Weiwei Cheng's News Archives - Philipps-Universität Marburg - Knowledge Engineering & Bioinformatics

News Archives

January 12th 2012. I am invited to the program committee of the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2012). ECAI is the leading conference on Artificial Intelligence in Europe, held every two years. It gives researchers from all over the world the possibility to identify important new trends and challenges in all subfields of Artificial Intelligence, and provides a major forum for potential users of innovative AI techniques. This year's conference is jointly organized by the European Coordination Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), the French Association for Artificial Intelligence (AFIA), and Montpellier Laboratory for Informatics, Robotics, and Microelectronics (LIRMM).
December 17th 2011. Among 4 of 15 accepted submissions, our work Label Ranking with Abstention: Predicting Partial Orders by Thresholding Probability Distributions is selected for an oral presentation at the NIPS workshop Choice Models and Preference Learning. This workshop is held at Sierra Nevada, Spain.
November 5th 2011. I am kindly selected for a travel award for attending The 25th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2011), to be held at Granada and Sierra Nevada, Spain. This year two of my papers appear at NIPS, An Exact Algorithm for F-Measure Maximization together with Krzysztof Dembczyński, Willem Waegeman, Eyke Hüllermeier (at main conference) and Label Ranking with Abstention: Predicting Partial Orders by Thresholding Probability Distributions together with Eyke Hüllermeier (at the Choice Models and Preference Learning workshop).
November 3rd 2011. My talk on "Learning Monotone Nonlinear Models using the Choquet Integral" at ECMLPKDD 2011 and LWA 2011 are now available respectively on VideoLectures.net and YouTube:
September 20th 2011. China Scholars Abroad magazine features an article about my research on the 259th issue (September 2011, Page 38). This article is written in Chinese.
September 8th 2011. Both of our submissions to ECMLPKDD, Learning Monotone Nonlinear Models using the Choquet Integral and Preference-Based Policy Iteration: Leveraging Preference Learning for Reinforcement Learning, are invited to appear at the Machine Learning Journal special issue devoted to ECMLPKDD 2011. In total, 10 papers are invited, selected from 599 submissions.
August 12th 2011. The paper Automated Feature Generation from Structured Knowledge is accepted at CIKM 2011 as a full paper and for an oral presentation. CIKM has a very tough selection process this year: Only 15% of the submissions are accepted as full papers. This paper is a joint work with Gjergji Kasneci, Thore Graepel, David Stern, Ralf Herbrich and is a result of my internship last year at Microsoft Research Cambridge.
July 22nd 2011. Our paper Choquistic Regression: Generalizing Logistic Regression using the Choquet Integral (co-authored by Ali Fallah Tehrani, me, and Eyke Hüllermeier) is nominated for the Best Student Paper award at the EUSFLAT 2011 conference. The basic idea of our approach is to replace the linear function of predictor variables, which is used in logistic regression to model the log odds of the positive class, by the Choquet integral. Thus, it becomes possible to capture non-linear dependencies and interactions among predictor variables while preserving important properties of logistic regression. The paper will soon be available in the proceedings of EUSFLAT 2011. Together with the presentation slides, it will appear in my publication list as well.
May 18th 2011. I attend the 2011 SIAM Conference on Optimization, OP11. Sponsored by SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) Activity Group on Optimization, OP11 presents the latest research in theory, algorithms, and applications in optimization, with a particular emphasis on large-scale problems. This year it has featured a highly interesting session on the research of ranking algorithms.
April 20th 2011. Together with Prof. Ilka Agricola and Prof. Rita Loogen, I am initiating the Consulting Service for Asian Students in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Philipps University Marburg. The mission of this consulting service is to promote the academic success and holistic experience of Asian students in our department. There are about thirty to forty students from China and other Asian countries studying here. Most of them have left the family for the first time, started a new life in an unfamiliar place. We hope through this new service we can help them with various issues they encounter during the study and the personal life.
March 6th 2011. I am recruited as a program committee member of ECMLPKDD 2011, the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases. ECMLPKDD is a leading conference in the field and a major European scientific event. It builds upon a series of 21 ECML and 14 PKDD conferences, which have been jointly organized for the past ten years. ECMLPKDD 2011 takes place in Athens, Greece from September 5th to 9th.
December 7th 2010. I present a demo at Think Computer Science, an one day event co-organized by Microsoft Research Cambridge. Every year, for the past 6 years, a number of students are invited for an exciting day of talks, demos, and interactive sessions. The goal is to inspire and support students early on in their education, providing insight into the world of a computer scientist. The demo I present (called RipOff!) together with a tutorial attempts to show some interesting aspects in cooperative game theory. It is based on the research of my colleague Yoram Bachrach.
Novermber 4th 2010. I participate in the Royal Society seminar Computational Frontiers in Scientific Discovery in London. This seminar brings together the recipients of the Royal Society and Académie des Sciences Microsoft Award, with leading scientists at the forefront of their disciplines, ranging from astrophysics and climate prediction, to genome biology and human variation. It explores the similarities and differences between the computational approaches across different disciplines and highlight potential synergies, whereby one discipline can borrow from another to speed up the process of discovery.
From October 14th 2010, I work as a research intern at Machine Learning and Perception Group, Microsoft Research Cambridge. The focus of my internship is to improve machine learning with large-scale ontological knowledge. This internship lasts for 3 months, during which I can be reached via t-wcheng@microsoft.com.
September 9th 2010. I am recruited as a reviewer for Journal of Machine Learning Research, a leading journal in computer science focusing on machine learning. JMLR is an open-access journal. All the accepted papers are published electronically (ISSN 1533-7928). The paper volumes are published and sold by Microtome Publishing (ISSN 1532-4435).
