Speaker: Han Zhao, University of Waterloo MSc graduate
We establish some theoretical connections between Sum-Product Networks (SPNs) and Bayesian Networks (BNs).
Speaker: Han Zhao, University of Waterloo MSc graduate
Speaker: Hassan Ashtiani, PhD candidate
We address the problem of communicating domain knowledge from a domain expert to the designer of a clustering algorithm.
Speaker: Areej Alhothali, PhD Candidate
We propose an extension to graph-based sentiment lexicon induction methods by incorporating distributed and semantic word representations in building the similarity graph to expand a three-dimensional sentiment lexicon. We also present a comprehensive evaluation of four graph-based propagation approaches using different word representations and similarity metrics.
Speaker: Priyank Jaini, PhD
We consider the problem of inferring a sequence of hidden states associated with a sequence of observations produced by an individual within a population. Instead of learning a single sequence model for the population (which does not account for variations within the population), we learn a set of basis sequence models based on different individuals.
Speaker: Aaron R. Voelker, PhD Candidate
One of the central challenges in neuroscience involves understanding how dynamic stimuli can be processed by neural mechanisms to drive behavior. By synthesizing models from neuroscience with tools from signal processing and control theory, we derive the feedback weights required to represent a low-frequency input signal by delaying it along a low-dimensional manifold, using a recurrently connected network of biologically plausible spiking neurons. This is shown to nonlinearly encode the continuous-time history of an input signal by optimally compressing it into a low-dimensional subspace.
Speaker: Zhengkun Shang, Master's Candidate
Emotions are an essential part of human social interactions. By integrating an automatic affect recognizer into an artificial system, the system can detect humans’ emotions and provide personal responses. We aim to build a prompting system that uses a virtual human with emotional interaction capabilities to help persons with a cognitive disability to complete daily activities independently.
Speaker: Milad Khaki, PhD Candidate
The project involves the analysis of procurement auctions for water infrastructure maintenance projects for Cities of Niagara Falls and London. The primary concern of this proposal is to generate a reliable mechanism for importing different formats of the tender summaries, provided as input data, of the projects and unify them in a database for further exploration and processing.
Speaker: Ivana Kajic, PhD Candidate
The semantic fluency task has been used to understand the effects of semantic relationships on human memory search. A variety of computational models have been proposed that explain human behavioral data, yet it remains unclear how millions of spiking neurons work in unison to realize the cognitive processes involved in memory search.
Speaker: Areej Alhothali, PhD Candidate
We propose an affect control theory-based (ACT) model to predict the temporal progression of the interactants' emotions and their optimal behavior over a sequence of interactions. ACT has a solid foundation in sociology to interpret, understand, and predict human social interactions. In this study, we extend the sociological mathematical model in ACT by learning and incorporating parameters from real data.