[Colloquium] [TTIC Colloquium] **TIME CHANGE** Andreas Krause, Carnegie Mellon University- TTI-C Talk

[Nathan Srebro]

Please note: to accommodate those who would like to attend also Eirc
Vigoda's talk, Andreas Krause's talk will be postponed by 15 minutes.
The talk will start at 1:15PM rather than 1PM.


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> When:             Tuesday, April 8, 1:00pm
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> Where:            TTI-C Conference Room
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>  Who:                Andreas Krause, Carnegie Mellon University
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>  Topic:              Optimizing Sensing from Water to the Web
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>  Where should we place sensors to quickly detect contaminations in drinking
> water distribution networks? Which blogs should we read to learn about the
> biggest stories on the web? These problems share a fundamental challenge:
> How can we obtain the most useful information about the state of the world,
> at minimum cost?
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> Such sensing, or active learning, problems are typically NP-hard, and were
> commonly addressed using heuristics without theoretical guarantees about the
> solution quality. In this talk, I will present algorithms which efficiently
> find provably near-optimal solutions to large, complex sensing problems. Our
> algorithms exploit submodularity, an intuitive notion of diminishing
> returns, common to many sensing problems; the more sensors we have already
> deployed, the less we learn by placing another sensor. To quantify the
> uncertainty in our predictions, we use probabilistic models, such as
> Gaussian Processes.
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> In addition to identifying the most informative sensing locations, our
> algorithms can handle more challenging settings, where sensors need to be
> able to reliably communicate over lossy links, where mobile robots are used
> for collecting data or where solutions need to be robust against adversaries
> and sensor failures.
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>  I will also present results applying our algorithms to several real-world
> sensing tasks, including environmental monitoring using robotic sensors,
> activity recognition using a built sensing chair, deciding which blogs to
> read on the web, and a sensor placement competition.
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> Bio:
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> Andreas Krause is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Computer Science Department of
> Carnegie Mellon University. He is a recipient of a Microsoft Research
> Graduate Fellowship, and his research on sensor placement and information
> acquisition received awards at several conferences (KDD '07, IPSN '06, ICML
> '05 and UAI '05). He obtained his Diplom in Computer Science and Mathematics
> from the Technische Universität München, where his research received the NRW
> Undergraduate Science Award.
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> Contact:          Nathan Srebro, TTI-C         nati at tti-c.org
> 834-7493
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