Current undergraduate students

Friday, December 1, 2006 12:30 pm - 12:30 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

AI seminar: Global reinforcement learning

Speaker: Milen Pavlov

When applying reinforcement learning to real world problems it is desirable to make use of any prior information to speed up the learning process. Unfortunately, there does not exist any framework for encoding prior knowledge in RL nor developing general algorithms that make use of it.

Friday, November 24, 2006 12:30 pm - 12:30 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

AI seminar: Rule-based social networking for expert finding

Speaker: Harold Boley (University of New Brunswick and Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council of Canada)

The Semantic Web contributes to making AI mainstream. AI knowledge representations such as ontologies and rules can be used to formalize Web metadata vocabularies, where constants, classes, and relations carry (Uniform Resource Identifier) URIs. This permits AI reasoning over metadata both for direct question answering and high-precision information (URI) retrieval.

Friday, November 10, 2006 12:30 pm - 12:30 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

AI seminar: Integrating laws and norms into MAS architectures

Speaker: Salvador Garcia-Martinez (McMaster University)

Through the development of Multi-Agent Systems, different architectures for agent systems have emerged. They follow different models and standards, but at the same time they share something in common: elements and relations. In this talk, I will discuss different multi-agent architectures that have been developed, focusing mainly on their similarities and how they have been implemented.

Speaker: Saeed Hassanpour

Recognition of cursive handwritings such as Persian script is a hard task as there is no fixed segmentation and simultaneous segmentation and recognition is required. We presents a novel comparison method for such tasks which is based on a Multiple States Machine to perform robust elastic comparison of small segments with high speed through generation and maintenance of a set of concurrent possible hypotheses.

Speaker: Jie Zhang

Familiarity between agents is often considered to be an important factor in determining the level of trust. In electronic marketplaces, trust is modeled, for instance, in order to allow buying agents to make effective selection of selling agents. In previous research, familiarity between two agents has been simply assumed to be the similarity between them, which is fixed for the two agents.

Friday, October 13, 2006 12:30 pm - 12:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

AI seminar: Exploring user-centric clickstream data for personalization

Speaker: Jiye Li

Clickstream data collected across multiple websites (user-centric data) captures users' browsing behaviors, interests and preferences more than clickstream data collected from individual websites (site-centric data). For example, we would expect that we could better model and predict the intentions of users who we know not only searched on google but also visited certain shopping websites, than if we know only one of these pieces of information. Current research on clickstream data analysis is mostly centered around site-centric data.

Speaker: Feng Jiao

We present a new semi-supervised training procedure for conditional random fields (CRFs) that can be used to train sequence segmentors and labelers from a combination of labeled and unlabeled training data.

Friday, September 29, 2006 12:30 pm - 12:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

AI seminar: TRANSLATOR: A TRANSlator from LAnguage TO Rules

Speaker: David Hirtle

One explanation as to why the Semantic Web has not quite caught on yet is that the barrier to entry is too high. This talk describes TRANSLATOR, a free tool available as a Java Web Start application designed to allow anyone, even non-experts, to write facts and rules in formal representation for use on the Semantic Web.