The Expo runs Monday August 10 through Wednesday August 12, 2026, in the 7th-Floor Conference Room of Morgridge Hall at UW–Madison. The program below is provisional and may be updated before the meeting.
Titles are shown as provided by the speakers. See the poster session list for the posters to be presented on Monday evening.
Monday, August 10 · 9:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.
3 plenaries · 7 short talks · reception and poster session, 5:00–7:00 p.m.
| Time | Program item | Speaker & talk details |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00–9:15 | Welcome and introduction | Hosts |
| 9:15–10:00 | Plenary Talk 1 |
Tammy Kolda — mathsci.ai Looking Forward: What is Foundational Research in the Age of AI? |
| 10:00–10:20 | Short Talk 1 |
Hyunseok Seung — University of Wisconsin–Madison Scalable Derivative Gaussian Processes via Exact Gradient Reduction |
| 10:20–10:35 | Coffee break | |
| 10:35–10:55 | Short Talk 2 |
Qiaomin Xie — University of Wisconsin–Madison Wasserstein-p Central Limit Theorem Rates: From Local Dependence to Markov Chains |
| 10:55–11:15 | Short Talk 3 |
Ramya Korlakai Vinayak — University of Wisconsin–Madison Uncertainty Quantification for Predictive and Generative AI |
| 11:15–12:00 | Plenary Talk 2 |
Dima Drusvyatskiy — UC San Diego Iteratively Weighted Kernel Machines Efficiently Learn Sparse Functions |
| 12:00–2:30 | Lunch | |
| 2:30–2:50 | Short Talk 4 |
Sandeep Silwal — University of Wisconsin–Madison Robustness for Computing on High-Dimensional Data |
| 2:50–3:10 | Short Talk 5 |
Mo Zhou — University of Washington Learning Orthogonal Multi-Index Models Beyond Small Initialization: Incremental Learning, Competitive Dynamics and Symmetry |
| 3:10–3:30 | Coffee break | |
| 3:30–4:15 | Plenary Talk 3 |
Sarah Dean — Cornell University Recovering Latent Structure from Partially Observed Sequences with Auto-regressive Models |
| 4:15–4:35 | Short Talk 6 |
Ulugbek Kamilov — ECE, University of Wisconsin–Madison Stochastic Generative Plug-and-Play Priors |
| 4:35–4:55 | Short Talk 7 |
Garrett Mulcahy — University of Washington Diffusion Approximation to Schrödinger Bridges |
| 5:00–7:00 | Reception and poster session · Morgridge Hall, 7th-Floor Seminar Hub and 7th-Floor Atrium. See the poster list. | |
Tuesday, August 11 · 9:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.
3 plenaries · 5 short talks · 60-minute panel discussion · informal gathering at Union Terrace
| Time | Program item | Speaker & talk details |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00–9:45 | Plenary Talk 4 |
Anru Zhang — Duke University When Does Synthetic Data Augmentation Help in Imbalanced Learning? |
| 9:45–10:05 | Short Talk 8 |
Haoyue Bai — University of Wisconsin–Madison Latent-State User Simulators: Modeling User Intent via Chain-of-Thought Dynamics |
| 10:05–10:25 | Short Talk 9 |
Dhananjay Bhaskar — University of Wisconsin–Madison Distilling the Representational Geometry of Language Models |
| 10:25–10:40 | Coffee break | |
| 10:40–11:25 | Plenary Talk 5 |
Kevin Jamieson — University of Washington When is Adaptive Sampling for Learning Worth It? |
| 11:25–11:45 | Short Talk 10 |
Misha Khodak — University of Wisconsin–Madison Breakeven Complexity: When Do Neural Surrogates Pay Off? |
| 11:45–12:05 | Short Talk 11 |
Gokcan Tatli — University of Wisconsin–Madison Preference and Metric Learning |
| 12:05–2:30 | Lunch | |
| 2:30–3:15 | Plenary Talk 6 |
Stephen Mussmann — Georgia Tech Better Data by Design: A Framework for Active Learning, and Codifying Data-Centric ML |
| 3:15–3:30 | Coffee break | |
| 3:30–4:30 | Panel discussion |
Topic: How Has Fundamental Data Science Changed Since 2017? Panelists to be announced. |
| 4:30–4:50 | Short Talk 12 |
Pouria Behnoudfar — University of Wisconsin–Madison An Explainable AI for Bridging Physical Models of Varying Complexity |
| 5:00–7:00 | Informal gathering · Memorial Union Terrace | |
Wednesday, August 12 · 9:00 a.m.–12:00 noon
8 short talks · morning coffee · closing remarks
| Time | Program item | Speaker & talk details |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00–9:20 | Short Talk 13 |
Gavin Brown — University of Wisconsin–Madison Markov Chains and Privacy Before Mixing |
| 9:20–9:40 | Short Talk 14 |
Miju Ahn — Southern Methodist University Decision-Aware Predictions for Right-Hand Side Parameters in Linear Programs |
| 9:40–10:00 | Short Talk 15 |
Michael O. Harding — University of Wisconsin–Madison Learning from Biased and Costly Data Sources: Minimax-Optimal Data Collection under a Budget |
| 10:00–10:20 | Short Talk 16 |
Vydhourie Thiyageswaran — University of Washington Optimal Design under Interference, Homophily, and Robustness |
| 10:20–10:35 | Coffee break | |
| 10:35–10:55 | Short Talk 17 |
Yu-Jie Zhang — University of Washington Universal Dynamic Portfolios |
| 10:55–11:15 | Short Talk 18 |
Matthew Zurek — University of Wisconsin–Madison Optimal Variance-Dependent Regret Bounds for Infinite-Horizon MDPs |
| 11:15–11:35 | Short Talk 19 |
Nan Chen — University of Wisconsin–Madison Applied Math and Data Science in Modern Geoscience |
| 11:35–11:55 | Short Talk 20 |
Song Gao — University of Wisconsin–Madison Foundations in Geospatial Data Science and AI |
| 11:55–12:00 | Closing remarks | |
Poster Session
The poster session takes place on Monday evening, August 10, from 5:00–7:00 p.m., in the 7th-floor Seminar Hub and Atrium of Morgridge Hall, together with the welcome reception.
The program is provisional and subject to minor changes. Please check back closer to the meeting for updates.