posted May 28, 2012 1:42 AM by James Collier
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updated May 28, 2012 5:33 PM
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Tuesday 1 June 2012 1:00 - 2:00 pm (Room 115/63) Speaker: Hiran Ganegedara Title: Exploratory data analysis using scalable self-organising maps
Abstract: There is a significant growth in the amount of data available for
anaysis and decision making purposes. The Self-Organising Map (SOM) and
the Growing Self-Organising Map (GSOM) are widely used unsupervised
techniques to visualises the data set and are useful in identifying
patterns in data. Finding interesting patterns from massive volumes of
data could be highly time consuming and the time requirement will grow
with the increase in the data quantity when SOM/GSOMs are used.
Processing high volumes of data is a challenging task, given the limited
computing power available in most computers. Recent developments in
parallel and distributed computing techniques as well as multi-core CPU
architectures have opened up a new avenue for large scale data
processing by providing high volumes of computing power. This
presentation aims at introducing a new technique which enables the SOM
algorithm to scale with the number of computing resources. The presented
technique will improve SOM/GSOM’s performance by several orders while
maintaining the same level of accuracy.
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posted Apr 30, 2012 11:04 PM by James Collier
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updated May 15, 2012 6:47 PM
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Friday 18 May 2012 1:00 - 2:00 pm (Room 115/63) Part ISpeaker: Upuli Gunasinghe Title: Sequence Learning using the Adaptive Suffix Trie AlgorithmAuthors: Upuli Gunasinghe and Damminda AlahakoonAbstract: Sequences
occur naturally in many domains such as biology, engineering, finance
and scientific research. Since humans have the inherent ability to
comprehend and utilize sequences in day to day cognitive tasks such as
speech, vision and motor control; biologically inspired sequence
learning techniques are used for explanatory data analysis in these
domains.
Identifying
the common substrings which exist in sequences helps in determining the
underlying structure and calculating the similarity between sequences.
The suffix trie, suffix tree and suffix array are data structures which
are used in many solutions to sequence based problems. However, these
are static data structures and not flexible tools which can be used for
sequence learning. In this word we present the Adaptive Suffix Trie
algorithm, a sequence learning algorithm which can be used for
identifying substrings of different lengths and frequencies from a given
set of sequences. In contrast to suffix data structures which store all
suffixes, the adaptive suffix trie only captures the frequent
substrings that occur in the given dataset, resulting in a less complex
structure with only the relevant or useful information. We show how the
algorithms' learning parameters can be adapted for extracting substrings
with the required characteristics and then demonstrate it's application
in the classification of biological sequences. Part II Speaker: Upuli Gunasinghe Title: A Sequence Based Dynamic SOM Model for Text Clustering Authors: Upuli Gunasinghe, Sumith Matharage and Damminda Alahakoon Abstract: Text
clustering can be considered as a four step process consisting of
feature extraction, text representation, document clustering and cluster
interpretation. Most text clustering models consider text as an
unordered collection of words. However the semantics of text would be
better captured if word sequences are taken into account. In this work
we propose a sequence based text clustering model where four novel
sequence based components are introduced in each of the four steps in
the text clustering process. Experiments conducted on the Reuters
dataset and Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) news archives demonstrate the
advantage of the proposed sequence based model, in terms of capturing
context with semantics, accuracy and speed, compared to clustering of
documents based on single words and n-gram based models.
Tuesday 8 May 2012 1:00 - 2:00 pm (Room 207/63)Speaker: Sunil AryalTitle: Generative classifiers based on mass Abstract: Generative classifiers estimate the class conditional likelihood
p(x|y) and the class prior p(y) and use Bayes rule to predict the most
probable class that maximises the class posterior p(y|x). Density
estimation is required to estimate the class conditional likelihood
p(x|y). Current density estimators such as kernel density estimator and
k-nearest neighbour density estimator are impractical in big and
multi-dimensional databases.
