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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20261002T131533
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T143000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T163000
SUMMARY:Lecture / Discussion:Online Learning and Decision-Making for Dynamic Pricing and Performative Prediction
DESCRIPTION:Many modern decision systems are not passive observers of the world they measure: the decisions they make change the data they subsequently receive. For example\, a seller that posts a price influences the decisions of potential buyers\, and hence the sales data it goes on to col-\nlect\; a lender that deploys a credit-scoring rule changes the nature of the loan applications it receives. In such settings\, the classical separation\nbetween estimation and decision-making breaks down\, and statistical guarantees must be derived jointly with the policy that generates the\ndata. This dissertation develops estimation theory and online algorithms for two such feedback settings --- dynamic pricing and performative\nprediction --- with a unifying theme: shape-constrained and microfounded structure can replace the tuning parameters\, smoothness assump-\ntions\, and parametric models on which existing methods rely.\nThe first part concerns dynamic pricing. We first consider a monopolistic setting with censored demand\, in which the seller posts a price and\nobserves only whether a sale occurred. In the linear valuation model\, the customer’s valuation is linear in the features of the item offered\,\nup to market noise with unknown distribution F. Existing methods estimate F by kernel smoothing\, bandit techniques\, or upper confidence\nbounds\; all of them impose Lipschitz or stronger conditions on F\, and all of them leave the analyst to choose bandwidths\, confidence widths\,\nor regularization parameters. We instead exploit the fact that F is monotone and estimate it by isotonic regression. The resulting policy car-\nries no tuning parameters whatsoever\, assumes only that F is Hölder continuous\, and attains sublinear regret. It also outperforms existing\nmethods in simulations and on transaction data from Welltower Inc. We then move to a competitive setting in which N sellers post prices\nover T periods\, and each seller’s demand follows a single-index model with an unknown monotone\, s-concave link. We prove existence and\nuniqueness of the Nash equilibrium\, and give a semiparametric least-squares policy under which prices converge to the Nash equilibrium\,\nwhile each seller incurs sublinear regret.\nThe second part concerns performative prediction\, which involves a learner and a population of agents whose actions follow a distribution\nP. The learner deploys a model M that shifts this distribution from P to P(M)\, thereby changing the data the learner observes\; the map P(M)\nis called the distribution map. Much of the literature assumes that the distribution map is known\, whereas we learn it from agent-response\ndata. We study two settings: a discrete-action framework\, in which agents choose from a finite set of alternatives\, and a continuous-action\nframework\, in which an action may be any real number. For discrete actions\, we give a nonparametric estimator of the distribution map\ntogether with an exploration--exploitation scheme that we show to be effective in minimizing the performative risk. For continuous actions\,\nwe model agents’ responses as a cost-adjusted utility maximization problem and propose an estimator of the cost. Our approach leverages\noptimal transport to align the pre-deployment distribution P with the post-deployment distribution P(M). We provide a rate of convergence\nfor the proposed estimator and assess its quality through empirical demonstrations on a credit-scoring dataset.
UID:153213-21915429@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/153213
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Dissertation
LOCATION:West Hall - 470
CONTACT:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20261017T202127
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T143500
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T151500
SUMMARY:Conference / Symposium:2026 International Students Career Success Conference
DESCRIPTION:🚀 Your career\, your future\, your success! Brought to you by the International Center and the University Career Center\, the International Students Career Success Conference is designed to help you move forward with clarity and confidence. Along the way\, you’ll also find a community of peers\, alumni\, and U-M staff who are here to support you and cheer you on.\n✔ Develop a career strategy tailored to your goals\, cultural identity\, and immigration timeline +\n✔ Connect with career experts and discover campus resources that support your next steps\n✔ Learn from a dynamic panel of international peers and UM alumni on cross-cultural workplace dynamics and strengthen your professional identity. Our panel features U-M alumni and students from diverse academic backgrounds and from all degree types.\n✔ Network with alumni and peers from diverse industries in an informal way\n✔ Leave with actionable insights and a stronger sense of direction for your future.Light Refreshments will be provided.This event is open to all degree-seeking students and alumni within two years of graduation.Agenda:1:00 – 1:15 pm | Opening Remarks1:20 – 2:00 pm | Concurrent Sessions Block 12:05 - 2:30 pm | Flash Sessions: Resume Best Practices or Break2:35 - 3:15 pm | Concurrent Sessions Block 23:20 - 4:00 pm | UM International Student Alumni Panel4:00 - 4:30 pm | Networking with panelistsThis event's information is shown in Sessions\, Handshake as well as on the Happening @ Michigan calendar so that it will be seen by a larger number of U-M Students. You can only register to attend this event within Sessions. We want to ensure full and equitable participation in our events. If an accessibility accommodation would promote your full participation in this event\, please indicate your accommodation requirements in this form\, preferably at least 14 days prior to the program. If you have any questions regarding access to our programs\, please don't hesitate to reach out to Jocelyn Gaydos jmgaydos@umich.edu. To ensure sufficient time for arranging your requested accommodation(s) or exploring suitable alternatives\, we kindly request that you inform us as soon as possible.
