Hi all, 

 Monday 28th October we will have Chris Williams giving to talks. Both of them will be in the rmm AA3195 (pavillon Andre-Aisendstandt, click here for directions) at the Université de Montréal. Abstract and title below. Hope to see you there !

First talk at 10:30 in AA3195

Title: Missing Components in Visual Scene Understanding: Hierarchy and
Perceptual Organization?

Chris Williams, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

There has been considerable progress in object recognition and scene
understanding over the last decade. However, we argue that much of
this work uses relatively shallow architectures, and that more
attention needs to be paid to hierarchical models and to processes of
perceptual organization, within a probabilistic inference framework.

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Second talk  at 13:30 in AA3195


Title: Switching Linear Dynamical Systems for Condition
Monitoring in the Intensive Care Unit

Abstract:

Data drawn from an observed system is often usefully described by a
number of hidden (or latent) factors.  Given a sequence of
observations, the task is to infer which latent factors are active at
each time frame.  In this talk I will describe the application of a
switching linear dynamical model to monitoring the condition
of a patient receiving intensive care.  The state of health of
a patient cannot be observed directly, but different underlying factors
are associated with particular patterns of measurements, e.g. in the
heart rate, blood pressure and temperature.

We demonstrate how to exploit knowledge of the structure of how the
various latent factors interact so as to reduce the amount of training
data needed for the system. A combination of domain knowledge
engineering and learning is used to produce an effective solution. We
use the model to infer the presence of two different types of factors:
common, recognisable regimes (e.g. certain artifacts or common
physiological phenomena), and novel patterns which are clinically
significant but have unknown cause. Experimental results are given
showing the potential of the system for the early detection of
neonatal sepsis, a major clinical concern in the care of premature
babies.

Chris Williams. Joint work with Yvonne Freer, Neil McIntosh, John
Quinn, Ioan Stanculescu.