Chicago Machine Learning Meetup

We'll have a distinguished speaker tonight, Dr. David McAllester, Chief Academic Officer at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. David is an AAAI Fellow and has done seminal research in a variety of areas of artificial intelligence and computer science, including both the theory and application of machine learning.

Talk Title: Machine Learning and Visual Object Detection

Abstract: As statistical methods came to dominate computer vision, speech recognition and machine translation there was a tendency toward shallow models. The late Fred Jelinek is famously quoted as saying that every time he fired a linguist the performance of his speech
recognition system improved. A major challenge of modern statistical methods is to demonstrate that deep models can be made to perform better than shallow models. This talk will describe an object detection system which tied for first place in the 2008 and 2009 PASCAL VOC object detection challenge and won a PASCAL "lifetime achievement" award in 2010. The system exploits a grammar model for representing object appearance. This model seems "deeper" than those used in the previous generation of statistically trained object detectors. This object detection system and the associated grammar formalism will be described in detail and future directions discussed.