Colloquia / Seminars / Industry Talks

Frank Rosenfeld's vision was the development of artificial systems which exhibit intelligent, human like behavior. He suggested that this was best achieved by simulating the brain by means of computer technology. This was 50 years ago. Much research has since been done in simulating neural systems on computer systems. Despite such efforts, artificial neural systems are yet to exhibit any form of intelligent behavior. Thus this area of research remains one of the most exciting in computer science and also one with the greatest potential for future successes. This seminar will introduce the current state-of-the-art in the research on artificial neural systems. It will be shown how current artificial systems can learn from data whose complexity is greater than those that can be comprehended by a human brain. Such capability allows the solving of numerous practical, real world problems which used to be very hard to solve. We will also provide a direction for future research in this area.

The seminar will be given as a series of four seminars, one per month starting from September. The seminar series will introduce artificial neural systems, supervised and unsupervised systems, and present results on a number of practical applications. Access to software simulators and datasets will be provided to allow for some "hands-on" experience. Attendees of the seminars do not need to have prior knowledge in artificial neural systems.

Markus Hagenbuchner holds a PhD (Computer Science, University of Wollongong, Australia). He is currently a senior lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He joint the machine learning research area in 1992, started to focus his research activities on Neural Networks for the graph structured domain in 1998, and pioneered the development of Self-Organizing Maps for structured data. His contribution to the development of a Self-Organizing Map for graphs led to winning the international competition on document mining on several occasions.

He is a team leader of the machine learning group at the University of Wollongong. He has been the co-chair for the AI-08 conference, and is a program committee member for ANNPR 2010. He has been a reviewer of international standing for the Australian Research Council since 2004, and has been an invited guest speaker at various international venues. His current research interest is on the development of supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods for the processing of complex data structures in data mining applications.