Networks for pattern recognition problems?

[Chip Bachmann]

An example of research directly comparing neural networks with traditional
statistical methods can be found in: R. A. Cole, Y. K. Muthusamy, and
L. Atlas, "Speaker-Independent Vowel Recognition: Comparison of
Backpropagation and Trained Classification Trees", in Proceedings of the
Twenty-Third Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences,
Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, January 2-5, 1990, Vol. 1, pp. 132-141.  The neural
network achieves better results than the CART algorithm, in this case for
a twelve-class vowel recognition task.  The data was extracted from the
TIMIT database, and a variety of different encoding schemes was employed.

Tangentially, I thought that I would enquire if you know of any postdoctoral
or other research positions available at NOAA, CIRES, or U. of Colorado.
I completed my Ph.D. in physics at Brown University under
Leon Cooper (Nobel laureate, 1972) this past May; my undergraduate degree
was from Princeton University and was also in physics.  My dissertation
research was carried out as part of an interdisciplinary
team in the Center for Neural Science here at Brown.
The primary focus of my dissertation was
the development of an alternative backward propagation algorithm which
incorporates a gain modification procedure.  I also investigated the
feature extraction and generalization of backward propagation for a speech
database of stop-consonants developed here in our laboratory at Brown.
In addition, I discussed hybrid network architectures and, in particular,
in a high-dimensional, multi-class vowel recognition problem (namely
with the data which Cole et. al. used in the paper which I mentioned above),
demonstrated an approach using smaller sub-networks to partition the data.  Such
approaches offer a means of dealing with the "curse of dimensionality."


If there are any openings that I might apply for, I would be happy to forward
my resume and any supporting materials that you might require.


                                                 Charles M. Bachmann
                                                 Box 1843
                                                 Physics Department &
                                                 Center for Neural Science
                                                 Brown University
                                                 Providence, R.I. 02912
                                                 e-mail: ph706008 at
                                                         brownvm