Invited speaker: Stochastic Geodesic Optimization, Ashia Wilson

Geodesic convexity offers a promising systematic way to handle non-convexity for many problems of interest in statistics and computer science. The focus of this talk will be to describe efforts to extend the basic tools of convex optimization on Euclidean space to the general setting of Riemannian manifolds. We begin by motivating our focus on geodesic optimization with several examples, reviewing the basics of geodesic spaces and several techniques from optimization along the way. Particular attention will be given to optimization techniques which achieve oracle lower bounds for minimizing stochastic functions, namely accelerated methods. We end with a discussion of how one might adapt these techniques to the Riemannian setting.