The Bayesian Crowd; Scalable data combination for Citizen Science & Crowdfunding

We're very pleased to announce our sixth meetup speaker, Stephen Roberts, Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Oxford and Faculty Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute.

In Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing applications information from large numbers of agents need to be combined in an intelligent manner. For realistic deployment methods such combination should conform to optimality wherever possible, yet scale well with large numbers of information sources and amounts of data. This talk will focus on Bayesian information aggregation models; we discuss how the use of approximate inference, based on variational learning, allows excellent scaling properties whilst retaining high performance. We showcase the breadth of applicability of the approach with examples from large Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing domains, feedback and user-task allocation mechanisms.

Programme

6:30pm: Arrive (drinks + food)

7:00pm: Talk

8:00 - 8:15pm: Questions

8:15 - 9ish: Finish off the food and drink!

Professor Stephen Roberts:

Stephen's main area of research lies in machine learning approaches to data analysis. He has particular interests in the development of machine learning theory for problems in time series analysis and decision theory. Current research applies Bayesian statistics, graphical models and information theory to diverse problem domains including astronomy, mathematical biology, finance and sensor networks. He leads the Machine Learning Research Group, is a Professorial Fellow of Somerville College, a Faculty fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Autonomous, Intelligent Machines and Systems (AIMS) and Director of the Oxford-Man Institute.

Supporters

Thanks once again to the Alan Turing Institute (https://turing.ac.uk) for supporting, and thanks to babylon health (https://www.babylonhealth.com/) for the food and drink.

babylon health is a comprehensive, immediate and personalised health service that you can use at home, work or abroad so you can have peace of mind and know that safe medical advice is always to hand. Our platform pairs clinicians with the latest in technology, including cutting-edge AI, to help us deliver on our mission of providing accessible, affordable health care for everyone on earth.