UID:152219-21913351@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/152219
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Sessions
LOCATION:Rackham Assembly Hall
CONTACT:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20261017T202127
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T143500
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T151500
SUMMARY:Conference / Symposium:2026 International Students Career Success Conference
DESCRIPTION:🚀 Your career\, your future\, your success! Brought to you by the International Center and the University Career Center\, the International Students Career Success Conference is designed to help you move forward with clarity and confidence. Along the way\, you’ll also find a community of peers\, alumni\, and U-M staff who are here to support you and cheer you on.\n✔ Develop a career strategy tailored to your goals\, cultural identity\, and immigration timeline +\n✔ Connect with career experts and discover campus resources that support your next steps\n✔ Learn from a dynamic panel of international peers and UM alumni on cross-cultural workplace dynamics and strengthen your professional identity. Our panel features U-M alumni and students from diverse academic backgrounds and from all degree types.\n✔ Network with alumni and peers from diverse industries in an informal way\n✔ Leave with actionable insights and a stronger sense of direction for your future.Light Refreshments will be provided.This event is open to all degree-seeking students and alumni within two years of graduation.Agenda:1:00 – 1:15 pm | Opening Remarks1:20 – 2:00 pm | Concurrent Sessions Block 12:05 - 2:30 pm | Flash Sessions: Resume Best Practices or Break2:35 - 3:15 pm | Concurrent Sessions Block 23:20 - 4:00 pm | UM International Student Alumni Panel4:00 - 4:30 pm | Networking with panelistsThis event's information is shown in Sessions\, Handshake as well as on the Happening @ Michigan calendar so that it will be seen by a larger number of U-M Students. You can only register to attend this event within Sessions. We want to ensure full and equitable participation in our events. If an accessibility accommodation would promote your full participation in this event\, please indicate your accommodation requirements in this form\, preferably at least 14 days prior to the program. If you have any questions regarding access to our programs\, please don't hesitate to reach out to Jocelyn Gaydos jmgaydos@umich.edu. To ensure sufficient time for arranging your requested accommodation(s) or exploring suitable alternatives\, we kindly request that you inform us as soon as possible.
UID:152219-21913350@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/152219
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Sessions
LOCATION:Rackham West Conference Room
CONTACT:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20261014T095112
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T150000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T160000
SUMMARY:Lecture / Discussion:AIM Seminar: How voting goes wrong\, and how it can go right: the evolution of collective intelligence
DESCRIPTION:Abstract: Voting sometimes works well. A crowd's average guess is often better than any individual guess. But voting can also fail\, producing a biased outcome or no decision at all. I will discuss natural mechanisms that cause each of these outcomes\, in groups whose members observe other voters and learn by imitating one another.\n\nI will first describe a voter game\, played online by 2\,520 people\, in which two parties of equal size compete to reach a supermajority. The structure of who sees whose voting intentions\, which we call information gerrymandering\, can bias the outcome toward one party\, even when both parties are the same size and every player has the same influence. When members of both parties see mainly their own party's intentions\, most groups end in deadlock.\n\nI will then ask what individual reward scheme allows a population of self-interested imitators\, each observing only part of a problem\, to evolve accurate collective decisions. For linear prediction problems\, rewarding individuals for their own accuracy eliminates the diversity of opinions a group needs. Rewarding those whose opinions reduce the collective error provably increases accuracy\, until the group predicts perfectly. For more realistic non-linear decisions\, a single majority vote cannot produce accurate decisions under any reward scheme. Voting in layers\, with rewards paid only to individuals who are pivotal at every layer above them\, provably allows a population to evolve accurate decisions. The evolved population is equivalent to a multi-layer perceptron in machine learning\, and the reward for pivotality corresponds to credit assignment that machines compute through backpropagation. These results therefore provide a naturalistic\, evolutionary account of collective in intelligence in humans and machines.\n\nContact: Naoki Masuda
UID:148879-21905041@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/148879
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Mathematics,Applied Mathematics
LOCATION:East Hall - 1084
CONTACT:
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260807T132324
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T150000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T163000
SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Faculty Workshop on Holistic Graduate Admissions for Excellence and Diversity
DESCRIPTION:Holistic admissions practices are an integral part of achieving both diversity and excellence when admitting graduate student cohorts. This workshop is designed to provide concrete strategies and evidence-based practices to support faculty and program goals in admitting diverse and excellent cohorts of graduate students. This workshop will provide members of graduate admissions committees an opportunity to develop their own holistic admissions tools.
