Activities

Guest Co-Editor

• Special topic on Mining and Learning with Graphs and Relations in the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). Together with Paolo Frasconi, Hannu Toivonen, Koji Tsuda. Submission deadline is February 3, 2008.
• Special issue on Probabilistic Relational Learning in the Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (AMAI). Together with Manfred Jaeger and Lise Getoor. Submission deadline was September 1, 2007.

Co-Chair / Co-Organizer

• AAAI-10 Workshop onStatistical Relational Artificial Intelligence (StarAI-10), July 11 or 12, 2010, Atlanta, Gorgia, USA . Together with Stuart Russell, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Alon Halevy, Sriraam Natarajan, and Lilyana Mihalkova.
• International Workshop on Statistical Relational Learning (SRL-09), July 02-04, 2009, Leuven, Belgium. Together with Pedro Domingos.
• International Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs (MLG-07), August 01 -03, 2007, Universita degli Studi di Firenze, Florence, Tuscany, Italy. Together with Paolo Frasconi and Koji Tsuda.
• Statistical Relational Learning Session at the 31st Annual Conference of the German Classification Society - Gesellschaft fuer Klassifikation (GfKI), March 7-9, 2007, Freiburg i. Br., Germany. Together with H. Blockeel.
• Dagstuhl Seminar 07161 on Probabilistic, Logical and Relational Learning - A Further Synthesis, April 2007. Togehter with L. De Raedt, T. Dietterich, L. Getoor, and S. H. Muggleton.

Editorial Boards

• Machine Learning Journal (MLJ)
• Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)

Program Commitee Member

• AAAI (06,08, PGAI Track 08, 10)
• ACML (09)
• AIS-ADM (05,07)
• ADMI (07)
• CMILE (07)
• DS (05,06,07,08,09) 
• ECAI (06,08,10)
• ECML/PKDD (06 [Area Chair], 07 [Area Chair],08,09)
• IAS (08)
• ICML (03,05,06,07,08,09,10 [Area Chair])
• IJCAI (09) 
• ILP (07,08,09,10)
• ISAIM (08, 10)
• KDD (06, 07,10)
• LEMIR (09) 
• MLG (06)
• MRDM (04,05,07)
• Multiview (05)
• PGM (08, 10)
• ACM-SAC, special track on data mining (04,05,06,07,08,09)
• "Relational Approaches to Knowledge Representation and Learning"@KI-09
• SBIA (08)
• SRL (03,04,06)
• RSS (08,10)

Reviewing

• ECML/PKDD (01,02),ILP (02,04),IPMU (04),KDD (04),NIPS (08, 09),PSB (04),SDM (07), RO-MAN (09), Spatial Cognition (04), Ubicomp (08,09), VAST (09)
• AICom, AIJ, CBM, DMKD, EcoMod, ETAI, Informatica, IDA, IJAR, Information Retrieval, JAIR, JIFS, JMLR, MLJ, Neurocomputing, New Generation Computing, SIGKDD Explorations, TNN, TOCL, TPLP
• US National Science Foundation (NSF), The Netherlands Organization for Research Funds (NWO) 

International Tutorials

• "First-order Planning" together with Scott Sanner at ICAPS-08 (International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling Sept 14-18,Sydney, Australia).
• "SRL without Tears: An ILP Perspective on SRL" at ILP-08 (18th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming, Sept 10-12, 2008, Prague, Czech Republic).
• "Decision-Theoretic Planning and Learning in Relational Domains" together with Prasad Tadepalli and Alan Fern at AAAI-08 (23rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, July 13-14, 2008, Chicago, USA).
• "Probabilistic Inductive Logic Learning" together with Luc De Raedt at ECML/PKDD-2005 (16th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML), 9th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD), October 3-7, 2005, Porto, Portugal).
• "Probabilistic Inductive Logic Learning" together with Luc De Raedt at IDA-2005 (6th International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis,September 8-10, 2005, Madrid, Spain).
• "Probabilistic Logic Learning" together with James Cussens at ICML-2004 (Twenty-First International Conference on Machine Learning, July 4, 2004, Banff, Alberta, Canada).  

