[PAST EVENT] Colloquium on Feb. 23 at 8AM in McGl 020

February 23, 2015
8am
Location
McGlothlin-Street Hall, Room 020
251 Jamestown Rd
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Title: Efficient Lifelong Machine Learning

Speaker: Eric Eaton, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: Lifelong learning is a key characteristic of human intelligence, largely responsible for the variety and complexity of our behavior. This process allows us to rapidly learn new skills by building upon and continually refining our learned knowledge over a lifetime of experience. Incorporating these abilities into machine learning algorithms remains a mostly unsolved problem, but one that is essential for the development of versatile autonomous systems.

In this talk, I will present our recent progress in developing algorithms for lifelong machine learning. These algorithms acquire knowledge incrementally over consecutive learning tasks, and then transfer that knowledge to rapidly learn to solve new problems. Our approach is highly efficient, scaling to large numbers of tasks and amounts of data, and provides a variety of theoretical guarantees on performance and convergence. I will show that our lifelong learning system achieves state-of-the-art results in multi-task learning for classification and regression on a variety of domains, including facial expression recognition, land mine detection, and student examination score prediction. I will also describe how lifelong learning can be applied to sequential decision making for robotics, demonstrating accelerated learning for optimal control on several dynamical systems, including an application to quadrotor control. Finally, I will discuss our work toward autonomous cross-domain transfer, enabling knowledge to be automatically transferred between different task domains.

Bio: Eric Eaton is a non-tenure-track faculty member in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the GRASP (General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, & Perception) lab. Prior to joining Penn, he was a visiting assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College, a senior research scientist at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories, and part-time faculty at Swarthmore College. His primary research interests lie in the fields of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data mining with applications to robotics, environmental sustainability, and medicine.
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