Speaker: William Hamilton, McGill University and MILA

Title: Graph Representation Learning: Recent Advances and Open Challenges

Abstract: Graph-structured data is ubiquitous throughout the natural and social sciences, from telecommunication networks to quantum chemistry. Building relational inductive biases into deep learning architectures is crucial if we want systems that can learn, reason, and generalize from this kind of data. Recent years have seen a surge in research on graph representation learning, most prominently in the development of graph neural networks (GNNs). Advances in GNNs have led to state-of-the-art results in numerous domains, including chemical synthesis, 3D-vision, recommender systems, question answering, and social network analysis. In the first part of this talk I will provide an overview and summary of recent progress in this fast-growing area, highlighting foundational methods and theoretical motivations. In the second part of this talk I will discuss fundamental limitations of the current GNN paradigm and propose open challenges for the theoretical advancement of the field.