Talks on Invitations

• "Statistical Relational AI", CS Department, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Dec. 14, 2009.
• "Statistical Relational AI", EE and CS Colloqium, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany, Dec. 03, 2009.
• "Relations and Probabilities: Friends, not Foes", Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA-09), Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany, Sept. 21-23, 2009.
• "Lifting and Wrapping Exponential Worlds" at the Symposium on "Recent Trends in Machine Learning", K.U. Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, Sept. 3, 2009. 
• "SRL without Tears" and "Counting Belief Propagation",  COST Action IC0602 Management Committee Meeting, Cork, ireland, April 23-24, 2009.
• "Nonparametric Policy Gradients" at Neville Roach Research Laboratory, NICTA@Kensington, Sydney, Australia, Oct. 1st, 2008.
• "What is Statistical Relational Learning and How to Boost it" at SML Group, NICTA, Canberra, Australia, September 26th, 2008.
• "Entertaining Statistical Relational Learning" at the Symposium on "Probabilistic Logic Learning", K. U. Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, July 1, 2008.
• "Statistical Relational Activity Mining: Ubiquitous Computing in Worlds of Objects" at the KDubiq Final Symposium, Bonn, Germany, May 13, 2008.
• "Finding many rough rules of how to act can be a lot easier than finding a single, highly accurate policy"at the Situation Modeling and Recognition Workshop, University fo Freiburg, Germany, March 13, 2008.
• "Statistical Relational Learning: A Key Challenge for AI" at the KIT-IAIS Cooperation Kick-Off Workshop, Fraunhofer IAIS, Schloss Berlinghoven, Sankt Augustin, Germany, March 7, 2008  
• "How to Make a PhD in Statistical Relational Learning" at the Second Research Contact Day of the CIL Doctoral School, Leuven, Belgium, August 29, 2007.
• "An Inductive Logic Programming Approach to Statistical Relational Learning" at ACAI 2007(Logic for Artificial Intelligence), Leuven, Belgium, August 24, 2007.
• "Most Likely Heteroscedastic Gaussian Process Regression" at Nick Roy\'s Working Group Meeting, CSAIL, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA, August 14, 2007.
• "Most Likely Heteroscedastic Gaussian Process Regression" at Fraunhofer IAIS, Sankt Augustin, Germany, August 06, 2007. Contact: Stefan Wrobel.
• "Statistical Relational Learning: A Key Challenge for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning" at the Institute for Compute Science, University of Freiburg, Germany, January 09, 2007
• "Statistical Relational Learning: A Key Challenge for Computational Biology" at Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK, April 26, 2007.
• "Probabilistic Logic Learning and Reasoning" at BeneLearn 2005: Fourteenth Annual Machine Learning Conference of Belgium and the Netherlands, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, February 17 -18, 2005.  

Panelist

• "Challenges of Machine Learning-based Autonomous Robotics" at the First International Workshop on LEarning and data Mining for Robotics (LEMIR 2009), Bled, Slovenia, Sep 7, 2009 (in conjunction with ECML/PKDD-2009).

   

Community

• ICML 05: Proceedings Chair
• IMLS web master (together with A. Zimmermann), Dec. 03 - 06.

Projects

• Leader of running ATTRACT project "STREAM: Statistical Relational Activity Mining". Jan. 2008 - Jan. 2013. Funded by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.
• Feb 01, 2007 -  Dec 31, 2007: CALO, "Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes",  Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), through the US Department of the Interior, NBC, Acquisition Services Division, under Contract No. NBCHD030010.
• May 01, 2004 - Dec. 24, 2006:
  APrIL,"Application of Probabilistic Inductive Logic Programming II" (APrIL II), EU Project, Contract no. FP6-508861
• October 01, 2001 - May 30, 2002 :
  APrIL, "Application of Probabilistic Inductive Logic Programming" (APrIL), EU Project, Contract no. IST-2001-33053

PhD Jury Membership

• Tom Croonenborghs, K. U. Leuven, Belgium, September 2009
• Daan Fierens, K.U. Leuven, Belgium, July 2008

(Co-) Supervised PhD Theses

• Mirwaes Wahabzada, "Relational Latent Space Models", ongoing
• Babak Ahmadi, "Reasoning about and Learning from Large-Scale Noisy Data in Rich Representations", ongoing
• Fabian Hadiji, "Inference and Learning in Weighted Logics with Applictions to Multi-Media Mining", ongoing
• Ahmed Jawad, "Machine Learning for Visual Analytics", ongoing   

