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Clustering… Again?

20 March 2026
h:
11:30 - 00:30
Location:
Meeting Room, Building C, Area Science Park, Padriciano 99, Trieste
Speaker:
Alejandro Rodriguez, Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics, Informatics and Geosciences, University of Trieste

Clustering is one of the most classical problems in data analysis, yet it continues to inspire new ideas and methods. In this talk I will revisit the Density Peaks framework and some of its recent developments, including Advanced Density Peaks and strategies to improve its computational efficiency. Building on these ideas, I will introduce a new perspective that connects Density Peaks with other well-known approaches such as Mean Shift and Spectral Clustering, leading to a method we call Spectral Density Peaks. Finally, I will briefly explore a different direction: whether representation learning tools such as Variational Autoencoders can help simplify clustering problems by reshaping the geometry of the data. I will conclude with a few speculative ideas and open questions for those interested in pushing these approaches further.