Faculty Recruitment and Academic Talks from Shanghai Jiao Tong University

strong>Recruitment talk: Introduction to John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science,
Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Speaker: Xinbing Wang, Executive Director of John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science;
Distinguished Professor, Associate Dean, Ph.D. Supervisor in both EE & CS Department
School of Electronic, Information & Electrical Engineering Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Introduction of John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science, SJTU:
Shanghai Jiao Tong University is one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in China, which
enjoys a long history and a world-renowned reputation. John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science,
founded in January 2017, focuses on the fundamental problems in computer science, exploring new
theories and efficient algorithms for the future, and fostering talents in computer
science. The center will provide a favorable international academic environment for
faculty members. Now the center is seeking to fill several tenure-track positions in
computer science at the rank of Assistant Professor and above. Strong candidates in
all areas will be considered with special consideration given (but not limited) to AI,
Big Data, and Mobile Internet etc. An internationally competitive package for salary
and benefits will be offered by the center and SJTU makes a great effort to provide a
startup research grant.

Academic talk: Generative Adversarial Nets with Reinforcement Learning

Speaker: Weinan Zhang, Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of John Hopcroft Center for
Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Abstract:
Generative adversarial nets (GANs) have been well studied and applied to various applications of data
generation since 2014. Nonetheless, most of the studied data generation tasks focus on continuous
data such as image and speech, while the discrete (sequence) data such as text is far less studied due
to the difficulty of directly taking gradient on the discrete tokens. As such, reinforcement learning
(RL) approaches start to be considered as the solution to generate the discrete
data. By modeling the generator as a stochastic RL policy and training it via policy
gradient methods, it is promising to bypass the discrete data gradient problem and
generate high quality discrete data. In this talk, I will introduce the fundamental
SeqGAN model for discrete (sequence) data generation, and then the LeakGAN
model with information leaking to further improve the learning effectiveness in
the interplay between the generator and discriminator. Finally, I will extend the
discussion of GANs to multi-agent RL and show some demos of our recent work.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University is one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in China. John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science, founded in January 2017, focuses on the fundamental problems in computer science, exploring new theories and efficient algorithms for the future, and fostering talents in computer science. The center will provide a favorable international academic environment for faculty members. Now the center is seeking to fill several tenure-track positions in computer science at the rank of Assistant Professor and above. Strong candidates in all areas will be considered with special consideration given (but not limited) to Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Mobile Internet, etc. An internationally competitive package for salary and benefits will be offered by the center and SJTU makes a great effort to provide a startup research grant.

Following the recruitment talk, SJTU speakers will also give an academic talk about their recent work on generative adversarial networks (GANs) in the text domain.