Speaker: Leonardo Ferreira Guilhoto

Abstract: Have you ever seen words like “deep learning”, “neural networks”, “transformers”, etc, and thought to yourself: geez, can a talk abstract have any more buzz-words glued together? Well, this pizza seminar is for you! I’ll be providing a very high level overview of what neural networks are, along with some interesting results from the 80/90’s regarding their approximation properties for continuous functions. Then, I’ll highlight some of the more current work being done in the realm of neural networks along with some areas people in math might be interested in, including approximation theory, optimization, probability, privacy, etc. My goal is to keep almost every technical detail to the side, and just focus on giving people a general idea of things going on.