Alexander J. Smola
homepage:http://alex.smola.org/
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Description

My primary research interest covers the following four areas:

  • Scalability of algorithms. This means pushing algorithms to internet scale, distributing them on many (faulty) machines, showing convergence, and modifying models to fit these requirements. For instance, randomized techniques are quite promising in this context. In other words, I'm interested in big data.
  • Kernels methods are quite an effective means of making linear methods nonlinear and nonparametric. My research interests include support vector Machines, gaussian processes, and conditional random fields. Kernels are very useful also for the representation of distributions, that is two-sample tests, independence tests and many applications to unsupervised learning.
  • Statistical modeling, primarily with Bayesian Nonparametrics is a great way of addressing many modeling problems. Quite often, the techniques overlap with kernel methods and scalability in rather delightful ways.
  • Applications, primarily in terms of user modeling, document analysis, temporal models, and modeling data at scale is a great source of inspiration. That is, how can we find principled techniques to solve the problem, what are the underlying concepts, how can we solve things automatically.


Lectures:

tutorial
flag Kernel methods and Support Vector Machines
as author at  Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS), Kioloa 2008,
10846 views
  invited talk
flag The Parameter Server
as author at  Discrete Optimization in Machine Learning,
697 views
invited talk
flag Fast Food: Approximating Kernel Expansion in Loglinear Time
as author at  Confluence between Kernel Methods and Graphical Models,
664 views
  lecture
flag Introduction to kernel methods
as author at  Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS), Tübingen 2007,
5995 views
lecture
flag Kernel Methods
as author at  Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS), Taipei 2006,
3282 views
  tutorial
flag Exponential Families
as author at  Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS), Canberra 2006,
3178 views
invited talk
flag Learning Graph Matching
as author at  5th International Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs (MLG), Firenze 2007,
2023 views
  invited talk
flag Scaling Latent Variable Models
as author at  Bayesian Nonparametric Methods: Hope or Hype?,
274 views
lecture
flag From collaborative filtering to multitask learning
as author at  27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Haifa 2010,
339 views
  lecture
flag Unsupervised Learning with Kernels
as author at  Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS), Tübingen 2003,
710 views
lecture
flag Nonparametric Tests between Distributions
as author at  Workshop on Modelling in Classification and Statistical Learning, Eindhoven 2004,
708 views
  lecture
flag Bayesian Kernel Methods
as author at  Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS), Canberra 2002,
549 views
lecture
flag Parallel Topic Models
as author at  NIPS Workshops, Whistler 2009,
258 views
  lecture
flag Improving Maximum Margin Matrix Factorization
as author at  European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD), Antwerp 2008,
together with: Markus Weimer, Alexandros Karatzoglou,
308 views
panel
flag Is non-(geo)metricity an issue for machine learning?
as author at  27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Haifa 2010,
together with: Joachim M. Buhmann, Edwin Hancock, Shai Ben-David,
171 views
  lecture
flag Exponential Families in Feature Space
as author at  Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS), Canberra 2005,
336 views
lecture
flag Mixed Norm Kernels, Hyperkernels and Other Variants
as author at  NIPS Workshop on Kernel Learning: Automatic Selection of Optimal Kernels, Whistler 2008,
226 views
  lecture
flag Exponential Families in Feature Space
as author at  Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS), Berder Island 2004,
290 views
lecture
flag Using features of probability distributions to achieve covariate shift
as author at  NIPS Workshop on Learning when Test and Training Inputs Have Different Distributions, Whistler 2006,
270 views
  lecture
flag Unifying Divergence Minimization and Statistical Inference via Convex Duality
as author at  Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS), Taipei 2006,
211 views