Welcome to The Salon!

The Salon is a group dedicated to the study of Statistics, Algorithms, Learning, and OptimizatioN. It is led by Professor Gautam Kamath at the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Its members are also affiliated with the Vector Institute. Current emphases of the group include enriching our understanding of data privacy and robustness in statistics and machine learning.

The name of The Salon is in reference to the French practice from the 17th and 18th centuries, a central venue for exchange of some of the most important ideas of the era.

News

May 2022: Incoming student Jimmy Di awarded the Vector Scholarship in Artifical Intelligence.
April 2023: One paper accepted to ICML 2023.
April 2023: One paper posted on arXiv.
April 2023: The Salon is now affiliated with the Vector Institute.
March 2023: Two papers (1, 2) posted on arXiv.
February 2023: Mahbod Majid awarded Faculty of Mathematics Graduate Research Excellence Award.
February 2023: One paper posted on arXiv.
February 2023: One paper accepted to STOC 2023.
January 2023: One paper posted on arXiv.

Recent Publications

Yiwei Lu, Gautam Kamath, Yaoliang Yu

July 2023 Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023)

Exploring the Limits of Indiscriminate Data Poisoning Attacks

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Samuel B Hopkins, Gautam Kamath, Mahbod Majid, Shyam Narayanan

June 2023 Proceedings of the 55th Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC 2023)

Robustness Implies Privacy in Statistical Estimation

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Rachel Cummings, Damien Desfontaines, David Evans, Roxana Geambasu, Matthew Jagielski, Yangsibo Huang, Peter Kairouz, Gautam Kamath, Sewoong Oh, Olga Ohrimenko, Nicolas Papernot, Ryan Rogers, Milan Shen, Shuang Song, Weijie Su, Andreas Terzis, Abhradeep Thakurta, Sergei Vassilvitskii, Yu-Xiang Wang, Li Xiong, Sergey Yekhanin, Da Yu, Huanyu Zhang, Wanrong Zhang

April 2023 arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.06929