Natural language research announcements

[dssi-cs <dssi-cs AT illinois.edu>]

The 2012 Data Sciences Summer Institute wraps up next week with three events, including our final project presentations. All events will be held in 2405 Siebel Center.

 

Monday, June 25, 1pm: “Using Apache Hadoop with Big Data” – Nathan Roberts, Yahoo! Inc. (abstract and bio below)

 

Wednesday, June 27, 1pm: “Machine Learning for Discovery in Legal Cases” – David Lewis, David D. Lewis Consulting (abstract and bio below; to schedule an individual meeting with this speaker, email erichorn AT illinois.edu)

 

Friday, June 29, 9am-12pm: DSSI Final Project Demos

·         Recognizing and Following “Hot” Events in Twitter

·         Detecting Events and Analyzing Sentiment via News and Social Media

 

 

“Using Apache Hadoop with Big Data” – Nathan Roberts, Yahoo! Inc.

Apache Hadoop is positioning itself as a major component in the big data arena. This talk will describe the history of Hadoop, from its beginnings in web search, to today’s diverse set of data applications being deployed on Hadoop. I will also provide an overview of the various components that make up the Hadoop stack; and describe sample use cases where Yahoo! builds on these components to solve real world big data problems.

 

Bio: Nathan Roberts is an architect for Yahoo!’s Hadoop Core team, located in the University of Illinois research park in Champaign IL. Prior to being a part of the Hadoop community, his areas of focus include high performance distributed storage systems, linux kernel internals, and operating system software for mobile phones.

 

 

“Machine Learning for Discovery in Legal Cases” – David Lewis, David D. Lewis Consulting

Changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in December 2006 led to an explosion in the amount of electronically stored information that needs to found and turned over in civil litigation in the United States. Traditional manual review approaches (rooms full of low paid lawyers and paralegals reading paper documents) have collapsed under this burden, spawning a multi-billion dollar electronic discovery (e-discovery) software and services industry. Information retrieval technology, particularly supervised machine learning for text classification, plays a pivotal role.
I will review the major technological and process challenges in e-discovery, the ways in which machine learning has been brought to bear on these challenges, and results from benchmarking efforts (in particular the NIST TREC Legal Track) in this area. I will also outline a new theoretical framework for studying supervised learning algorithms, Finite Population Annotation. FPA was inspired by the technical and legal context of the e-discovery setting, but arguably is an appropriate model for a range of practical applications of active and transductive learning.

Bio: Dave Lewis, Ph.D. (www.DavidDLewis.com) is a Chicago-based consulting computer scientist working in the areas of information retrieval, data mining, natural language processing, and the evaluation of complex information systems. He formerly held research positions at AT&T Labs, Bell Labs, and the University of Chicago. He has published more than 75 scientific papers and 8 patents, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006.

 

If you are interested in an individual meeting with this speaker, please contact Eric Horn (erichorn AT illinois.edu), 333-0871).

 

 

Data Sciences Summer Institute (DSSI):

The Data Sciences Summer Institute is a 6-week long program in Data Science areas for graduate and undergraduate students from around the country.  This summer program (May 20 – June 30, 2012) consists of an intensive class in the mathematical foundations of Data Sciences, tutorials on advanced Data Science topics and collaborative research projects.  The DSSI weaves together mathematical foundations, applications, and research.

 

The mission of the Data Sciences Summer Institute is to develop diverse human resources to enhance the scientific research, education, and government workforce in Data Science disciplines.  This program is funded by the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence – Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA) at the UIUC’s Multimodal Information Access & Synthesis (MIAS) Center, and by a grant from Yahoo!

 

For more information about the Data Sciences Summer Institute, please see our website at: http://mias.illinois.edu/DSSI2012 or contact Eric Horn at DSSI-cs AT illinois.edu, 217-333-0871.