Future students

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.

Speaker: Fei Song (University of Guelph)

Text categorization is the process of assigning predefined categories to textual documents. As the exponential growth of web pages and online documents continues, there is an increasing need for systems that automatically classify text into proper categories.

Speaker: Shaheen Fatima

Sequential and simultaneous auctions are two important mechanisms for buying and selling multiple objects. These two mechanisms yield different outcomes (i.e., different surpluses, different revenues, and also different profits to the winning bidders). Given this, we compare the outcomes for the sequential and simultaneous mechanisms for the following scenario.

Speaker: Wei Li

The ability to update the structure of a Bayesian network when new data becomes available is crucial for building adaptive systems. Recent work demonstrates that the well-known Davis-Putnam procedure combined with a dynamic decomposition and caching technique is an effective method for exact inference in Bayesian networks with high density and width.

Speaker: Alex Lopez-Ortiz

Consider the scenario of routing of a Fedex delivery van. The packages to be delivered are received by midnight and delivery starts at 7:00am. This means we have seven hours to compute the best possible approximation to the optimum Travelling Salesman Path computable in that time.