Causality and Machine Learning

Come join us for this Meetup at Teknologihuset, where Fabio Massimo Zennaro will share knowledge on causal modelling, and its relationship to machine learning.
Free pizza & refreshments will be served!

Program:
17:30 - Pizza is served
18:00 - Talk by Fabio Massimo Zennaro
~19:00 - Fabio answers questions from the community

Causality is a pervasive concept in scientific and everyday reasoning. Defining the idea of causality is difficult, and this has hindered its adoption in many fields such as machine learning.

Yet, causal reasoning is arguably a relevant component of intelligence, and a significant amount of work has been done in the recent decades to formalize this concept.

This talk aims at providing an overall understanding of the role of causal modelling, and its relationship to machine learning. We are going to introduce casual models following the popular approach based on structural causal models proposed by Pearl, and show how they can capture the notion of causal relations. We will consider paradigmatic casual problems (causal inference and causal discovery) and discuss how they can be tackled. Finally, we will briefly explore connections between causality and machine learning, touching on topics such as learning with causal assumptions, using counterfactuals to assess fairness, and expressing reinforcement learning problems in causal terms.

Fabio Massimo Zennaro is a post-doc researcher in the Digital Security group of the University of Oslo. He holds a PhD in machine learning fro the University of Manchester.