COMP 875 Presentation Reading Lists

September 22: Rahul Raguram

This presentation covers learning techniques applied to a combination of images and text.

September 24: Brendan Walters

This presentation covers transformation-based error-driven learning for part-of-speech tagging.

September 29: Andrew White

This presentation focuses on sequence classification using hidden Markov models and their application to encrypted VoIP conversation reconstruction.

October 1: Kevin Snow

This presentation focuses on the application of HMM's in network traffic classification, VoIP spoken language reconstruction, and VoIP phrase recognition.

October 6: Xiaoyang Wen

CAPTCHA images are widely used on the Internet today as one major mechanism for distinguishing real human users from bot programs. How to design a good CAPTCHA that can defeat bots while not bothering human users too much is a very practical Internet security problem. I will introduce this issue in the presentation focusing on CAPTCHA design and breaking techniques, and what advantages machine learning schemes have in breaking even the most advanced CAPTCHA images.

October 8: Gabe Hart

This presentation covers the general topic of kernel regression. It gives background coverage of standard univariate-valued regression techniques, and focuses primarily on the subject of manifold kernel regression. The examples given focus on the use of manifold kernel regression as it applies to shape analysis in 2D images.

October 13: Liang Shan

This talk is about clustering techniques. A couple of clustering methods: K-means, fuzzy C-means and normalized cuts, etc., will be talked about. Their applications in image segmentation will also be covered.

October 15: Danny Kumar

This talk will present methods for estimating distances (redshifts) of quasars with partial (photometric) light measurements that are much less expensive than full (spectroscopic) measurements of the objects. Techniques used are neural networks and radial basis function networks. Also presented is a nearest-neighbor method of selecting a subset of quasars whose estimated distances are likely to be highly accurate.

October 20: Chen-Rui Chou

This talk will introduce an image registration method which is based on probabilistic learning and coarse-to-fine processing.

October 27: Tim Johnson

This presentation deals with the problem of learning distance functions. Specific attention is given to applications in image retrieval and classification.

October 29: Yunchao Gong

This presentation will focus on the recent advances in fast image search for very large scale image collections. We will first categorize these methods into three classes and mainly focus on the second (hashing) and the third (small code).

November 3: Jonathan Bidwell

This presentation covers a min-hash method for finding near-duplicate images in a large database of images. Insights from a recent implementation of the algorithm will be discussed.

November 5: Yilin Wang

The presentation will introduce Markov random fields and conditional random fields, and how to use them in image labeling.

November 10: Matthew O'Meara

I will introduce the Earth Mover's Distance as a meaningful measure of distance between probability distributions and point sets. While it unfortunately runs slowly, O(n^3log(n)),recent progress has been made at fast approximations of the EMD.

November 12: Christopher Sheldahl

This presentation will focus on the application of the
Gibbs sampler to the sequence alignment of biological macromolecules (proteins and nucleic acids).

November 17: Sami Benzaid

This presentation will focus on human action recognition.

November 19: Peng Li

This presentation will focus on the malware classification and clustering problem. I will first talk about why we have this problem and how we can do clustering. Then I will present the techniques adopted in the following papers and try to generalize the problem.

December 1: Joe Tighe

This presentation will cover apprenticeship learning with application to autonomous helicopter flight.