s u m i t * b a s u
s u m i t b @ m i c r o s o f t . c o m
     

background

 

   I'm Sumit Basu, a Researcher in the Knowledge Tools Group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. My research focus is on developing interactive, machine-learning based power tools to assist users in understanding and extracting answers from complex data - be it in computer systems, sensory signals like speech or music, scientific data, document collections, or the web.   The interactive aspect comes from having humans in a tight loop with the learning algorithm: instead of getting a big batch of labeled data, interactive learning tasks involve a delicate dance between the human and the algorithm to achieve sufficient performance with a minimum of operator effort.  If you're a bright graduate student interested in such problems and curious about internship opportunities, drop me a line!

A brief history: I received my BS (1995), MEng (1997), and PhD (2002) all from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  I did my graduate work at the Media Lab with Professor Alex Pentland.  My doctoral thesis, "Conversational Scene Analysis," examined how machine learning and signal processing techniques could be used to understand the structure of conversational interactions from auditory signals without recognizing words.  The common thread through all of my work to date has been the combination of sensors and machine learning; fortunately there are an endless array of application areas (including systems) of this ilk, especially if one is flexible in one's definition of "sensor." 

 

current projects

  

Interactive Machine Learning: machine learning problems with a human in the loop

Songsmith: a songwriting tool that takes melodies and helps develop accompaniments for them: based on this research, it's now a product. Check it out and download the trial here.

StickySorter: a tool for doing affinity diagramming and other flavors of information organization: you can download it here.

Sho: an interactive language for scientific computing based on IronPython

Music Analysis/Synthesis: using machine learning to help users understand, manipulate, and create music

Systems and Machine Learning: using machine learning to address problems in computer systems

Conversational Scene Analysis: seeking structure and content from conversational patterns

 

current activities

   Co-Chair (with Armando Fox), Systems and Machine Learning Workshop, 2008 (SysML 2008).  at OSDI 2008.

Senior PC Member, Intelligent User Interfaces 2009 (IUI'09).

Co-Chair (with Archana Ganapathi, Emre Kiciman, and Fei Sha), MLSys'07: Workshop on Statistical Learning Techniques for Systems Problems at NIPS 2007.

Publicity Chair, NIPS 2007.  You can see the poster I designed for the conference here.

PC Member, Systems and Machine Learning Workshop, 2007 (SysML 2007).  at NSDI 2007.

For fall quarter 2007, Emre Kiciman and I taught a graduate course on Systems Applications of Machine Learning (cse599n) at the University of Washington.

Other quarters, I co-teach the Markovia Seminar (cse590mv) on Machine Learning with Tanzeem Choudhury at the University of Washington.

 

recent papers

   Alan Ritter and Sumit Basu.  "Learning to Generalize for Complex Selection Tasks."  In Proceedings of Intelligent User Interfaces 2009 (IUI '09).  January, 2009.  [Winner of Best Student Paper Award] [webpage with paper and video]

Eric Nichols, Dan Morris, and Sumit Basu.  "Data-Driven Exploration of Musical Chord Sequences."  In Proceedings of Intelligent User Interfaces 2009 (IUI '09).  January, 2009.

Michael Gamon, Sumit Basu, Dmitriy Belenko, Danyel Fisher, Matthew Hurst, Arnd Christian König. "BLEWS - Using Blogs to Provide Context for News Articles."  In Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). April, 2008. [webpage] [video demo]

Dan Morris, Ian Simon, and Sumit Basu.  "Exposing Parameters of a Trained Dynamic Model for Interactive Music Creation."  In Proceedings of AAAI 2008.  June, 2008.

Ian Simon, Dan Morris, and Sumit Basu.  "MySong:  Automatic Accompaniment Generation for Vocal Melodies."  In Proceedings of Computer-Human Interaction 2008 (CHI '08).  April, 2008.

