John Platt's Home Page

headshot06small Welcome to my home page! I am a Research Area Manager at Microsoft Research. I directly manage the Knowledge Tools Group, and help with the Machine Learning and Applied Statistics group, the Interactive Visual Media group, and the MSR Redmond Graphics Group.

Research interests

My research is focused on helping people become more effective and efficient. Part of this is improving the data/human interface, which includes projects such as:

Helping admins manage systems and networks by finding anomalies or understanding root causes of problems.
Improving the resolution of LCDs with ClearType (to help see more data per screen).
Improving document search through text categorization.

Part of making people more effective is giving them semi-automated tools for handling large amounts of data. These tools are based on fast machine learning algorithms, including:

Combining multiple instance learning with boosting to create MILBoost.
Fast search of high-dimensional data (for multimedia retrieval).
Fast training algorithms, probabilistic outputs, multi-class training, and on-line training for Support Vector Machines.

Finally, I’ve had an interest in improving the interface to various media (for entertainment, rather than for information workers):

Making digital music easier to use with audio fingerprinting and AutoDJ.
Making personal photographs more browsable with AutoAlbum.

Recent publications

Sorted by topic, then by date

Productivity tools based on machine learning

· Scalable Summaries of Spoken Conversations

by S. Basu, S. Gupta, M. Mahajan, P. Nguyen, J.C. Platt, Proc. Intelligent User Interfaces, to appear, (2008).

· Fast Variational Inference for Large-scale Internet Diagnosis

by J.C. Platt, E. Kiciman, D.A. Maltz, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 20, to appear, (2008).

· Mining Web Logs to Debug Distant Connectivity Problems

by E. Kiciman, D.A. Maltz, M. Goldszmidt, J.C. Platt, ACM SIGCOMM 2006 Workshop on Mining Network Data, (2006).

· Automatic Discovery of Personal Topics to Organize Email

by A.C. Surendran, J.C. Platt, E. Renshaw, 2^nd Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, (2005).

· Automatic Misconfiguration Troubleshooting with PeerPressure

by H. J. Wang, J. Platt, Y. Chen, R. Zhang, Y.-M. Wang, Proc. 6^th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, (2004). Shorter previous version as Peer Pressure for Automatic Troubleshooting pp. 398-399, ACM SIGMETRICS, (2004).

· Inductive Learning Algorithms and Representations for Text Categorization

by S. Dumais, J. Platt, D. Heckerman, M. Sahami, 7th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 148-152, (1998).

High-speed machine learning algorithms

· Fast Low-Rank Semidefinite Programming for Embedding and Clustering

By B. Kulis, A.C. Surendran, J.C. Platt, in Proc. 11^th International Conference on AI and Statistics, (2007).

· Redundant Bit Vectors for Quickly Searching High-Dimensional Regions

By J. Goldstein, J. C. Platt, C.J.C. Burges, in Deterministic and Statistical Methods in Machine Learning, J. Winkler, M. Niranjan, N. Lawrence, (eds.), Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science 3635, pp. 137-158, (2005). Previous version: Indexing High-Dimensional Regions for Fast Multimedia Identification, MSR-TR-2003-38, (2003).

· FastMap, MetricMap, and Landmark MDS are all Nyström Algorithms

By J. C. Platt, 10^th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, pp. 261-268, (2005).

· Learning to Learn with the Informative Vector Machine

By N. D. Lawrence, J. C. Platt, International Conference on Machine Learning, Paper No. 65, (2004).

· Fast Embedding of Sparse Music Similarity Graphs

By J. C. Platt, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16, pp. 571-578, (2004).

· Distortion Discriminant Analysis for Audio Fingerprinting

by C.J.C. Burges, J.C. Platt, S. Jana, IEEE Trans. on Speech and Audio Processing, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 165-174, (2003). Previous version appeared as “Extracting Noise-Robust Features from Audio Data” by C.J.C. Burges, J.C. Platt, S. Jana, ICASSP 2002, pp. I1021-I1024, (2002).

· Fast Training of Support Vector Machines using Sequential Minimal Optimization

by J.C. Platt, Advances in Kernel Methods - Support Vector Learning, B. Schölkopf, C. Burges, and A. Smola, eds., pp. 185-208, MIT Press, (1999). A conference version of the paper was “Using Analytic QP and Sparseness to Speed Training of Support Vector Machines,” by J.C. Platt, NIPS 11, pp. 557-563, (1999).

Intelligent image processing

· Multiple Instance Boosting for Object Detection

by P. Viola, J.C. Platt, C. Zhang, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Vol. 18, pp. 1417-1426, (2006).

· Learning Spatially-Variable Filters for Super-Resolution of Text

by A. Corduneanu, J.C. Platt, IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, (2005).

· PhotoTOC: Automatic Clustering for Browsing Personal Photographs

by J.C. Platt, M. Czerwinski, B. Field, Fourth IEEE Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia (2003). Longer version as Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2002-17, (2002).

· AutoAlbum: Clustering Digital Photographs Using Probabilistic Model Merging

by J.C. Platt, Proc. IEEE Workshop on Content-Based Access of Image and Video Libraries 2000, pp. 96-100, (2000).

Intelligent music & speech processing

· Speaker Identification using a Microphone Array and a Joint HMM with Speech Spectrum and Angle of Arrival

By J.W. Stokes, J.C. Platt, S. Basu, Proc. ICASSP, pp. III-736 – III-739, (2006).

· Robust RLS with Round Robin Regularization including Application to Stereo Acoustic Echo Cancellation

By J.W. Stokes, J.C. Platt, Proc. ICME, (2006).

· Hidden Conditional Random Fields for Phone Classification

By A. Gunawardana, M. Mahajan, A. Acero, J.C. Platt, Proc. Interspeech (2005).

