey.bsky.social) at the 12.30-2.30pm poster session on Feb 28! Let me know if you're around & want to chat #GeoAI!🛰️

Paper: tinyurl.com/5eejz5kw
Code: tinyurl.com/2zm64967

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Reposted by Lester Mackey

Naomi Saphra @nsaphra.bsky.social · Feb 20

idk dude it's 30 pages of proofs and then they drop this

Quality of T2T-ViT attention approximations on ImageNet. Their method is faster than everything but Performer, while losing less accuracy than any other approximation (including Performer, which is too lossy to really show up in prod).

Time-power trade-off curves for detecting Higgs bosons with deep kernel MMD tests. Their method is way past pareto optimal.

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