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:

Sho: a system for scientific computing on top of .NET
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;

and automatically creating representations for data, including:

Generating good representations for text and audio using Oriented Principal Components Analysis.

Biography

I've been a researcher at Microsoft Research since 1997, where I led the Statistical Media Processing project, and then the Knowledge Tools group. Before Microsoft, I was Director of Research at Synaptics. I received my Ph.D. from Caltech in 1989, where I studied both computer graphics and machine learning.

In 2006, I received a Technical Academy Award for my research in simulating cloth and other stretchy material for computer graphics.

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. By some definition, my Kevin Bacon number is also 3, through Rachel McAdams.

Recent publications

Sorted by topic, then by date

Learning representations of data

Learning Discriminative Projections for Text Similarity Measures by W.-T. Yih, K. Toutanova, J.C. Platt, C. Meek, Proc. Co-NLL, (2011).
Translingual Document Representations from Discriminative Projections by J.C. Platt, K. Toutanova, W.-T. Yih, Proc. Empirical Methods in NLP, (2010).

Productivity tools based on machine learning

Learning from multi-topic web documents for contextual advertisement by Y. Zhang, A.C. Surendran, J.C. Platt, M. Narasimhan, Proc. KDD, pp. 1051-1059, (2008).
Scalable Summaries of Spoken Conversations by S. Basu, S. Gupta, M. Mahajan, P. Nguyen, J.C. Platt, Proc. Intelligent User Interfaces, (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, 1169-1176, (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).

Machine learning for visual object recognition

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).
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).
A Convolutional Neural Network Hand Tracker, by S. Nowlan and J. Platt, NIPS 7, pp.901-908, (1995).
Postal Address Block Location Using A Convolutional Locator Network, by R. Wolf and J. Platt, NIPS 6, pp. 745-752, (1994).

Intelligent signal processing

Please see the Statistical Media Processing project page.

Improved user interface for media

Please see the Audio Fingerprinting, AutoDJ, and AutoAlbum project pages.

ClearType

Please see the ClearType project page.

Support Vector Machines & Large Margin Learning

Please see the Support Vector Machine project page.