Date: April 14, 2026 Time: 14:00 Location: TBD Title: Rare Effects, Real Impact: Sparse Signal Modeling in Data Science and Engineering Speaker: Alon Kipnis is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science

Date: April 14, 2026 Time: 14:00 Location: בבניין 51 חדר 15 Title: Rare Effects, Real Impact: Sparse Signal Modeling in Data Science and Engineering Speaker: Alon Kipnis is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science Abstract: Many problems in data science share a common structure: among a large number of observed signals, most are pure noise while a small, unknown subset carry a true effect. This "needles in a haystack" setting calls for statistical tools that are sensitive to rare and weak departures from a null model. This talk discusses Higher Criticism (HC) as a principled, parameter-free tool for this setting, and traces its application across a range of problems: authorship attribution (the Federalist Papers, biblical authorship), survival analysis, quickest change-point detection in multistream data, and detection of human edits in AI-generated text. We also discuss emerging connections to few-shot classification with rare useful features and adaptive retrieval in large databases. On the theoretical side, we show that HC is asymptotically optimal for detecting rare/weak departures in a broad class of models, unified through a Rare Moderate Departure framework that yields sharp phase-transition boundaries for when detection is and is not possible. Bio: Alon Kipnis is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science, Reichman University, Israel. He received the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2017, and was a Koret Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Statistics at Stanford University from 2018 to 2021. His research interests include mathematical statistics, information theory, and signal processing in high-dimensions. Dr. Kipnis is the recipient of the 2023 Bergman Memorial Research Award of the U.S.–Israel Binational Science Foundation.