Machine Learning Class (Session #1)

October 1, 2012
John Langford and Vijay Narayanan | MSR-NYC, Microsoft

October 1: Beginning Day

9:30am-10:45am
Intro to Machine Learning: Part I
John Langford and Vijay Narayanan

I’ll discuss what machine learning is at a high level and provide a short overview of the course.

Speaker Details

John Langford studied Physics and Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology, earning a double bachelor’s degree in 1997, and received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002. Since then, he has worked at Yahoo!, Toyota Technological Institute, and IBM’s Watson Research Center. He is also the primary author of the popular Machine Learning weblog, hunch.net and the principle developer of Vowpal Wabbit. Previous research projects include Isomap, Captcha, Learning Reductions, Cover Trees, and Contextual Bandit learning. For more information visit http://hunch.net/~jl

Vijay K Narayanan joined the Cloud and Information Services Lab in May 2012, where he works on a platform and applications of machine learning. Earlier, he was a Principal Scientist in Yahoo Labs, where he worked on large scale machine learning applications in computational advertising. He received a B.Tech degree from IIT, Chennai and a Ph.D in Astronomy from The Ohio State University. He had worked as a Sloan Digital Sky Survey research fellow in Astrophysics in Princeton University, a Modeling Researcher in ACI Worldwide and an Analytic Science Manager in Fair Isaac corporation. He has authored or co-authored about 55 peer-reviewed papers in astrophysics, about 10 papers on machine learning in internet applications, a dozen patents (filed or granted), and presented an invited tutorial in each of WWW 2010 and KDD 2011, besides several talks. He is deeply interested in the theoretical, applied and business aspects of large scale data mining and machine learning, and has indiscriminate interests in statistics, information retrieval, extraction, signal processing, information theory, large scale computing etc. He is a co-discoverer of the ionization boundary, and the 4 farthest quasars (circa 2002) in the universe.