Jeff A. Bilmes

I am an associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle Washington. I am also an adjunct professor in Computer Science & Engineering and the department of Linguistics. I am also a co-founder of the Signal, Speech, and Language Interpretation Laboratory here in the department. I received my Ph.D. from the Computer Science Division of the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California in Berkeley. I was also a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, and a member of the Realization group there.

I am a 2001 NSF Career award winner, a 2002 CRA Digitial Government Fellow, and a 2008 NAE Gilbreth Lecturership award recipient

My primary interests lie in statistical modeling (particularly graphical model approaches) and signal processing for pattern classification, speech recognition, language processing, bio-informatics, machine learning, submodularity in combinatorial optimization and machine learning, active and semi-supervised learning, and audio/music processing. I am particularly interested in temporal graphical models (or dynamic graphical models, which includes HMMs, DBNs, and CRFs) and ways in which to design efficient algorithms for them and design their structure so that they may perform as better structured classifiers. I also have strong interests in speech-based human-computer interfaces, the statistical properties of natural objects and natural scenes, information theory and its relation to natural computation by humans and pattern recognition by machines, and computational music processing (such as human timing subtleties). I am also quite interested in high performance computing systems, computer architecture, and software techniques to reduce power consumption.

I ran the 1st inference evaluation at UAI2006 in (2006).

I was program co-chair of the 25th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2009) along with Andrew Ng. Please see here.

For the academic year 2008/2009 I was on sabbatical at the Max-Planck Institute for biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, working in Bernhard Schölkopf's group.

I am a technical chair of IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) in 2009.

I am co-organizing a NIPS 2010 workshop on submodularity and discrete optimization in machine learning. Deadline is Nov 6th, 2009. Please submit

I am the general chair of the 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence in 2010 (UAI2010). More details forthcoming.

I am on the senior program committee of AAAI-2010. Submission deadline is Jan 18th, 2010.