CMU ML/Google Seminar: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN MARKOV LOGIC

January 14, 2008
Speaker: Pedro Domingos Associate Professor, University of Washington
Title: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN MARKOV LOGIC

Abstract:
Intelligent agents must be able to handle the complexity and uncertainty of the real world. Logical AI has focused mainly on the former, and statistical AI on the latter. Markov logic combines the two by attaching weights to first-order formulas and viewing them as templates for features of Markov networks. Learning and inference algorithms for Markov logic are available in the open-source Alchemy system. In this talk I will discuss some of the latest developments in Markov logic, including lifted first-order probabilistic inference, relational decision theory, statistical predicate invention, efficient second-order algorithms for weight learning, extending the representation to continuous features, and transferring learned knowledge across domains. I will give an overview of recent and ongoing applications in natural language processing, robot mapping, social network analysis, and computational biology, and conclude with a discussion of open problems and exciting research directions. (Joint work with Jesse Davis, Stanley Kok, Daniel Lowd, Hoifung Poon, Aniruddh Nath, Matt Richardson, Parag Singla, Marc Sumner, and Jue Wang.)

Speaker Bio: I received an undergraduate degree (1988) and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (1992) from IST, in Lisbon. I received an M.S. (1994) and Ph.D. (1997) in Information and Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine. I spent two years as an assistant professor at IST, before joining the faculty of the University of Washington in 1999. I'm the author or co-author of over 100 technical publications in machine learning, data mining, and other areas. I'm a member of the editorial board of the Machine Learning journal and the advisory board of JAIR, and a co-founder of the International Machine Learning Society. I was program co-chair of KDD-2003, and I've served on the program committees of AAAI, ICML, IJCAI, KDD, SIGMOD, WWW, and others. I've received a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Scholarship, an IBM Faculty Award, two KDD best paper awards, and other distinctions.