A leading expert on machine learning and its applications to speech recognition, text processing and analysis of genomic sequences will present the 2007 Mervyn Young Memorial Lecture Feb. 22 at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Fernando Pereira, the Rachleff Professor and chair of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, will discuss a new, unified discriminative learning approach to sequence analysis problems. The one-hour talk, titled "Learning to Analyze Sequences," is free and open to the public and will begin at 3:30 p.m. in the Engineering Center Complex, room ECCR 265.
Originally from Lisbon, Portugal, Pereira earned his doctorate in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and then joined SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center in Menlo Park, Calif., where he worked on logic programming, natural-language understanding and speech-understanding systems. He joined AT&T in 1989, and from 1994 to 2000 he headed the machine learning and information retrieval department of AT&T Labs-Research.
He also spent a year as a research scientist at WhizBang! Labs, where he developed finite-state models and algorithms for information extraction from the World Wide Web. He joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 2001.
The Mervyn Young Memorial Lecture Series was established through a private endowment in CU-Boulder's department of computer science to explore issues of computing technology and society. The series was launched in 1999 with a lecture by Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
For more information call the computer science department at (303) 492-6101.