In the summer term 2008 the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 will host a seminar entitled:

Seminar "Selected Topics in Pattern Recognition"

Registration for the seminar:

Registration for the seminar is only possible online via the registration page provided by the institute. A link can be found on the Computer Science Department's homepage.

Prerequisites for participation in the seminar:

• Vordiplom or Bachelor degree
  
• Attendance of the lectures Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks, Speech Recognition or Statistical Methods in Natural Language Processing, or evidence of equivalent knowledge.
  

Seminar format and important dates:

• Proposals: initial proposals will be accepted up until the start of the term (April 7, 2008) at the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 office or by the relevant supervisor. At this time participants must arrange an appointment with the relevant supervisor. Revised proposals will be accepted up until two weeks after the start of the term.
• Article: must be submitted at least 1 month prior to the trial presentation date to either the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 office or the relevant supervisor.
  
• Presentation slides: must be submitted at least 1 week prior to the trial presentation date to either the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 office or the relevant supervisor.
• Trial presentations: at least 2 weeks prior to the actual presentation date; refer to the section on topics.
• Seminar presentations: the exact dates and plan for the presentation block (expected to be around July 2008) will be arranged and announced for the individual topics.
• Final (possibly corrected) articles and presentation slides: must be submitted at the latest 2 weeks after the presentation date to either the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 office or the relevant supervisor.
• Compulsory attendance: in order to receive a certificate participants must attend all presentation sessions.
• Ethical Guidelines:The Computer Science Department of RWTH Aachen University has adopted ethical guidelines for the authoring of academic work such as seminar reports. Each student has to comply with these guidelines. In this regard, you, as a seminar attendant, have to sign a declaration of compliance, in which you assert that your work complies with the guidelines, that all references used are properly cited, and that the report was done autonomously by yourself. We ask you do download the guidelines and submit the declaration together with your seminar report and talk to your supervisor. You also find a German version of the guidelines and a German version of the declaration you may use as well.

Note: Deadlines are binding. Failure to meet deadlines can lead to exclusion from the seminar.

Topics, Relevant References and Participants:

1. Bootstrap und Resampling (Pyttel; Supervisor: Lööf )
   Talk: Wed, July 23, 2008, 13:00h
   References:
   
   • B. Efron, R.J. Tibshirani: An introduction to the bootstrap, Chapman & Hall, New York, NY, 1993, 436 pages.
2. Classification and Regression Trees (Kramp; Supervisor: Lööf )
   Talk: Wed, July 23, 2008, 14:15h
   References:
   
   • L. Breiman, J.H. Friedman, R.A. Olshen: Classification and regression trees, Chapman & Hall, New York, NY, 1984, 358 pages.
3. Extremely randomized trees (Kelle-Emden; Supervisor: Lehnen )
   Talk: Wed, July 23, 2008, 15:45h
   References:
   
   • P. Geurts, D. Ernst, L. Wehenkel: Extremely randomized trees, Machine Learning, Volume 63, No. 1, April 2006.
   http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/services/stochastic/pubs/2006/GEW06a
4. Graphical Models (Bulczak; Supervisor: Hasan )
   Talk: Thu, July 24, 2008, 13:00h
   References:
   
   • C.M. Bishop: Graphical models, Chapter 8 in: Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Springer, New York, NY, 2006.
5. Introduction to Kernel Methods/Support Vector Machines (Dötsch; Supervisor: Dreuw )
   Talk: Thu, July 24, 2008, 14:15h
   References:
   
   • N. Cristianini, J. Shawe-Taylor: An Introduction to Support Vector Machines and Other Kernel-based Learning Methods, Section 3, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
   • J. Shawe-Taylor, N. Cristianini: Kernel methods for pattern analysis Cambridge University Press, Section 2 and 3, 2004.
   • B. Schölkopf, A. Smola: Learning with Kernels , MIT Press, London, 2002.
   • N. Cristianini, J. Shawe-Taylor: An Introduction to Support Vector Machines and Other Kernel-based Learning Methods, Section 6, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
   • B. Schölkopf, A.J. Smola, C.J.C. Burges (Hrsg.): Advances in kernel methods. Support vector learning MIT Press, 1999.
6. Discriminative Alignment for Machine Translation (Vasileva; Supervisor: Mauser )
   Talk: Thu, July 24, 2008, 15:45h
   References:
   
   • Ben Taskar, Simon Lacoste-Julien, and Dan Klein: A Discriminative Matching Approach to Word Alignment. In Proc. HLT/EMNLP 2005, pp. 73--80, Vancouver, Canada, 2005.
   • Abraham Ittycheriah, Salim Roukus: A Maximum Entropy Word Aligner for Arabic-English Machine Translation In Proc. HLT/EMNLP 05, pp. 89--96, Vancouver, Canada, 2005.
   • Phil Blunsom and Trevor Cohn: Discriminative Word Alignment with Conditional Random Fields p. 65-72, ACL 2006, Sydney.
7. Discriminative Training for Machine Translation (Wübker; Supervisor: Mauser )
   Talk: Fri, July 25, 2008, 14:00h
   References:
   
