Invited Speakers

Andrew Blake

Prof Andrew Blake
Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK

Visual Tracking of Objects in Motion

Andrew Blake was on the faculty of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, and also a Royal Society Research Fellow, until 1987. He then moved to the Department of Engineering Science in the University of Oxford, where he became a Professor in 1996, and Royal Society Senior Research Fellow in 1998. In 1999 he was appointed Senior Research Scientist at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, while continuing as visiting Professor at Oxford. His research interests are in computer vision, signal processing and learning. He has published a number of papers in vision, a book with A Zisserman (Visual Reconstruction, MIT press), edited Active Vision with Alan Yuille (MIT Press) and a book (Active Contours, Springer-Verlag) with Michael Isard. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1998.

Adnan Darwiche

Prof Adnan Darwiche
Computer Science Department, University of California at Los Angeles

The Quest for Efficient Probabilistic Inference

Adnan Darwiche is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UCLA, having received his PhD and MS degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1993 and 1989, respectively. His research interests are mainly in the areas of probabilistic and symbolic automated reasoning. Dr. Darwiche was a program co-chair of the Eighteenth Conference on Uncertainty in AI (UAI'02), and the general chair of the Nineteenth Conference on Uncertainty in AI (UAI'03). He is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and an Associate Editor for AI Communications. Prior to joining UCLA, Dr. Darwiche was a senior scientist and manager of the department of diagnostics and modeling at Rockwell Science Center.

Nir Friedman

Prof Nir Friedman
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Understanding Molecular Regulatory Mechanisms

Nir Friedman received a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University in 1987, a MSc in Mathematics and Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1992, and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 1997. From 1996 until 1998, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Since the fall of 1998 he has been a faculty member at the School of Computer Science & Engineering at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. Dr. Friedman's major research interests include probabilistic graphical models and their applications to computational biology. His group has pioneered the use of probabilistic graphical models for the task of reverse engineering of regulatory networks from high-throughput biological assays.

Alison Gopnik

Prof Alison Gopnik
Department of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley

Babies and Bayes Nets: Causal Inference in Computers and Children

Alison Gopnik received her BA from McGill University and her PhD from Oxford University. She was a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada University Research Fellow at the University of Toronto from 1983-1988 and in 1988 became a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. She is an internationally recognized leader in the study of children's learning and the author of over 100 articles and two books, Words, thoughts and theories (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff), MIT Press, 1997 and The Scientist in the Crib (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl) William Morrow, 1999. The Scientist in the Crib has been profiled and enthusiastically reviewed in US News and World Report, Time, Science, The New Yorker, the Washington Post and The New York Review of Books (among others). She has also written for The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books and the New York Times. She has been President of the Society for Philosophy of Psychology, Associate Editor of Child Development, the leading journal in the field and an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. She lives in Berkeley. California with her husband and three sons.

Stephen Jacobsen

Prof Stephen Jacobsen
University of Utah, and Sarcos Research Corporation

Designing Robots: From Artificial Limbs to Powerful, Energetic, Autonomous Humanoids

Stephen Jacobsen is a distinguished professor of Mechanical Engineering and also holds additional appointments in the departments of Bioengineering, Computer Science, and Surgery at the University of Utah (UU). He founded the Center for Engineering Design (CED) at the UU, where he presently holds the position of Director. He has authored approximately 255 publications and taught courses in design, automatic control, mechanics and fluid mechanics. In 1986, Dr Jacobsen founded Sarcos Research Corporation (SRC) to augment development activities at the University. He is now Chairman and CEO of SRC, which has spun out a number of corporations focused on commercializing developed technology. He currently holds over 200 US and foreign patents. He has received a number of awards for his work and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Science. Dr Jacobsen received his PhD degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973, his MS degree in 1970 from the University of Utah, and his BS degree in 1967 from the University of Utah.

Kevin Knight

Dr Kevin Knight
USC/Information Sciences Institute

What's New in Statistical Machine Translation

Kevin Knight is a Senior Research Scientist at USC's Information Sciences Institute, a Research Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at USC, and a co-founder of Language Weaver Inc. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991 and his BA from Harvard University in 1986. He is co-author (with Elaine Rich) of the textbook Artificial Intelligence. His main research interests are statistical natural language processing, machine translation, natural language generation, and decipherment. Dr Knight is currently serving as general chair of the Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2005).

Bart Selman

Prof Bart Selman
Department of Computer Science, Cornell University

The Next Generation of Automated Reasoning Methods

Bart Selman is a professor of computer science at Cornell University. He previously was at AT&T Bell Laboratories. His research interests include efficient reasoning procedures, planning, knowledge representation, and connections between computer science and statistical physics. He has (co-)authored over 100 papers, including five best papers. His papers have appeared in venues spanning Nature, Science, Proc. Natl. Acad. of Sciences, and a variety of conferences and journals in AI and Computer Science. He received the Cornell Stephen Miles Excellence in Teaching Award, and the Cornell Outstanding Educator Award. He also received an NSF Career Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Daniel Wolpert

Prof Daniel Wolpert
Institute of Neurology, University College London

Probabilistic Models of Human Sensorimotor Control

Daniel Wolpert read medical sciences at Cambridge and clinical medicine at Oxford. After working as a medical doctor for a year he joined John Stein's group in the Physiology Department of Oxford University. After receiving a PhD in 1992, he spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT where he worked in Mike Jordan's group. He joined the Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience & Movement Disorders, Institute of Neurology in 1995, and is currently Professor of Motor Neuroscience and co-director of the Institute of Movement Neuroscience, UCL. His research interests are computational and experimental approaches to human sensorimotor control (www.wolpertlab.com).