[Intelligence Seminar] Jan. 16, 3:30pm:, Presentation by Andreas Krause

[Dana Houston]

INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR
JANUARY 16 (MONDAY) AT 3:30PM, IN GHC 4405
(PLEASE NOTE THE UNUSUAL DAY AND TIME)

SPEAKER: ANDREAS KRAUSE (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich)
Host: Carlos Guestrin
For meetings, contact Michelle Martin (michelle324 at cs.cmu.edu)

SEQUENTIAL DECISION MAKING IN EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN
SUSTAINABILITY VIA ADAPTIVE SUBMODULARITY

Joint work with Daniel Golovin

Solving sequential decision problems under partial observability is a
fundamental but notoriously difficult challenge. I will introduce the
new concept of adaptive submodularity, generalizing the classical
notion of submodular set functions to adaptive policies. We prove
that, if a problem satisfies this property, a simple adaptive greedy
algorithm is guaranteed to be competitive with the optimal policy.
The concept allows us to recover, generalize, and extend existing
results in diverse applications, including sensor management, viral
marketing, and active learning. I will focus on two case studies. In
an application to Bayesian experimental design, we show how greedy
optimization of a novel adaptive submodular criterion outperforms
standard myopic techniques based on information gain and value of
information. I will also discuss how adaptive submodularity can help
to address problems in computational sustainability by presenting
results on conservation planning for three rare species in the Pacific
Northwest of the United States.

BIO

Andreas Krause received his Diplom in Computer Science and Mathematics
from the Technical University of Munich (2004) and his Ph.D. in
Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (2008). He joined the
California Institute of Technology as an assistant professor of
computer science in 2009, and is currently assistant professor in the
Department of Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology, Zurich. His research is in adaptive systems that actively
acquire information, reason, and make decisions in large, distributed,
and uncertain domains, such as sensor networks and the web. Dr. Krause
is a 2010 National Academy of Sciences' Kavli Frontiers Fellow. He
received an NSF CAREER award, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant
recognizing top young researchers in telecommunications, as well as
awards at several premier conferences (AAAI, KDD, IPSN, ICML, UAI) and
the ASCE Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management.

-- 
Dana M. Houston
Language Technologies Institute
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
5405 Gates Hillman Complex
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

T:  (412)268-4717
F:  (412)268-6298