Natural language research announcements

["Samdani, Rajhans" <rsamdan2 AT illinois.edu>]

Dear all,

This is a gentle reminder for today's AIIS talk by Prof. Thorsten Joachims 
(www.cs.cornell.edu/people/tj/).
Details of the talk:

When: Monday, August 19, 2 pm (Note the difference from the usual AIIS 
Fridays)

Where: 3405 Siebel Center


Title: Learning with Humans in the Loop


Abstract:
Machine Learning is increasingly becoming a technology that directly 
interacts with human users. Search engines, recommender systems, and 
electronic commerce already heavily rely on adapting the user experience 
through machine learning, and other applications are likely to follow in the 
near future (e.g., autonomous robotics, smart homes, gaming). In this talk, I 
argue that learning with humans in the loop requires learning algorithms that 
explicitly account for human behavior, their motivations, and their judgment 
of performance. Towards this goal, the talk explores how integrating 
microeconomic models of human behavior into the learning process leads to new 
learning models that no longer reduce the user to a "labeling subroutine". 
This motivates an interesting area for theoretical, algorithmic, and applied 
machine learning research with connections to rational choice theory, 
econometrics, and behavioral economics.


Bio:
Thorsten Joachims is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. 
His research interests center on a synthesis of theory and system building in 
machine learning, with applications in language technology, information 
retrieval, and recommendation. His past research focused on support vector 
machines, text classification, structured output prediction, convex 
optimization, learning to rank, learning with preferences, and learning from 
implicit feedback. In 2001, he finished his dissertation advised by Prof. 
Katharina Morik at the University of Dortmund. From there he also received 
his Diploma in Computer Science in 1997. Between 2000 and 2001 he worked as a 
PostDoc at the GMD Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems. From 1994 to 
1996 he was a visiting scholar with Prof. Tom Mitchell at Carnegie Mellon 
University.

Hope to see you all there.
Best,
Rajhans