Sumit Basu, Surabhi Gupta, Milind Mahajan, Patrick Nguyen, and John C. Platt.  "Scalable Summaries of Spoken Conversations."  In Proceedings of Intelligent User Interfaces 2008 (IUI '08).  January, 2008.

Sumit Basu, John Dunagan, and Greg Smith.  "Why Did My PC Suddenly Slow Down?"  In Proceedings of the Systems and Machine Learning Workshop 2007.  April, 2007.

Ashish Kapoor, Eric Horvitz, and Sumit Basu.  "Selective Supervision: Guiding Supervised Learning with Decision-Theoretic Active Learning."  In Proceedings of the Int'l. Joint Conf. on AI (IJCAI '07). January, 2007.

Karthik Gopalratnam, Sumit Basu, John Dunagan, and Helen Wang.  "Automatically Extracting Fields from Unknown Network Protocols."  In Proceedings of the Systems and Machine Learning Workshop 2006 (SysML'06).  June, 2006.

Sumit Basu.  "Acoustic Echo Cancellation in a Channel with Rapidly Varying Gain."  In Proceedings of the the Int'l Conf. on Multimedia and Expo 2006 (ICME'06).  July, 2006.

Jay Stokes, John Platt, and Sumit Basu.  "Speaker Identification Using a Microphone Array and a Joint HMM with Speech Spectrum and Angle of Arrival."  In Proceedings of the the Int'l Conf. on Multimedia and Expo 2006 (ICME'06).  July, 2006. 

Nebojsa Jojic, Sumit Basu, and Nemanja Petrovic.  "Home Video Browsing and Consumption Through Exploration of a Learned Generative Model."   (Video Submission).  In Proceedings of CVPR'06.  June 2006.

Nemanja Petrovic, Aleksandar Ivanovic, Nebojsa Jojic, Sumit Basu, and Thomas Huang.  "Recursive Estimation of Generative Models of Video."   In Proceedings of CVPR'06.  June 2006.

Ian Simon, Sumit Basu, David Salesin, and Maneesh Agrawala.  "Audio Analogies: Creating New Music from an Existing Performance by Concatenative Synthesis."   In Proceedings of the Int'l Conf. on Comp. Music 2005.  August, 2005.

Ashish Kapoor and Sumit Basu.  "The Audio Epitome: A New Representation for Modeling and Classifying Auditory Phenomena."  In Proceedings of ICASSP 2005.  May, 2005.

Tanzeem Choudhury and Sumit Basu.  "Modeling Conversational Dynamics as a Mixed-Memory Markov Process."  In Proceedings of NIPS 2004. December, 2004.

Sumit Basu. "Mixing with Mozart."  In Proceedings of the Int'l. Conf. on Comp. Music 2004.  Miami.  November, 2004.

T. Paek, M. Agrawala, S. Basu, S. Drucker, T. Kristjansson, R. Logan, K. Toyama & A. Wilson. Toward universal mobile interaction for shared displays. Proceedings of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2004, pp. 266-269.

Nebojsa Jojic, Sumit Basu, Nemanja Petrovic, Brendan Frey, and Thomas Huang.  "Joint design of Data Analysis Algorithms and User Interface for Video Applications."  In Proceedings of the Machine Learning Meets the User Interface Workshop (MLUI) at NIPS 2003.  Vancouver, BC.  December, 2003. 

Tanzeem Choudhury, Brian Clarkson,  Sumit Basu, and Alex Pentland. "Learning Communities: Connectivity and Dynamics of Interacting Agents."  Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN'03), Special Session on on Autonomous Mental Development. July 2003.

Sumit Basu, "A Linked-HMM Model for Voicing and Speech Detection."  Appears in the Proceedings of the IEEE Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing ( ICASSP 2003).  Hong Kong.  May, 2003. 

For older papers, please check here.

 

hobbies

   singing/songwriting, guitar, music of almost any kind, sewing, and poetry.

 

contact

   s u m i t b @ m i c r o s o f  t . c o m, one microsoft way, redmond, wa 98052