Seminar GAIA@LIX

Date

Monday 15th June 2009, 2:00pm

Location

LIX bocal room

Title

Geometric entropy minimization (GEM)

Speaker

Professor Alfred HERO (http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~hero/)
Slides Software

Abstract

Geometric entropy minimization (GEM) is a principle that combines combinatorial optimization, information theory, and learning theory. The basis for GEM are the R\'enyi alpha entropies, which are generalizations of the Shannon entropy. GEM estimates the entropy of a sample by finding graphs that span the sample points with minimal properties, e.g. nearest neighbors and minimal spanning trees. We will present the theory of GEM and show applications including anomaly detection, intrinsic dimension estimation, and image segmentation.

Biography

Alfred O. Hero III received the B.S. (summa cum laude) from Boston University (1980) and the Ph.D from Princeton University (1984), both in Electrical Engineering. Since 1984 he has been with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is the R. Jamison and Betty Professor of Engineering. His primary appointment is in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and he also has appointments, by courtesy, in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Statistics. In 2008 he was awarded the the Digiteo Chaire d'Excellence, sponsored by Digiteo Research Park in Paris, located at the Ecole Superieure d'Electricite, Gif-sur-Yvette, France. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and has received a IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award (1998), a IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award (1998), and the IEEE Third Millenium Medal (2000). Alfred Hero was President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2006-2008) and is Director-elect of IEEE for Division IX (2009). Alfred Hero's recent research interests have been in detection, classification, pattern analysis, and adaptive sampling for spatio-temporal data. Of particular interest are applications to network security, multi-modal sensing and tracking, biomedical imaging, and genomic signal processing.

Frank Nielsen, June 2009.