# ESP Biography

## KAI XIAO, Deep Learning Graduate Student

Major: Computer Science

College/Employer: MIT

## Brief Biographical Sketch:

I like math and computer science!

And Chinese food.

## Past Classes

(Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

M12450: Robust Statistics and Machine Learning in Splash 2018 (Nov. 17 - 18, 2018)
"Robust statistics seek to provide methods that emulate popular statistical methods, but which are not unduly affected by outliers or other small departures from model assumptions" - Wikipedia We'll also see some applications of robust statistics ideas in machine learning, where state-of-the-art deep neural networks are prone to classifying two very similar images differently, and how we can avoid these problems.

X12451: High Tea with Kai and Andy in Splash 2018 (Nov. 17 - 18, 2018)
Come learn about British culture from two guys who aren’t remotely British (and enjoy some high tea)! This is the perfect time for you to pay your respects to Her Majesty, watch some Ali G videos, and polish your British accents that you’ve been secretly practicing this whole time.

C11986: How fast can you search through k lists? in Splash 2017 (Nov. 18 - 19, 2017)
Some of you might know how to search for an item in a sorted list very fast. How about 2 lists at a time? How about 20 lists? Or k lists? Is the answer $$O(k \log n)$$? Nah, we can do (much) better. We'll tackle the problem of searching for an item in many lists efficiently using the technique of fractional cascading. [Spoiler alert: it actually takes the same amount of time as searching in 1 list!...almost]. Then, we'll see how fractional cascading can be applied to solve a variety of geometric problems in theoretical CS.