Omid Madani (Under Construction.. Indefinitely!)
I am a senior computer scientist at SRI AI Center. I am
interested in all aspects of intelligence, especially from a
computational perspective. My research has included the following threads:
- I have been mostly working in machine
learning in the recent years (large-scale learning, online learning, data mining,
active learning, machine learning applications, and so on).
- I am inspired by how our minds might work. An important feature
of our intelligence that separates us humans from many other animals
is the huge number of concepts that we (apparently) acquire and
develop and effectively use. Here, by "concept" I mean a recurring
(and useful) pattern, such as words and phrases uttered in continuous
speech, or visual objects and entities such as books, faces, common
action sequences, etc. What tasks and problems, processes and
algorithms, and representations and data structures, support such
complexity? These questions are very broad and provide a starting
point. I hope to contribute to answering some such questions, in
particular from the perspective of computational learning and
development.
- I have been working on efficient learning algorithms for
supervised learning problems with high input and output
dimensionalities (potentially huge numbers of features and
classes/concepts). The initial focus has been on online algorithms
that can handle dynamic sets of classes, possible nonstationarities,
etc.
- Another very challenging class of problems involves acquiring and working with many concepts autonomously (without explicit teaching)
(unsupervised concept and feature induction).
- Other related threads in my work include empirical and theoretial
analyses of algorithms (in particular, inspired by AI problems, such
as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs)), exploration of applications, and
discovery of new problems in the applications. Past and future
(potential) application areas include information retrieval, text and
natural language processing, game playing, personalization, vision,
and so on.
The following links provide further info.
A
poem by Omar
Khayyam.