To mitigate this difficulty, some classifiers assume
that attributes are conditionally independent given the class label y,
and estimate the density distribution on one dimension, p(x_i|y) at a
time. This assumption is too rigid and often violated in real world
problems where attributes are related in some way. Some flexible
Bayesian classifiers are proposed with less restrictive assumptions.
In this research, we propose a new type of
generative classifier called "MassBayes", that estimates the likelihood
by mass estimation. Mass estimation does not make any explicit
assumption about the distribution. Empirical evaluations show that
MassBayes yields better results than existing generative classifiers on
benchmark data sets, specially in big data sets. MassBayes has
sub-linear time complexity and constant space complexity; hence, it
scales better with big databases. About Sunil Aryal: Sunil Aryal did his bachelor in Information technology from Purbanchal
University, Nepal. He is currently doing Master of Information
Technology (Research) in Monash Univeristy with A/Prof. Kai Ming Ting.
Before joining Monash, he worked as a research assistant in Katholieke
University, Leuven, Belgium. He also worked as a software developer in
Sydney for two years. His research interest includes data mining and
machine learning, mass-based learning etc. |
posted Apr 15, 2012 7:17 PM by James Collier
Thursday 19 April 2012 1:00 - 2:00 pm (Room 115/63)
Speaker: Cora Beatriz Perez-Ariza Title: Recursive Probability Trees for Probabilistic Graphical Models
Abstract: Recursive Probability Trees aim to represent the probabilistic information encoded in a probabilistic graphical model in a more compact and efficient way than traditional structures do. They capture context-specific independencies within the distribution, and also they can represent other peculiarities like certain factorizations. By being able to work with this factorized and compacted structure, the inference process can be speeded up. In this talk I would like to introduce the structure and the approach we have followed so far to build it, that involves looking for good approximations of the distributions when an exact representation is not possible.
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posted Mar 15, 2012 7:36 PM by Hiran Ganegedara
Monday 19 March 2012 1:00 - 2:00 pm (Room 135/26)
Host: Nitin Mahadeo Title: Towards mainstream use of iris biometrics
Abstract: The iris is the most accurate biometric to date. However, iris recognition is still in its infancy compared to other biometrics such as fingerprints or face recognition. In order for the iris to be widely accepted, it needs to be able to perform in a robust and reliable manner in a variety of imaging conditions. In this talk, we examine the strengths and weaknesses of current implementations and how they can be improved. This first part of our work focusses mainly on the segmentation stage in an iris recognition system. Different segmentation techniques are explored and a novel model-based technique for accurate iris localization in noisy images is proposed. Our results show both improved accuracy and speed. We also present a new approach for eyelid, eyelash and shadows detection in eye images. Our aim is to take the iris biometric a step forward towards mainstream use for recognition and identification purposes. New approaches for achieving better performance and reliability are also discussed. |
posted Mar 11, 2012 8:11 PM by Hiran Ganegedara
We will be starting the seminars for 2012 soon.
