AIRG Topics - Fall 2001

Our group meets on Thursdays at 11:00 a.m., FL 246.

Dates and topics for this semester are as follows:

Sept 6

AIRG/DKBRG Organizational Meeting (Coordinators: DCB & EAR)

Sept 13

Faculty-led discussion of research overlaps between AIRG, REFER, DKBRG, and ISRG.
Each faculty member gets one slide to describe overlaps.

Sept 20

Andreas Koeller

"Discovering Inclusion Dependencies in Databases"

PhD Progress Report.

Sept 27

Elke Rundensteiner **Postponed**

title tba

Oct 4

Dave Brown

"An Overview of AI in Design Research at WPI"

Oct 11

Geraldine Rosario

"Data Analysis on Steroids: A Credit Industry Perspective"

Have you ever applied for a loan or a credit card before? Chances are your financial institution must have used a statistical model to evaluate your credit risk. In 1957, a company called "Fair, Isaac" invented the idea of credit risk analysis and developed its models using techniques from statistics and operations research. Today, the company continues to explore existing and emerging techniques from fields such as AI, data mining, decision theory, etc. to improve on its techniques.

In this talk, we will take a peek (just a peek) at:

• the types of data analysis problems that Fair, Isaac analysts face
• some of the techniques used to solve these problems
• the business constraints imposed that make the problem more interesting and challenging
• the role Computer Science fields such as Data Mining, Machine Learning, Databases, etc. can play.

Lastly, I will try to tie all these together with an analogy that starts with "A neural network is like a bikini ..." - you have to attend my talk to find out why!

Oct 18

Elke Rundensteiner

"What kind of Research am I doing?"

Oct 25

Adina Florea

"Achieving cooperation among self-interested agents"

Nov 1

Lee Becker

Discussion of reading:

"A New Direction in AI: Toward a Computational Theory of Perceptions"
Lofti A. Zadeh
AI Magazine, AAAI,
Spring 2001, pp. 73-84.

{Copies of the paper are available in the AIRG mailbox in the CS Dept. office}

Nov 8

Carolina Ruiz

"Data Mining over Genetic Data"

Nov 15

Janet Burge

"The use of Design Rational in Software Engineering"

PhD Progress Report

Nov 22

Thanksgiving Break

Nov 29

Jing Yang

"Visual Hierarchical Dimension Reduction"

MS Thesis presentation

Dec 6

Matt Ward

"Visual representations for N-dimensional points, surfaces, and solids"

Dec 13

Songting Chen

Efficient Multiple Continuous Query Processing