[Colloquium] REMINDER: Talks at TTIC: Nate Kushman, MIT

[Dawn Ellis]

When:     Friday, April 10th at 11am

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526

Who:       Nate Kushman, MIT

Title:       Text To Programs: Automating Computer Tasks from Natural
Language
               Descriptions

Abstract:
As computers have become more powerful and more sophisticated, they have
also become more complicated and difficult for humans to use.  Many tasks
that a user would like to perform, however, have already been described
on-line in natural language.  By designing new machine learning algorithms
that can translate these natural language descriptions into computer
programs, we enable machines to perform many tasks which today require
significant manual effort.

In this talk I will describe systems I have built towards this end in three
different computing domains:  text processing tasks, mathematical
calculations, and robotic object construction in a virtual world.  By
translating the natural language to computer programs we are able to both
determine semantic equivalence between the programs, and observe the
results of their execution.  I will show that integrating these
capabilities into the learning algorithms significantly improves the
effectiveness of the learning, as well as enabling learning with much less
training data.

Bio:
Nate Kushman is a PhD candidate at MIT advised by Regina Barzilay and Dina
Katabi.  His research focuses on learning to perform computer tasks based
on natural language descriptions of those tasks.  A business plan based on
his research won the IT Track of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Contest in
2010.  Prior to his PhD, he was the senior architect for Akamai's
load-balancing system, and the co-founder and CTO of UBUBU, Inc.  He
received his master's and bachelor's degrees from MIT, both in Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science.

Host:  Matthew Walter, mwalter at ttic.edu





-- 
*Dawn Ellis*
Administrative Coordinator,
Bookkeeper
773-834-1757
dellis at ttic.edu

TTIC
6045 S. Kenwood Ave.
Chicago, IL. 60637
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