Cognitive computation expert to speak Oct. 23

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Dan Roth, professor in the computer science department and the Beckman Institute at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the featured speaker for the Distinguished Computational Linguistics Lecture on Oct. 23.

Dan Roth is known internationally for his research in machine learning and natural language understanding, and the connection to the broader field of intelligent computing.

Roth, professor in the computer science department and the Beckman Institute at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the featured speaker for the Distinguished Computational Linguistics Lecture, 12:30 p.m. Oct. 23 in Golisano Hall auditorium, B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing Information Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology.

During his talk, “Learning and Inference for Natural Language Understanding,” Roth will discuss machine learning and computational inference methods. These are pervasive in scalable intelligent systems that process and make sense of natural language data. Roth has developed an integrated, global learning-centered approach that recognizes that many decisions are involved in computers processing human language. He will clarify what some of the challenges are for making future advances in machine learning, in the context of automated natural language understanding.

Roth is director of the Center for Multimodal Information Access and Synthesis and is a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and the Association for Computational Linguistics, for his contributions to the foundations of machine learning and inference and for developing learning-centered solutions for natural language processing problems.

He has published broadly in machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation and reasoning, and learning theory, and has developed a wide range of advanced machine learning-based tools for natural language processing. He has also won several teaching and best paper awards. Roth is associate editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and will serve as editor-in-chief beginning in 2015. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University.

“Faculty and students with interests in natural language and speech processing, as well as machine learning and computational inference, will especially benefit from Dr. Roth’s lecture,” said Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, assistant professor and computational linguist. “Besides important theoretical contributions, Dr. Roth’s research group—the Cognitive Computation Group—is renowned for key contributions in making tools available that are used both in industrial and academic organizations for a suite of natural language processing applications. These efforts have been essential for enabling systems that perform intelligent tasks with massive text-based information.”

The lecture is sponsored by RIT’s B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences and the College of Liberal Arts.

For more information about the free presentation, contact Ovesdotter Alm at 585-475-7327 or coagla@rit.edu. Interpreters will be provided.