Panel: Can Projects Coordinate?

• August 29, 2014
• Bart van Merrienboer, Bob Carpenter, Chih-Jen Lin, Frederic Bastien, Hal Daumé III, Heiko Strathmann, John Langford, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Leon Bottou, Nicolas Vasilache, and Sumit Chopra

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Speaker Details

Léon Bottou received the Diplôme d’Ingénieur de l’École Polytechnique (X84) in 1987, the Magistère de Mathématiques Fondamentales et Appliquées et d’Informatique from École Normale Superieure in 1988, the Diplôme d’Études Approndies in Computer Science in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from LRI, Université de Paris-Sud in 1991. After his Ph.D., Léon joined AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1991 to 1992. He then became chairman of Neuristique, a small company pioneering machine learning for data mining applications. He returned to AT&T Labs from 1995 to 2002, and NEC Labs America at Princeton from 2002 to March 2010. He recently joined the Science team of Microsoft adCenter. Léon’s primary research interest is machine learning. His contributions to this field address theory, algorithms and large scale applications. Léon’s secondary research interest is data compression and coding. His best known contribution in this field is the DjVu document compression technology. Léon has published over 60 papers. He is serving or has served on the boards of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine and Pattern Recognition Letters. More information at http://leon.bottou.org

John Langford is a machine learning research scientist, a field which he says “is shifting from an academic discipline to an industrial tool”. He is the author of the weblog hunch.net and the principal developer of Vowpal Wabbit. John works at Microsoft Research New York, of which he was one of the founding members, and was previously affiliated with Yahoo! Research, Toyota Technological Institute, and IBM’s Watson Research Center. He studied Physics and Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology, earning a double bachelor’s degree in 1997, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002. He was the program co-chair for the 2012 International Conference on Machine Learning.

Chih-Jen Lin is currently a distinguished professor at the Department of Computer Science, National Taiwan University. He obtained his B.S. degree from National Taiwan University in 1993 and Ph.D. degree from University of Michigan in 1998. His major research areas include machine learning, data mining, and numerical optimization. He is best known for his work on support vector machines (SVM) for data classification. His software LIBSVM is one of the most widely used and cited SVM packages. For his research work he has received many awards, including the ACM KDD 2010 and ACM RecSys 2013 best paper awards. He is an IEEE fellow, an AAAI fellow, and an ACM distinguished scientist for his contribution to machine learning algorithms and software design. More information about him can be found at http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin.

Hal Daumé III is an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. He holds joint appointments in UMIACS and Linguistics. His primary research interest is in understanding how to get human knowledge into a machine learning system in the most efficient way possible. He works primarily in the areas of language (computational linguistics and natural language processing) and machine learning (structured prediction, domain adaptation and Bayesian inference). He associates himself most with conferences like ACL, ICML, NIPS and EMNLP, and has over 30 conference papers (one best paper award in ECML/PKDD 2010) and 7 journal papers. He earned his PhD at the University of Southern California with a thesis on structured prediction for language (his advisor was Daniel Marcu). He spent the summer of 2003 working with Eric Brill in the machine learning and applied statistics group at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he studied math (mostly logic) at Carnegie Mellon University. He still likes math and doesn’t like to use C (instead he uses O’Caml or Haskell). He doesn’t like shoes, but does like activities that are hard on your feet: skiing, badminton, Aikido and rock climbing.

Sumit Chopra is a doctoral student under the supervision of Prof. Yann LeCun, at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. His primary area of interest in Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition. His research involves developing efficient inference and learning algorithms for models that can handle the uncertainties and interdependencies among samples in large scale data sets, with application in computer vision, robotics, and economics. He has published a number of papers in peer-reviewed conferences and journals including NIPS, CVPR, KDD, AISTATS and JPDC. He has also contributed to a chapter in a book titled “Predicting Structured Outputs.” He has been a reviewer of the journals “Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence,” and “Signal Image and Video Processing.” Sumit was also the recipient of Henry MacCraken fellowship award from New York University.

I am a research scientist at Google DeepMind. Previously, I was a researcher at Deepmind Technologies and before that a research staff member at NEC Labs America in the machine learning department. During my PhD, I was in Yann LeCun’s group (Computational and Biological Learning Lab) at New York University and worked on unsupervised learning of feature extractors and multi-stage architectures for object recognition. Before starting computer science studies, I did my masters and undergraduate on aerospace engineering.

Bart is a student at the University of Montreal.

Frederic is a researcher at the University of Montreal.

Heiko is a PhD student at the Gatsby Unit, UCL London. His research interests evolve around Machine Learning, Computational Statistics, and Neuroscience. In addition, he is attached to the Open-Source community, for example as his role as a core-developer and president of the Shogun Machine Learning Toolbox e.V.

Bob is a Research Scientist in the Department of Statistics at Columbia University.

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