UID:150000-21907798@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/150000
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Sessions,Rgs-events,Rgs Events
LOCATION:Rackham Building, 4th Floor
CONTACT:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20261009T151118
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T150000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T160000
SUMMARY:Lecture / Discussion:HET Seminar | Dark Energy and Time Reparametrizations
DESCRIPTION:The cosmological constant’s quantum origin is a famous open problem in theoretical physics and cosmology. Its observed value and theoretical prediction exhibit a large 120-order discrepancy. In this talk\, we first summarize the current state of research on the cosmological constant problem and review the Schwarzian theory of time reparametrizations in the literature. Inspired by an early work by Gary Gibbons and our recent attempts to solve various formidable problems (e.g.\, color confinement in SYM\, fluid/gravity correspondence at low temperatures\, etc.) via the JT gravity/Schwarzian theory duality\, we apply the Schwarzian theory of time reparametrizations and its ensemble average to the cosmological constant problem and propose a new approach to resolving it. We will show that this new method\, at leading order\, yields a theoretical value that exactly matches the observed value of the cosmological constant. However\, recent results from dark energy observations (such as DESI) suggest a dynamical dark energy. Starting from the leading-order constant value\, we will take into account matter-gravity interactions and develop a more realistic dynamical dark energy model based on time reparametrizations that can fit observational data with comparable precision to other models (e.g.\, LCDM and CPL). We also provide some falsifiable predictions for future more precise observations. This talk is based on my recent paper arXiv:2602.17476 and another upcoming work.\n\nBrief Biography:\nJun Nian is an assistant professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics Asia-Pacific (ICTP-AP)\, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received a Diplom degree from the University of Heidelberg in 2009 and a Ph.D. degree from Stony Brook University in 2015. Before joining ICTP-AP in 2021\, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES)\, the University of Michigan\, and the University of Milan. His research interests include quantum field theory\, gravity theory\, and string theory\, with a recent focus on the quantum-gravitational effects in black holes and cosmology.
UID:151803-21912195@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/151803
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Talk,Science,Physics,Lecture,High Energy Theory Seminar,Seminar
LOCATION:Randall Laboratory - 4404
CONTACT:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260903T132805
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T150000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20261023T163000
SUMMARY:Lecture / Discussion:Incorporations: Capitalism and Collective Life with Associate Professor Matthew Hull
DESCRIPTION:Join the U-M Department of Anthropology for the annual Roy A. Rappaport Lecture Series! Associate Professor Matthew Hull will present the fall 2026 series\, titled “Incorporations: Capitalism and Collective Life.”\n\nAbstract: “Corporations are often seen as purely economic actors\, but they have been central to Anglo-American governance for centuries—pioneers of democratic assembly\, speech\, citizenship\, and constitutions. Many features of corporations\, once grounded in democratic ideals\, now foster the unresponsiveness of these institutions. These lectures will include discussion of a diverse array of corporations: medieval guilds\, the English East India Company\, Alaska Native corporations\, and caste-based corporations in India.”\n\nRappaport lectures will take place on the following fall Fridays from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in West Hall Room 411. They are free and open to the public:\n\nFriday\, Sept. 25\n“Corporate Persons in Human Law: Reproduction\, Kinship\, Jurisdiction”\n\nFriday\, Oct. 23\n“Freedom and Citizenship: Corporate Membership and the Making of Exclusion”\n\nFriday\, Nov. 13\n“Meetings and Speech: Corporate Mediations of Will”\n\nFriday\, Dec. 4\n“Sharing and Inequality in Corporations”\n\nVIRTUAL PARTICIPATION LINK: https://umich.zoom.us/j/91475190155\n\nREGISTRATION IS APPRECIATED for planning purposes: https://myumi.ch/e77Ax\n\nIf you need accommodations to attend\, please email anthro.exec.secretary@umich.edu.\n\nABOUT ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR MATTHEW HULL\nMatthew Hull is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the nexus of signification\, technology\, and institutions. His book\, “Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan\,” winner of the 2019 J.I. Staley Prize from the School of Advanced Research\, examines governance as a semiotic and material practice. He has worked on urban planning in 1960s India and police communication systems and lotteries in contemporary India. He is currently writing a book on how early modern corporations shaped democratic governance and continue to structure contemporary political life.
UID:148332-21903935@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/148332
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:AEM Featured,Anthropology,South Asian Studies,Lecture
LOCATION:West Hall - 411
CONTACT:
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