July 29th 2010. I receive the UNESCO Conference Grant at the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD 2010). This grant, sponsored by UNESCO Chair in Data Privacy, is aim to offset the cost of attending ECMLPKDD 2010 for selected participants. ECMLPKDD 2010 builds upon a very successful series of 20 ECML and 13 PKDD conferences, which have been jointly organized for the past nine years. It has become the major European scientific event in these fields.
It is my great honor to be named a winner of the 2009 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad. I am one of 37 winners in Germany to receive the 2009 award, which includes a $5,000 prize and a certificate. This award is presented by the China Scholarship Council annually to recognize the academic merit and research accomplishments of exceptional, self-financed — not government-financed — students from China who are pursuing doctoral degrees abroad. It is granted around the world across all disciplines. The award ceremony in Germany was held at the Embassy of China in Berlin on June 5th 2010, where I have given the award acceptance speech on behalf of all the award winners. Here are a selection of news reports from the Chinese media as well as news articles from the press office at University of Marburg and Oberhessische Presse.
May 23rd 2010. I am awarded with the Student Travel Scholarship at the 27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2010). The goals of this scholarship are to encourage Ph.D. students to exchange ideas and to give them a forum to communicate with other researchers in the field. Recipients of this scholarship are provided financial supports to subsidize travel, conference registration, housing, and other expenses for ICML 2010. Moreover, they have the chance to show their recent research in the poster sessions during the conference. The scholarship is sponsored by IBM, NSF, etc. Here is the list of all recipients.
April 17th 2010. All of my three submissions, joint work with Krzysztof Dembczynski and Eyke Hüllermeier, to the 27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2010) are accepted! Those submissions are: Label Ranking Methods based on the Plackett-Luce Model, Graded Multi-Label Classification: The Ordinal Case, and Bayes Optimal Multi-Label Classification via Probabilistic Classifier Chains. Drafts of these papers will soon appear in my publication list. More about the reviewing process of ICML 2010 can be seen at a post of my personal blog.
March 15th 2010. I am nominated for the "2009 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad". This award is presented by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) and aims to encourage research excellence and recognize the achievement among Chinese students studying abroad. It is granted across all disciplines. This year 37 Chinese students in Germany have been nominated. Here is the list of all nominees for 2009 (in Chinese).
On November 10th 2009, I have given a tutorial on text classification at GTO IES Audit & Risk Management Department, Deutsche Bank AG. In this tutorial I have introduced some general concepts of statistical classification and demonstrate the text classification system I developed for Deutsche Bank.
October 26th 2009. I am recruited as a reviewer for The 27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2010), the premier scientific conference in machine learning, pattern recognition, and related fields. ICML 2010 will be held in Haifa, Israel, June 21-24, 2010, and will be co-located with The 23rd International Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2010). The call for paper can be found at here.
My talk on Combining Instance-Based Learning and Logistic Regression for Multi-Label Classification at LWA 2009, TU Darmstadt is now available on YouTube:
September 25th 2009. I am invited to give a talk on human and computer intelligence at Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg. This event is organized by Association of Chinese Scholars and Students in Magdeburg e.V..
I have been invited to attend the 4th Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC 2009) in Zurich, Switzerland on September 21st and 22nd 2009, and have given a 5-minute talk on multi-label classification in the "Lightning Talk" session. This event was organized by Google Zurich office. The talk is now available on YouTube:
Invited by Prof. Manfred Sommer, I participated in the Ernst & Young seminar hosted at our faculty on November 4th 2009. Ernst & Young is one of the largest professional services firms in the world and one of the Big Four auditors, along with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, and KPMG. In this seminar, a throughout overview of the financial services that Ernst & Young offers was presented to the audience, together with some underlying statistical models applied at Ernst & Young.
Video streams of my talks at ICML 2009 and ECMLPKDD 2009 are available at VideoLectures.net:
On September 7th 2009 I was invited to the Round-Table dinner hosted by McKinsey & Company Inc. at the restaurant Zur Sonne, Marburg. McKinsey is a global management consulting firm that focuses on solving issues of concern to senior management and is widely recognized as a leader and one of the most prestigious firms in the management consulting industry. This Round-Table event was created to establish the relationship between (post-)graduate students at University of Marburg and McKinsey. Twelve (post-)graduate students were invited. Among them, two were from Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. During the dinner, the representatives from McKinsey have introduced the policy of the company, its long-term goal, and the working environment. This is also a get-to-know event for the consulting business at McKinsey.
From August 3rd 2009, I have started working on a text mining project at GTO Deutsche Bank and thus appear at the campus only on Thursday and Friday. In case of need, you can reach me via email: weiwei-a.cheng@db.com or telephone: +49-69-91067416 (from Monday till Wednesday between 9am to 5pm). The duration of this project is approximately 6 months.
June 30th 2009. A paper from the KEBI lab, Combining Instance-Based Learning and Logistic Regression for Multi-Label Classification, co-authored with Eyke Hüllermeier, wins the "Machine Learning Journal Best Student Paper Award" at 2009 European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD 09). In this paper, we create a novel framework for multi-label classification that is able to explore the interdependencies between labels by combining nearest neighbor and logistic regression learning. This best paper award includes a €3,000 prize, a certificate, and a copy of Machine Learning Jounal Special Issue from ECMLPKDD 2009 (Springer).
September 27th 2006. I participates in Symposium on Fuzzy Systems in Computer Science 2006 (FSCS 2006), invited by Prof. Eyke Hüllermeier. Prof. Lotfi Zadeh from UC Berkeley, the inventor of fuzzy logic, presents the keynote talk "A New Frontier in Computation – Computation with Information Described in Natural Language".