   • Ben Taskar, D. Klein: Max-Margin Methods for NLP: Estimation, Structure, and Applications. Tutorial presented at ACL 2005, Ann Arbor, MI, June 2005.
   • Percy Liang, Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Dan Klein, and Ben Taskar: An End-to-End Discriminative Approach to Machine Translation, p. 761-768, ACL 2006, Sydney.
   • Christoph Tillmann and Tong Zhang: A Discriminative Global Training Algorithm for Statistical MT, p. 721-728, ACL 2006, Sydney.
   • A. Ittycheriah, S. Roukus: Direct Translation Model 2, Proc. of NAACL HLT 2007, pp. 57-64, 2007.
8. Marcov Decision Processes/Partially-Observed Random Processes (Mädler; Supervisor: Hahn )
   Talk: Fri, July 25, 2008, 15:15h
   References:
   
   • S. Russell, P. Norvig: Artificial Intelligence, Prentice Hall, Chapter 17, 1995.
   • L. Kaelbling, M. Littman, A. Cassandra: Planning and acting in partially observable stochastic domains. Technical report, Brown University, Providence, RI, 1995, http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/article/kaelbling97planning.html
   • E. Levin, R. Pieraccini, and W. Eckert, "Using markov decision process for learning dialogue strategies," Proc. ICASSP, 1998. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/article/levin98using.html
   • J. Williams, S. Young, "Partially observable Markov decision processes for spoken dialog systems", Computer Speech and Language, Vol. 21 , No. 2 (April 2007), Pages 393-422.

Guidelines for the article and presentation:

The roughly 20-page article together with the slides (between 20 & 30) for the presentation should be prepared in LaTeX format. Presentations will consist of 45 minutes presentation time & 15 minutes discussion time. Document templates for both the article and the presentation slides are provided below along with links to LaTeX documentation available online. The article and the slides should be prepared in LaTeX format and submitted electronically in pdf format. Other formats will not be accepted.

• Online LaTeX-Documentation:
• LaTeX: "A document preparation system"
• LaTeX help 1.1
• The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX
  
• LaTeX 2e for authors
• Document Templates:
• Article Template (164kB),  contains the template and all necessary files in tar format (or here 53kB in zip format).
• Presentation Slide Template (4.9MB), a zip file containing the template and all necessary graphics as well as the institute’s style template.
• Guidelines for articles and presentation slides:
             General:

• The aim of the seminar for the participants is to learn the following:
• to tackle a topic and to expand knowledge
• to critically analyze the literature
  
• to hold a presentation
  
• Take notice of references to other topics in the seminar and discuss topics with one another!
  
• Take care to stay within your own topic. To this end participants should be aware of the other topics in the seminar. If applicable, cross-reference other articles and presentations.
  
             Specific:

• Important: As part of the introduction, a slide should outline the most important literature used for the presentation. In addition, the presentation should clearly indicate which literature the particular elements of the presentation refer to.
  
• Take notice of references to other topics in the seminar and discuss topics with one another!
  
• Participants are expected to seek out additional literature on their topic. Assistance with the literature search is available at the faculty’s library. Access to literature is naturally also available at the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 library.
• Notation/Mathematical Formulas: consistent, correct notation is essential. When necessary, differing notation from various literature sources is to be modified or standardized in order to be clear and consistent. The lectures held by the Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6 should provide a guide as to what appropriate notation should look like.
  
• Tables must have titles (appearing above the table).
• Figures must have captions (appearing below the figure).
  
• In the case that no adequate translation of an English technical term is available, the term should be used unchanged.
• Articles and presentation slides can also be prepared in English.
  
• Completeness: acknowledge all literature and sources.
  
• Referencing must conform to the standard described in the article template.
• Examples should be used to illustrate points.
• Examples should be as complex as necessary but as simple as possible.
• Slides should be used as presentation aids and not to replace the role of the presenter; specifically, slides should:
• illustrate important points and relationships;
• remind the audience (and the presenter) of important aspects and considerations;
  
• give the audience an overview of the presentation.
  
• Slides should not contain chunks of text or complicated sentences; rather they should consist of succinct words and terms.
• Use illustrations where appropriate - a picture says a thousand words!
• Abbreviations should be defined at the first usage in the manner demonstrated in the following example: "[...] at the Rheinisch-Westfälischen Technischen Hochschule (RWTH) there are [...]".
  
• Take care to stay within your own topic. To this end participants should be aware of the other topics in the seminar. If applicable, cross-reference other articles and presentations.
• Usage of fonts, typefaces and colors in presentation slides must be consistent and appropriate. Such means should serve to clarify points or relationships, not be applied needlessly or at random.
  
• Care should be taken when selecting fonts for presentation slides (also within diagrams) to ensure legibility on a projector even for those seated far from the screen.
• 
  

Registration for the seminar:


Registration for the seminar  is only possible online via the registration page  provided by the institute. A link can be found on the Computer Science Department's homepage.



Inquiries relating to organizational aspects of the seminar should be directed to:

Dr. Ralf Schlüter
RWTH Aachen
Lehrstuhl für Informatik 6
Ahornstr. 55
52056 Aachen

Room 6125b (1. Etage E2)
Telephone: 0241 / 80 21 612
E-Mail: schlueter@cs.rwth-aachen.de