Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

Representation Discovery for High-Dimensional Data Mining and Control

Seminar
Speaker: Sridhar Mahadevan University of Massachusetts Department of Computer Science 140 Governor’s Drive Amherst
Date: Monday, 10 Jan 2011 (all day)
Venue: A-212 (STCS Seminar Room)

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Abstract:  The explosive growth in digital archiving poses many fundamental challenges in machine learning. This talk will describe a confluence of recent ideas from applied mathematics, statistics, and machine learning on constructing low-dimensional representations that capture the intrinsic statistical properties of the original data. I will present new representation discovery algorithms motivated by two application domains: cross-lingual information retrieval and robotics. I will describe new alignment algorithms that find correspondences across languages by projecting document collections onto a common low-dimensional manifold. I also describe new reinforcement learning algorithms for solving robot control problems modeled as Markov decision processes that dynamically construct sparse representations for approximating value functions.

BIO: Sridhar Mahadevan is a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he co-directs the Autonomous Learning Laboratory. Professor Mahadevan's research interests span several areas of artificial intelligence and computer science, including machine learning, decision making, and robotics. He has published over a hundred articles in these areas, as well as three books.