Photo courtesy of United Nations Development Programme An organization called Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI-D) recently had a workshop at Stanford which looked at ways that data driven statistical modeling and prediction could be used to help under-served populations...

Photo courtesy of DahKohlmeyer A few months ago on the University of California, Irvine campus we had an incident in which a student wearing camouflage was seen walking onto campus from secondary road coming from a somewhat remote area...

Photo courtesy of Walt Jabsco The problem of trying to incorporate social networks into collaborative filtering recommendations seems to be a hot research topic right now. The basic idea of this problem is that one may have a dataset...

Photo courtesy of hockadilly In the paper "Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams" by Mor Naaman, Jeffrey Boase, and Chih-Hui Lai and published in CSCW 2010, the authors look at Twitter messages and attempt...

Photo courtesy of future15pic I've been thinking about geolocated status messages a bit recently and have just started to look into studies that have been conducted about such data. This started after I had seen some pretty cool visualizations...

So as part of the Nomatic*IM project which I am working on, Kah and I have been looking at ways of using presence information to trigger actions. One of the first ideas that occurred to us was to use presence...

Review following a meeting with Nik N. The paper is by Lin Liao, Dieter Fox and Henry Kautz. This paper used Relational Markov Models. It created undirected clique templates which were instantiated to create an undirected belief network. It...

You have got to love paper reviews. Here are some excerpts from my reviewers comments on a recent paper: Premature. Could be a radical new concept, but not enough there to really have any idea what the authors are talking...

This paper from Pervasive 2004 talked about collecting data from a bunch of worn wireless biaxial accelerometers and then using that data to determine what activities the user is engaged in. A key feature of this study was the...

This paper presented a model and algorithmic technique for recognizing an activity which might have the following properties: Sequential streams: There is a natural partial ordering of components. Duration of elements: The primitives are not events but have temporal...

In a previous article I discussed some challenges associated with trying to grade to sequences of activities. One of which is the true, or gold trace, and the other is the inferred, or black, trace. In that discussion I...

This paper seems to be quite an influential paper in the current AI milieu around UW and Intel. In this work, the authors present a method for recognizing policies in an Abstract Hidden Markov Model (AHMM) from a sequence...

This paper did a wonderful job of showing how belief propagation has been applied to a variety of graphical models in a variety of disciplines. It is very clearly written. The first part of the paper discussed the conversions...

This paper presents a method of determining priors over hierarchical topic structures in a world with infinite topics. The paper relies on a generative description of how topic hierarchies are generated and then uses Gibbs sampling to find the...

This paper presented a method of performing location estimation based on observed wireless signal strength. There are basically two ways of approaching this problem: Fingerprinting and Access Point Modeling. Fingerprinting means taking a bunch of samples in the area...

This paper was further reading along the lines of model building for the anesthesiology application. It was presented at a AAAI workshop in 2002 (which I actually attended). The problem that the authors were addressing was that of trying...

This is a paper that was in WWW2004. It's goal was to analyze a bunch of Brazilian news sites and pull out bits of the news story from them. Things like the title, the author and the content. The...

This paper describes a new way of modeling the changes in a state space over time called Continuous Time Bayesian Networks (CTBNs). It uses a novel graphical model framework which competes with a Dynamic Bayesian Network and is specifically...

I just finished reading A Closed-Form Solution for Mapping General Distributions to Minimal PH Distributions. This was a paper that came from CMU and shows how one can approximate any member of a family of functions. The family of...