Hi,

There is a talk today at McGill on "Spectral Methods for Learning Finite State Machines", details below. It seems like it could be really interesting.

Cheers, Aaron

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Doina Precup dprecup@cs.mcgill.ca Date: Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 9:26 PM Subject: Fwd: Visitor and Talk (Monday 2:30) about learning finite automata To: Aaron Courville courvila@iro.umontreal.ca

Hi Aaron,

Please post this to the LISA mailing list. BTW, if I should be sending these announcements to someone else, let me know

Thank you, Doina

Begin forwarded message:

From: Doina Precup dprecup@cs.mcgill.ca Date: September 15, 2012 9:24:26 PM EDT To: labrl@cs.mcgill.ca Cc: Denis Therien denis@cs.mcgill.ca Subject: Visitor and Talk (Monday 2:30) about learning finite automata

Hi everyone,

Borja Balle Pigem will be visiting Monday-Thursday next week. He has been doing very interesting work on spectral methods for learning automata, related to many of our interests in learning with partial observability. He will give a talk this Monday at 2:30, in MC 103:

Title: Spectral Methods for Learning Finite State Machines

Abstract: A spectral method for learning Hidden Markov Models was presented by Hsu, Kakade, Zhang in COLT 2009. Following this seminal work their method has been extended to many other probabilistic models, including: Predictive State Representations, Kernelized Hidden Markov Models, Latent Tree Graphical Models, High-dimensional Mixture Models, Finite State Transducers, and Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars. The main feature of the method is that it provides a local-minima-free alternative to EM which is fast, easy to implement, and amenable to theoretical analysis.

In this talk I will give a general and elegant description of this spectral method in a framework that encompasses some of the results mentioned above. In particular, those related to models that can be defined using Finite States Machines. I will also discuss open problems and opportunities for applications.

(based on joint work with X. Carreras, M. Mohri, and A. Quattoni)

For more information: http://www.lsi.upc.edu/~bballe/

Let me know when you would be available to meet with him during his stay.

Best, Doina