(Co-) Supervised Master Theses

• Marion Neumann, "Empricial Traffic Analysis with Gaussian Processes", 2009
• Hannes Schluz, "Euclidean Embedding of Co-proven Queries", 2009
• Ingo Thon, "Dynamic Probabilistic Models over Interpretations", 2006.
• Angelika Kimmig, "Learning Stochastic Logic Programs.", 2005.
• Bernd Gutmann, "Relational Conditional Random Fields (for Logical Sequences)", 2005.
• Alexandru Cocora, "Learning Relational Navigation Policies", 2005.
• Joerg Fischer, "Asynchronous Relational Value Iteration", 2005.
• Tayfun Guerel, "Naive Graph Labelling", 2005.
• Steven Ganzert, "Using Equation Discovery for Finding ARDS-Lung Models: A Case Study", 2003.
• Livia Predoiu, "Bayes\\\'sche Datalog Programme", 2003.  

(Co-) Supervised Bachelor Theses

• Eva Zielasko, "Web Page Classification using Link-Information", 2009.
• Alexander Vasiliev, "Visualization of Research Topics of Unstructured Collections of Publications", 2009 

(Co-) Supervised Student Research Projects

• Michael Haimes, "First-Order Variable Elimination", 2007
• Zuoyu Tao, "Belief Point Updates for POMDPs", 2007
• Uwe Dick, "Relational Fisher Kernels", 2005.
• Hans-Martin Schultze, "Information Extraction with LOHMMs Learned by Stochastic Optimization", 2005.
• Bernd Gutmann, "Relational Influence Diagrams", 2005.
• Alexandru Cocora, "Discriminative Learning for Logical Sequences", 2004.
• Ingo Thon, "Logical Markov Models", 2004.
• Christian Stolle, "Learning from Random SAT", 2004.
• Gerrit Merkel, "Information Extraction using Logical Hidden Markov Models", 2003.
• Joerg Fischer, "SCGEM - A Fast Acceleration of EM", 2003.
• Victoria Polzer, "Learning Patterns for Information Extraction with TILDE: A Case Study on Chemical Abstracts", 2003.
• Niels Landwehr, "EM and Gradient-Based Learning of Bayesian Networks: A Case Study", 2002.
• Steven Ganzert, "Analyse von Daten einer klinischen Multicenterstudie zur mechanischen Beatmung von Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) - Patienten mit Methoden der Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD)", 2001.  

CV (Curriculum Vitae)

For a longer CV, please see the corresponding PDF below.

Since January 2008
Head of the "Statistical Relational Activity Mining" ATTRACT Group, Knowledge Discovery Department of Fraunhofer IAIS, Schloss Birlinghoven, Sankt Augustin, Germany, and Researcher at the Reihnische Friedrich-Wilhelms University, Bonn, Germany

Research Affiliate, CSAIL, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

February 2007 - December 2007
Postdoctoral Associate, CSAIL, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
 
May 2000 - January 2007
Research Assistant, Machine Learning Lab, Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg, Germany

April 2006
Dr. rer. nat (Ph.D.), "An Inductive Logic Programming Approach to Statistical Relational Learning"
Machine Learning Lab, CS Department, Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg, Germany

2000
Diplom (M.Sc.), "Bayessche-logische Programme",
Machine Learning Lab, CS Department, Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg, Germany


Awards and Fellowships

ERCIM Cor Baayen Award 2009 Finalist: "Most Promising Young Researcher In Europe in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics"

Fraunhofer Attract Fellowship (2008). EURO500.000/annum granted by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft for building up a research group on statistical relational activity mining.

ECCAI 2006 Artificial Intelligence Dissertation Award. Award for the best European Dissertation in the field of AI. Awarded annually by ECCAI, the European Coordination Committee for Artificial Intelligence.

ECML06 Student Best Paper Award for the paper entitled "TildeCRF: Conditional Random fields for Logical Sequences" co-authored with Bernd Gutmann. The ECML Student Best paper Award was sponsored by the Machine Learning Journal.

Wolfgang-Gentner-Nachwuchsfoerderpreis 2000. Award for outstanding CS diploma thesis at the CS department of the University of Freiburg, Germany (shared with Felix Klaedtke).

Attached Files