Alumni

Speaker: Nasser Mooman

With the increasing amount of available information sources for learners, the need for systems that can effectively and efficiently mine, retrieve, and process such information has become critical.

Speaker: Linli Xu

In this talk, I will discuss a new unsupervised algorithm for training hidden Markov models that is convex and avoids the use of EM.

Speaker: Mu Zhu (Statistics and Actuarial Sciences, University of Waterloo)

I shall describe a few projects in the area of rare target detection.

Speaker: Mattt Enss

A lexical chain is a sequence of words in a document that are semantically related (i.e., related in meaning). Lexical chains indicate where certain topics or subjects are being discussed in a document. The chains therefore can provide context and be used to determine where topic changes occur.

Speaker: Claude-Guy Quimper

After giving a brief summary of general principles in constraint programming, we will present two constraints: the all different constraint and the global cardinality constraint.

Speaker: Wayne Oldford (Dir. of Computational Math, UW)

The problem of cluster analysis, or finding groups in data, is inherently ill-posed; hence the multitude of different methods which purport to solve "the'' problem. In this talk, a variety of examples illustrate this point and cast doubt on whether a single universally useful clustering method exists.

Speaker: Bowen Hui (University of Toronto)

Automated software customization is drawing increasing attention as a means to help users deal with the scope, complexity, potential intrusiveness, and ever-changing nature of modern software. The ability to automatically customize functionality, interfaces, and advice to specific users is made more difficult by the uncertainty about the needs of specific individuals and their preferences for interaction.

Speaker: Robin Cohen

In this paper, we discuss the importance of modeling the potential bother to the user, when reasoning about interaction in a mixed-initiative setting. We summarize our previous work on modeling bother as one of the costs of interaction, clarifying how to incorporate this estimated cost when reasoning about whether to initiate interaction.

Speaker: Rob Warren

Ontology research has had a renewed interest with the release of two ontological markup standards, DAML+OIL and OWL, in December of 2001 and March of 2002.

In this talk I'll review some of the work I did while at the Fungal Web Project in Montreal, where we faced several questions about the use and adoption of ontologies and their markup languages:

Speaker: Kevin Regan

This paper examines approaches to representing uncertainty in reputation systems for electronic markets with the aim of constructing a decision theoretic framework for collecting information about selling agents and making purchase decisions in the context of a social reputation system.