Natural language research announcements

[Rajhans Samdani <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

This week we have Jing Gao from the DAIS group as our speaker at AIIS. She is 
a 
student of Prof. Jiawei Han. Details: 

When: Friday, Feb 11, 2 pm. 

Where: 3405, Siebel Center. 

Title: Exploring the Power of Heterogeneous Information Sources 

Abstract: 
Nowadays, a vast ocean of data is collected from trillions of connected 
devices 
everyday. Useful knowledge is usually buried in multiple genres of data, 
which are 
from different sources, in different formats, and with different types of 
representation. 
Many interesting patterns cannot be extracted from a single data collection, 
but have 
to be discovered from the integrative analysis of all heterogeneous data 
sources 
available. Although many algorithms have been developed to analyze multiple 
information sources, real applications continuously pose new challenges: Data 
can be 
gigantic, noisy, unreliable, dynamically evolving, highly imbalanced, and 
heterogeneous. Meanwhile, users provide limited feedback, have growing 
privacy 
concerns, and ask for actionable knowledge. In this talk, I will discuss my 
thesis work 
on exploring the power of multiple heterogeneous information sources in 
challenging 
learning scenarios. I will present two perspectives of learning from multiple 
sources, 
i.e., exploring their similarities (knowledge integration) or their 
differences 
(inconsistency detection). First, for knowledge integration, I proposed a 
graph based 
consensus maximization framework to combine multiple supervised and 
unsupervised 
models, which greatly improves classification accuracy. Second, I developed 
approaches based on probabilistic models and spectral embedding techniques to 
detect objects performing inconsistently across multiple sources as a new 
type of 
outliers. I will show the effectiveness of these general learning techniques 
with a few 
sample applications in social networks, Internet, multimedia, and 
cyber-security. 

See you! 
Best, 
Rajhans 


Rajhans Samdani,
Graduate Student,
Dept. of Computer Science,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.