Stay tuned. |
posted Nov 28, 2011 8:08 PM by Hiran Ganegedara
Friday, 2 December 2011, 1:00-2:00pm (Room 135/26)
Host: Amir Basirat Title: Distributed Associative Memory Approaches for large-scale Data Processing in Cloud Computing Environments and Wireless Sensor Networks
Abstract: Unlike the early computations that used several bytes of data, existing computing infrastructure has been able to generate and store more than peta-bytes of data for day-to-day operations. This poses a question of whether our capability to recognise and process these data, matches our ability to generate them? In this short talk, this question will be addressed, by looking at the capability of existing recognition schemes to scale up with this outgrowth of data. Applications such as pattern recognition are essential in providing front-end mechanism for data processing. However, a different perspective of pattern recognition will be considered. Rather than looking at conventional approaches, such as statistical computations and deterministic learning schemes, this research will be focusing on distributed processing approach for scalable pattern recognition. My research work aims to explore new methods of partitioning and distributing data that is, resource vitalisation in the cloud and WSNs by fundamentally re-thinking the way in which future data management models will need to be developed on the Internet. Loosely-coupled associative computing techniques, which have so far not been considered, can provide the break through needed for a distributed data management scheme. |
posted Nov 23, 2011 9:14 PM by Hiran Ganegedara
Tuesday, 29 November 2011, 1:00-2:00pm (Room 135/26)
Host: A/Prof Graham Farr Title: Co-authorship and other publication issues Abstract: This will cover matters such as: - what kind of contribution merits a co-authorship of a paper? - how is order of authors determined? - how do these things vary from one discipline to another? - how can disagreements about co-authorships be resolved? We'll have a panel consisting of: - A/Prof Graham Farr (HDR Co-ordinator, Clayton School of IT) - A/Prof Maria Garcia de la Banda (Head, Caulfield School of IT) - Dr Arun Konagurthu (Larkins Fellow) The discussion will be chaired by Prof Kim Marriott (Head, Clayton School of IT). Panelists will talk for about 5 mins each and then there will be plenty of time for discussion and questions. The discussion will focus on computer science but will touch on related issues in other disciplines. |
posted Oct 26, 2011 10:41 PM by Hiran Ganegedara
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updated Oct 26, 2011 10:41 PM
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Thursday, 27 October 2011, 1:00-2:00pm (Room 135/26)
Host: Hiran Ganegedara Title: Scalable Data Mining: A Sammon's Projection Based Techniqe for Merging Self Organising Maps
Abstract: Self-Organizing Map (SOM) and Growing Self-Organizing Map (GSOM) are widely used techniques for exploratory data analysis. The key desirable features of these techniques are their applicability to real world data sets and their ability to visualize high dimensional data in low dimensional output space. One of the core problems of using SOM/GSOM based techniques on large datasets is the high processing time requirement. One possible solution is the generation of multiple maps for subsets of data where the subsets consists of the entire dataset. However the advantage of topographic organization of a single map is lost in the above process. I will be presenting a new technique where Sammon's projection is used to merge an array of GSOMs generated on subsets of a large dataset.I will be discussing cluster accuracy and performance analysis for several datasets. This technique is ideally suited to harness the processing power of parallel computing resources. |
posted Oct 9, 2011 11:01 PM by Hiran Ganegedara
Tuesday, 11 October 2011, 1:00-2:00pm (Room 115/63)
Host: Dror CohenTitle: "Computational Neuroscience, Physics envy and the Free-Energy Principle"
Abstract: The biological sciences are increasingly utilising computational approaches for data analysis, as well as to better understand the governing mechanisms. Computational insights are particularly valuable in the neural sciences where the relationship between function and physiology is intricately coupled and difficult to discern. A recently proposed Free-Energy principle attempts to provide a unifying framework for the understanding of computational mechanisms throughout the cortex. We demonstrate how this principle can produce topography preservation, a feature that has been well observed in the cortex.
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posted Aug 28, 2011 5:46 PM by Hiran Ganegedara
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updated Aug 31, 2011 4:31 PM
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Tuesday, 6 September 2011, 1:00-2:00pm (Room 115/63)
Host: Sara MirandaTitle: "The Library – your new best friend and partner in your postgraduate degree"Abstract: The Hargrave-Andrew Library has staff dedicated to helping academics and students in the Clayton School of Information Technology.
Sara Miranda, the information research skills librarian can assist in effective use of library services and resources, including databases, finding information, citing and referencing.
Noriaki Sato, the learning skills adviser, can assist with thesis writing, oral communication and presentation, and writing for research projects. Postgraduate students can arrange individual sessions with Nori, or participate in group sessions tailored to your needs. In this session we will present an overview of what we do, and go into some detail on how you can use our services and facilities. If there is anything you wanted to know about the library but were reluctant or didn’t have time to ask, this is your opportunity. |
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