Events Calendar

Annual George Bekey Keynote Lecture 2011

Speaker: Prof. Michael I. Jordan, University of California, Berkeley

Talk Title: Completely Random Measures for Bayesian Nonparametrics

Abstract: Computer Science has historically been strong on data structures and weak on inference from data, whereas Statistics has historically been weak on data structures and strong on inference from data. One way to draw on the strengths of both disciplines is to pursue the study of "inferential methods for data structures", i.e., methods that update probability distributions on recursively-defined objects such as trees, graphs, grammars and function calls. This is accommodated in the world of "Bayesian non parametrics", where prior and posterior distributions are allowed to be general stochastic processes. Both statistical and computational considerations lead one to certain classes of stochastic processes, and these tend to have interesting connections to combinatorics. I will focus on Bayesian non parametric modeling based on completely random measures, giving examples of how recursions based on these measures lead to useful models in several applied problem domains, including protein structural modeling, natural language processing, computational vision, and statistical genetics.



Biography: Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research in recent years has focused on Bayesian nonparametric analysis, probabilistic graphical models, spectral methods, kernel machines and applications to problems in signal processing, statistical genetics, computational biology, information retrieval and natural language processing. Prof. Jordan was named to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2010 and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2010. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the IMS, the ACM, and the IEEE.

Refreshments will be served at the Gerontology (GER) courtyard at 4 pm. Talk begins in GER Auditorium at 4:30pm.



Host: Prof. Fei Sha

Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - Auditorium

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kanak Agrawal