ColloquiaFrank McSherry - talk on Friday, May 10

[Margery Ishmael]

Friday, May 10, 2002
2:30 pm
Ryerson 251

FRANK MCSHERRY
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington

"Data Mining via Spectral Analysis"

Much attention has recently been paid to the analysis of data by first 
casting the data set as a matrix, and then considering its eigenvectors. 
This spectral analysis of data has been applied successfully in many 
domains; examples include Google's PageRank algorithm, Latent Semantic 
Analysis, and Kernel PCA. However, the success of spectral analysis is 
largely empirical, with little analytic understanding of why this approach 
works so well.

In this talk I will present a general framework for data mining problems 
and show how this framework justifies the application of spectral analysis. 
Specifically, we will see that the problems of collaborative filtering, web 
search, and data clustering fall into the framework and give rigorous 
bounds on the performance of spectral analysis on each problem. 
Furthermore, we will see how we can immediately translate ideas and 
understanding developed through this framework into new algorithms which 
address problems in graph theory and numerical analysis.

This research is joint work with Yossi Azar and Amos Fiat at Tel Aviv 
University, Dimitris Achlioptas at Microsoft Research, and Anna Karlin and 
Jared Saia at the University of Washington.
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/mcsherry

Host: Svetlozar Nestorov

*The talk will be followed by refreshments in Ryerson 255*

Persons who need assistance should call 773.834.8977

If you wish to meet the speaker, please send e-mail to marge at cs.uchicago.edu



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Margery Ishmael
Secretary to the Chairman, Department of Computer Science
The University of Chicago
tel. 773.834.8977  fax. 773.702.8487
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