Keynote Speakers

Christopher Manning is a professor of computer science and linguistics at Stanford University. His Ph.D. is from Stanford in 1995, and he held faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Sydney before returning to Stanford. His research goal is computers that can intelligently process, understand, and generate human language material. Manning concentrates on machine learning approaches to computational linguistic problems, including syntactic parsing, computational semantics and pragmatics, textual inference, machine translation, and using deep learning for NLP. He is an ACM Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, and an ACL Fellow, and has coauthored leading textbooks on statistical natural language processing and information retrieval. He is a member of the Stanford NLP group (@stanfordnlp).

Keynote abstract

There is a lot of overlap between the core problems of information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). An IR system gains from understanding a user need and from understanding documents, and hence being able to determine whether a document has information that satisfies the user need. Much of NLP is about the same thing: Natural language understanding aims to understand the meaning of questions and documents and meaning relationships. The exciting recent application of deep learning approaches in NLP has brought new tools for effectively understanding language semantics. In principle, there should be a lot of synergy, though in practice the concerns of IR on large systems and macro-scale understanding have tended to contrast with the emphasis in NLP on language structure and micro-scale understanding.
My talk will emphasize the two topics of how NLP can contribute to understanding textual relationships and how deep learning approaches substantially aid in this goal. One basic – and very successful tool – has been the new generation of distributed word representations: neural word embeddings. However, beyond just word meanings, we need to understand how to compose the meanings of larger pieces of text. Two requirements for that are good ways to understand the structure of human language utterances and ways to compose their meanings. Deep learning methods can help for both tasks. Finally, we need to understand relationships between pieces of text, to be able to do tasks such as Natural Language Inference (or Recognizing Textual Entailment) and Question Answering, and I will look at some of our recent work in these areas, both with and without the help of neural networks.

Vipin Kumar is a Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, where he holds the William Norris Endowed Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Kumar’s current research interests include data mining, high-performance computing, and their applications in Climate/Ecosystems and Biomedical domains. Kumar is the Lead PI of a 5-year, $10 Million project, “Understanding Climate Change – A Data Driven Approach” funded by the NSF’s Expeditions in Computing program. This project is focused on the development of novel data driven approaches to help understand climate change and its impact. He has authored over 300 research articles, and has coedited or coauthored 10 books including two text books “Introduction to Parallel Computing” and “Introduction to Data Mining”, that are used world-wide and have been translated into many languages. Kumar co-founded SIAM International Conference on Data Mining and served as a founding co-editor-in-chief of Journal of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining (an official journal of the American Statistical Association). Kumar is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE and AAAS. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee (2013), the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Computer Science Department, University of Maryland College Park (2009), and IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Achievement Award (2005). Kumar’s foundational research in data mining and its applications to scientific data was honored by the ACM SIGKDD 2012 Innovation Award, which is the highest award for technical excellence in the field of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD).

Keynote abstract

This talk will present an overview of research being done in a large interdisciplinary project on the development of novel data mining and machine learning approaches for analyzing massive amount of climate and ecosystem data now available from satellite and ground-based sensors, and physics-based climate model simulations. These information-rich data sets offer huge potential for monitoring, understanding, and predicting the behavior of the Earth’s ecosystem and for advancing the science of global change. This talk will discuss challenges in analyzing such data sets and some of our research results in mapping the dynamics of surface water globally as well as detecting deforestation and fires in tropical forests using data from Earth observing satellites.