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Matt Graham - ARC, UCL 
Thursday 20 November 2025, 13:00-14:00
Automatic differentiation - an RSE's eye view
- đ¤ Speaker: Matt Graham - ARC, UCL đ Website
- đ Date & Time: Thursday 20 November 2025, 13:00 - 14:00
- đ Venue: Room A, West Hub
Abstract
Automatic or algorithmic differentiation (AD) underpins much of the current boom in use of machine learning methods but is also widely used in other scientific computing contexts.
In this talk I will give an overview of what automatic differentiation is and a brief summary of its history. I will then review how it relates to symbolic and numerical differentiation, how forward- and reverse-mode AD differ and some of the different approaches to implementing AD frameworks, before demonstrating how AD is used in practice with some applied examples. I will conclude with some discussion of my experiences of using various automatic differentiation implementations in research software projects I have worked on, particularly from a context of the trade-offs between ease of use and maintainability and generality of code a framework can differentiate.
Series This talk is part of the RSE Seminars series.
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