		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 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. While I do work in several application areas, I have recently been focusing on problems in the area of systems and machine learning (also called SysML or MLSys), in which we attempt to use machine learning techniques to diagnose and improve the performance of computer systems, networks, and programs. This area spans the range from performance problems on a single desktop to network problems on a global scale. It's an exciting new area of immense impact that is just beginning to take shape, and if you're a bright graduate student looking for a opportunity to make a real difference with your machine learning skills, 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		Systems and Machine Learning: using machine learning to address problems in computer systems Interactive Machine Learning: machine learning problems with a human in the loop Music Analysis/Synthesis: using one musical signal to create another Conversational Scene Analysis: seeking structure and content from conversational patterns Sho: an interactive language for scientific computing based on IronPython
current activities		Co-Chair (with Armando Fox), Systems and Machine Learning Workshop, 2008 (SysML 2008). at OSDI 2008. 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		Michael Gamon, Sumit Basu, Dmitriy Belenko, Danyel Fisher, Matthew Hurst, Arnd Christian König. "BLEWS - Using Blogs to Provide Context for News Articles." To appear in Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). April, 2008. [webpage] Ian Simon, Dan Morris, and Sumit Basu. "MySong: Automatic Accompaniment Generation for Vocal Melodies." To appear 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." To appear 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