Dr. Rafael Alonso, Sarnoff Corporation 

"Model-guided Mining and Discovery" 

Wednesday April 6, 4:00 pm

Packard Lab -- Room 360

Abstract:
In this talk I will describe the research done at Sarnoff developing adaptive models to tailor the behavior of search and knowledge discovery systems to the needs of individual users. I will describe our development of dynamically adaptive models that capture user intent and entity behavior, and can dynamically adapt by both expanding model content (with the aid of an ontology) and by refining measures of user interest (based on implicit and explicit user feedback). I will describe previous and current work in the context of several applications and present experimental evaluation results. I will also describe how these models are being used to develop an anomaly detection system for surveillance applications, and outline our recent work in threat assessment algorithms. The talk will conclude with a short description of the commercial applications of our work.


Bio:
Rafael Alonso obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from New York University. Dr. Alonso was a faculty member at Princeton University from 1984 to 1992 where he graduated three doctoral students, obtained several government and industrial grants, and developed new courses in database technology and distributed systems. In 1991 he co-founded the Matsushita Information Technology Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., where he developed leading edge information and video systems for Panasonic. In 1996 Dr. Alonso joined Sarnoff Corporation, where he is presently the Head of Adaptive Systems. Dr. Alonso oversees research projects in a number of areas including Multimedia Storage and Databases Systems, Web Information Systems, Machine Learning and User Modeling, and Targeted Advertising. Dr. Alonso's current research interests include multimedia database systems, machine learning and user modeling, data mining, and mobile information systems. Dr. Alonso has published over 50 refereed papers, obtained four U.S. patents for his work, been a member of more than 20 Program Committees, and is currently on the editorial board of several technical journals. Dr. Alonso is a member of IEEE and ACM.