Vowpal Wabbit

The goal of this workshop is to inform people about open source machine learning systems being developed, aid the coordination of such projects, and discuss future plans.

Speaker Details

John Langford is a machine learning research scientist, a field which he says “is shifting from an academic discipline to an industrial tool”. He is the author of the weblog hunch.net and the principal developer of Vowpal Wabbit. John works at Microsoft Research New York, of which he was one of the founding members, and was previously affiliated with Yahoo! Research, Toyota Technological Institute, and IBM’s Watson Research Center. He studied Physics and Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology, earning a double bachelor’s degree in 1997, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002. He was the program co-chair for the 2012 International Conference on Machine Learning.

Hal Daumé III is an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. He holds joint appointments in UMIACS and Linguistics. His primary research interest is in understanding how to get human knowledge into a machine learning system in the most efficient way possible. He works primarily in the areas of language (computational linguistics and natural language processing) and machine learning (structured prediction, domain adaptation and Bayesian inference). He associates himself most with conferences like ACL, ICML, NIPS and EMNLP, and has over 30 conference papers (one best paper award in ECML/PKDD 2010) and 7 journal papers. He earned his PhD at the University of Southern California with a thesis on structured prediction for language (his advisor was Daniel Marcu). He spent the summer of 2003 working with Eric Brill in the machine learning and applied statistics group at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he studied math (mostly logic) at Carnegie Mellon University. He still likes math and doesn’t like to use C (instead he uses O’Caml or Haskell). He doesn’t like shoes, but does like activities that are hard on your feet: skiing, badminton, Aikido and rock climbing.

Date:
Speakers:
Hal Daumé III and John Langford
Affiliation:
Microsoft Research New York, University of Maryland