Pedro Domingos
Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington

"Markov Logic Networks: A Language for Statistical Relational Learning"

Abstract:

Modern machine learning applications are characterized by high degrees of complexity and uncertainty. Complexity is well handled by first-order logic, and uncertainty by probabilistic graphical models. Statistical relational learning seeks to combine the two. Markov logic networks (MLNs) do this by attaching weights to logical formulas and treating them as templates for features of Markov random fields. This talk will cover MLN representation, inference, learning and applications. MLN inference techniques are based on satisfiability testing, resolution, Markov chain Monte Carlo, and belief propagation. Learning techniques include pseudo-likelihood, voted perceptrons, second-order convex optimization, and inductive logic programming. MLNs have been applied in a wide variety of areas, including natural language processing, information extraction and integration, robot mapping, social networks, computational biology, and others. Open-source implementations of MLN algorithms are available in the Alchemy package (alchemy.cs.washington.edu). (Joint work with Jesse Davis, Stanley Kok, Daniel Lowd, Aniruddh Nath, Hoifung Poon, Matt Richardson, Parag Singla, Marc Sumner, and Jue Wang.)

Bio:

Pedro Domingos is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His research interests are in artificial intelligence, machine learning and data mining. He received a PhD in Information and Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine, and is the author or co-author of over 150 technical publications. He is  a member of the editorial board of the Machine Learning journal, co-founder of the International Machine Learning Society, and past associate editor of JAIR. He was program co-chair of KDD-2003 and SRL-2009, and has served on numerous program committees. He has received several awards, including a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Scholarship, an IBM Faculty Award, and best paper awards at KDD-98, KDD-99, PKDD-05 and EMNLP-09.