ShaiFest

ShaiFest, in honor of Shai Ben-David, will take place on Feb 27, 2026, immediately after ALT. You can register for free with your registration for the main conference. 

The morning program will include a tutorial for graduate students (everyone welcome!) by Shai Ben-David. During the afternoon, there will be invited talks by some of Shai’s most significant collaborators.

Friday,
Feb 27
9:30 – 10:30Tutorial I: Set Theory background: Cardinals, well orderings and independence of set theory
10:30 – 11:00Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:00Tutorial II: Infinite combinatorics and applications to ML theory
12:00 – 13:00Open Mic(*)
13:00 – 14:00Lunch
14:00 – 14:30Invited talk by Peter Bartlett
Title: Collaborating with Shai in the twentieth century
14:30 – 15:00Invited talk by Shay Moran
Title: Minimax for Infinite Games
15:00 – 15:30Coffee Break
15:30 – 16:00Invited talk by Hans Simon
Title: The Pioneering Era of Computational Learning and the First Years of my Collaboration with Shai
16:00 – 16:30Invited talk by Nati Srebro
Title: The Negative Result Minsky and Papert Got Wrong: Why SVMs and the Perceptron Don’t Work, and Does Deep Learning Help?
(*) Come to the open mic to share pictures, annectotes, birthday greetings! If you’d like to use some slides, please send pdf slides to Ruth (uruth@yorku.ca) beforehand.