Workshops
Institute workshops will be held each semester, starting with the inaugural workshop in the Fall of 2020. The inaugural workshop will be broad in scope and relatively large in scale2, while each subsequent workshop will focus on one of the institute themes and attract around 100 participants on average. The inaugural workshop is meant to be a high-visibility event, one of whose goals will be to position Illinois as a leader in the area of data science and dynamical systems and to begin planting the seeds for Phase II activities. The subsequent workshops will explore one of the institute themes in greater depth, and will aim to both disseminate recent developments and identify key opportunities for future research. Each workshop will feature invited talks by leading researchers in data science and dynamical systems. The workshops can be held in conjunction with existing regular events at Illinois or in the Midwest, such as the Annual Allerton Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing; the CSL Student Conference; the biannual Midwest Theory Day; the Illinois Data Days; the Midwest Machine Learning Symposium; and the Midwest Workshop on Game and Control Theory.
Tutorial Days and Summer Schools
Even though there is considerable existing expertise at Illinois in both data science and dynamical systems, there are relatively few resources dedicated to bringing graduate
students and advanced undergraduate students up to speed with the recent developments that straddle both of these fields. In order to make sure that the workshops are an enriching educational experience for students, each workshop will be preceded by one day of in-depth tutorial-style lectures by both local and non-local speakers on topics at the intersection of dynamical systems and data science, with the theme of each workshop in mind. Summer schools will be also organized for a deeper dive into the material; these can be overlaid on top of existing initiatives, such as the Program for Interdisciplinary and Industrial Internships at Illinois (PI4), which was co-founded by SP Baryshnikov.3
Seminar Series
In addition to the workshops, a bi-weekly seminar series will be held in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, devoted to studying cutting-edge techniques, disseminating early research outcomes, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and engaging local researchers both at the University of Illinois and in the Midwest. Nearby institutions include University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Chicago, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Michigan, Ohio State, Purdue University, and Washington University in St. Louis, and there are already existing interactions between Illinois and researchers at these institutions through participation in the events listed above. In addition, we will be able to overlay the institute seminars on top of already existing seminar series, including both the well-established events like the Decision and Control Seminar and the Signals, Inference, and Networks (SINE) Seminar at CSL, as well as more recent series, such as the Illinois Machine Learning Seminar (co-organized by PI He, PI Koyejo, SP Schwing, and SP Telgarsky) or the Illinois Center for Autonomy Special Lectures and Distinguished Lectures.