Natural language research announcements

[Margaret Fleck <mfleck AT cs.uiuc.edu>]

The following talk in CSL, 4-5pm tomorrow (Tuesday), may be interesting to
some natural language folks.   I don't know anything beyond what's attached
and (in particular) don't know anything about the balance of theory and
practice in this talk.

   Margaret Fleck

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*** RECEPTION IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING TUESDAY, APRIL 13th SEMINAR IN ROOM 301 
CSL ***



DISTINGUISHED VISITOR LECTURE SERIES

·         Main Lecture:  4/13/10 @ 4:00 p.m. in Room B02

·         Related Talks:  4/12, 4/14, 4/15, and 4/16/10 @ 9:00 a.m. all days 
in Room B02



Title:  Foreseeing the Unseen:  Probability Estimation over Large Alphabets



Speaker:  Professor Alon Orlitsky, ECE and CSE, UCSD



Date:  April 13, 2010

Time:  4:00 - 5:00 p.m.

Where:  B02 Coordinated Science Lab





Abstract:  Many applications call for estimating probabilities of rare, even previously unseen, 
events. This overview talk first outlines the problem's theory, applications, and relation to works 
by Fisher, Shakespeare, Laplace, Good, Turing, Hardy, Ramanujan, and Shannon, and then describes 
recent constructions of asymptotically optimal estimators. Four more technical talks presented 
throughout the week will concentrate on specific aspects and provide proofs and simulation results. 
The talks are self contained and based on work with P. Santhanam, K. Viswanathan, J. Zhang, and others.



Biography:  Alon Orlitsky received B.Sc. degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Ben 
Gurion University in 1980 and 1981, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from 
Stanford University in 1982 and 1986.



 From 1986 to 1996 he was with the Communications Analysis Research Department of Bell 
Laboratories. He spent the following year as a quantitative analyst at D.E. Shaw and Company, an 
investment firm in New York city. In 1997 he joined the University of California, San Diego, where 
he is currently a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Computer Science and 
Engineering, and directs the Information Theory and Applications Center.



Alon's research concerns information theory, statistical modeling, machine learning, and speech 
recognition. He is a recipient of the

1981 ITT International Fellowship and the 1992 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Paper Award, a co-recipient of the 
2006 Information Theory Society Paper Award, a fellow of the IEEE, and holds the Qualcomm Chair for 
Information Theory and its Applications at UCSD.



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Barbara J. Horner
University of Illinois
Coordinated Science Lab
Room 131 / MC-228
1308 West Main Street
Urbana, IL 61801

Phone:  217-265-0839
Fax:  217-244-1642
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Attachment: Orlitsky CV.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document