· Regression-Based Residual Acoustic Echo Suppression

By A. Chhetri, A.C. Surendran, J.W. Stokes, J.C. Platt, International Workshop on Acoustic Echo and Noise Control, (2005).

· Using Audio Fingerprinting for Duplicate Detection and Thumbnail Generation

By C.J.C. Burges, D. Plastina, J.C. Platt, E. Renshaw, H.S. Malvar, ICASSP, Vol. 3, pp. 9-12, (2005)

· Convolutional Networks for Speech Detection

By S. Sukittanon, A.C Surendran, J.C. Platt, and C.J.C. Burges, ICSLP, Vol. 2, pp. 1077-1080, (2004).

· Logistic Discriminative Speech Detectors using Posterior SNRs

By A.C Surendran, S. Sukittanon, and J.C. Platt, ICASSP, Volume 5, pp. 625-628, (2004).

· Fast Embedding of Sparse Music Similarity Graphs

By J. C. Platt, NIPS 16, pp. 571-578, (2004).

· Distortion Discriminant Analysis for Audio Fingerprinting

· Learning a Gaussian Process Prior for Automatically Generating Music Playlists

by J C. Platt, C.J.C. Burges, S. Swenson, C. Weare, A. Zheng, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14, pp. 1425-1432, (2002).

Learning to learn (learning priors of Gaussian processes)

· Learning to Learn with the Informative Vector Machine

By N. D. Lawrence, J. C. Platt, International Conference on Machine Learning, (2004). Longer version: Extensions of the Informative Vector Machine, by N.D. Lawrence, J.C. Platt, M.I. Jordan, Proc. Sheffield Machine Learning Workshop, Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science 3635, (2005).

· Learning a Gaussian Process Prior for Automatically Generating Music Playlists

by J C. Platt, C.J.C. Burges, S. Swenson, C. Weare, A. Zheng, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14, pp. 1425-1432, (2002).

Applications of machine learning (including handwriting recognition)

· Minimizing Calibration Effort for an Indoor 802.11 Device Location Measurement System

by J. Krumm, J. Platt, Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2003-82, (2003).

· Best Practices for Convolutional Neural Networks Applied to Visual Document Analysis

by P.Y. Simard, D. Steinkraus, J.C. Platt, Intl. Conf. Document Analysis and Recognition, pp. 958-962, (2003).

· QuickStroke: An Incremental On-line Chinese Handwriting Recognition System

by N. P. Matić, J.C. Platt, T. Wang, 16^th Intl. Conf. Pattern Recognition, vol. 3, pp. 435-439, (2002).

ClearType

· Optimal Filtering for Patterned Displays

by J.C. Platt, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 7, 7, pp. 179-80, (2000).

· Displaced Filtering for Patterned Displays

by C. Betrisey, J.F. Blinn, B. Dresevic, B. Hill, G. Hitchcock, B. Keely, D.P. Mitchell, J.C. Platt, T. Whitted, Proc. Society for Information Display Symposium, pp. 296-299, (2000).

Support Vector Machines & large margin learning

· Online Bayes Point Machines

by E. Harrington, R. Herbrich, J. Kivinen, J. Platt, R. Williamson, Seventh Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 241-252, (2003).

· Estimating the Support of a High-Dimensional Distribution

by B. Schölkopf, J.C. Platt, J. Shawe-Taylor, A. J. Smola, and R. C. Williamson, Neural Computation, v 13, no 7, pp. 1443-1472, (2001). A longer version appeared as Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-99-87, (1999). A conference version was Support Vector Method for Novelty Detection by B. Schölkopf, R. Williamson, A.J. Smola, J. Shawe-Taylor, J.C. Platt, NIPS 12, pp. 582-588, (2000).

· Large Margin DAGs for Multiclass Classification

by J.C. Platt, N. Cristianini, J. Shawe-Taylor, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 12, pp. 547-553, MIT Press, (2000).

· Probabilities for SV Machines

by J.C. Platt, in Advances in Large Margin Classifiers, A. Smola, P. Bartlett, B. Schölkopf, D. Schuurmans, eds., pp. 61-74, MIT Press, (1999). Original Title: “Probabilistic Outputs for Support Vector Machines and Comparisons to Regularized Likelihood Methods”

· Fast Training of Support Vector Machines using Sequential Minimal Optimization

· Inductive Learning Algorithms and Representations for Text Categorization

by S. Dumais, J. Platt, D. Heckerman, M. Sahami, 7th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 148-152, (1998).

· How to Implement SVMs

by J. Platt, IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine, Trends and Controversies, Marti Hearst, ed., vol 13, no 4, (1998).

There are abstracts and downloadable Postscript of some older papers. These papers are about neural networks, visual object recognition, and computer graphics.

Biography

Before coming to Microsoft in 1997, I was Director of Research at a small company called Synaptics. They make touchpads and Chinese handwriting recognition products. At Synaptics, I worked on neural network architectures & hardware, neural networks to recognize objects, and handwriting recognition.

I got my Ph.D. at Computer Science at Caltech in the Caltech Computer Graphics group in 1989. I studied both computer graphics and neural networks. I got my M.S. at Caltech in 1985, in the Physics of Computation group.

Other Information

· I have worked with a number of other people inside and outside Microsoft Research

· I was the program chair for the NIPS 2006 conference, and general chair for the NIPS 2007 conference.

· Asteroids I've discovered

· My Erdös number is 3, through John-Shawe Taylor.

· My Kevin Bacon number is 3, through Rachel McAdams, see here or here.

Back to Knowledge Tools Home Page
My e-mail address is jplatt AT microsoft.com (non-standard form used to prevent spam).
Last updated 18 Apr 2006