Umar Ali Syed

Department of Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania 3330 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389 Phone: (860) 748-7724 [email protected] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~usyed/

Education

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. Ph.D., Computer Science, August 2010. Advisor: Prof. Robert E. Schapire Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. M.Eng., Computer Science, December 2001. Advisor: Prof. Golan Yona University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. B.Sc., Computer Engineering, December 2000. Advisor: Prof. Heinz Fridrich

August 2004 - August 2009

January 2001 - December 2001

August 1996 - December 2000

Research interests Research Experience

Machine learning. My research has covered topics such as apprenticeship learning, imitation learning, semi-supervised learning, bandit algorithms, game theory, web search, spoken dialog management, computational biology, and Internet routing. University of Pennsylvania September 2009 - present Department of Computer and Information Science Philadelphia, PA Research in semi-supervised learning, bandit algorithms and game theory. Postdoctoral researcher, hosted by Prof. Ben Taskar and Prof. Michael Kearns. Princeton University May 2005 - August 2009 Department of Computer Science Princeton, NJ Research in apprenticeship learning, imitation learning and game theory. Ph.D. student, advised by Prof. Robert E. Schapire. Microsoft Research June - September 2008 Mountain View, CA Developed a novel bandit algorithm for providing accurate results for search engine queries that have rapidly shifting semantic meaning. Summer internship with Nina Mishra, Alex Slivkins, Krishnaram Kenthapadi, and Alan Halverson. AT&T Labs Research June - August 2007 Florham Park, NJ Built a probabilistic model of user behavior from unlabeled corpora in a voice-activated interactive application. Summer internship with Jason Williams, Srinivas Bangalore and Patrick Haner. Gene Network Sciences, Inc. February 2003 - May 2004 Ithaca, NY Developed an algorithm for inferring a probabilistic model of protein-protein interactions; part of a larger model of a human colon cancer cell. Supervised by Iya Khalil. Cornell University January 2001 - February 2003 Department of Computer Science Ithaca, NY Developed an algorithm for building human-interpretable models of protein families from heterogeneous data sources. Research assistantship, supervised by Prof. Golan Yona.

Umar Ali Syed

Other experience

University of Florida August 1999 - May 2000 Gainesville, FL Software development for high-speed modems. Senior project with Prof. Heinz Fridrich. Paradyne Corporation Largo, FL Software development intern. Pratt & Whitney Jupiter, FL IT intern. May - August 2000

May - August 1997, May - August 1998

Postgraduate Honors

Oral presentation, Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2007, 2010 Approximately 10% of accepted papers are invited to give an oral presentation at the conference. Google Student Award Winner, Machine Learning Symposium, New York Academy of Sciences, 2007, 2009 Awarded to ve presenters at the symposium. Wallace Memorial Fellowship in Engineering, Princeton University, 2008 Awarded annually to two Princeton engineering graduate students. Best Student Paper Runner-up, Uncertainty in Articial Intelligence (UAI), 2007 Computer Science Department Award, Princeton University, 2004 Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology Fellowship, Princeton University, 2004 (declined)

Undergraduate Honors

National Merit Scholarship Florida Bright Futures Scholarship Robert C. Byrd Scholarship United Technologies Scholarship

Reviewing

International Joint Conference on Articial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2011 Articial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2011 Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2009, 2010 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2008, 2010, 2011 European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML), 2010 Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), 2008, 2009, 2010 ACM Special Interest Group on Graphics (SIGGRAPH), 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2010 Journal of Zhejiang University - Science A, 2010 Uncertainty in Articial Intelligence (UAI), 2009 ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM), 2009 Information and Computation, 2009 Autonomous Robots Journal, 2009 ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM), 2008

Publications Amin, K., Kearns, M., Syed, U. (2011)* Graphical models for bandit problems. Submitted. Amin, K., Kearns, M., Syed, U. (2011)* Bandits, query learning, and the haystack dimension. Submitted. Fabrikant, A., Syed, U., Rexford, J. (2011) Theres something about MRAI: Timing diversity can exponentially worsen BGP convergence. Proceedings of the Thirtieth IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2011).

Umar Ali Syed

Syed, U., Taskar, B. (2010) Semi-supervised learning with adversarially missing label information. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 24 (NIPS 2010). Syed, U., Schapire, R. E. (2010) A reduction from apprenticeship learning to classication. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 24 (NIPS 2010). Brautbar, M., Kearns, M., Syed, U. (2010)* Private and third-party randomization in risksensitive equilibrium concepts. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Conference on Articial Intelligence (AAAI 2010). Syed, U., Slivkins, A., Mishra, N. (2009) Adapting to the shifting intent of search queries. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23 (NIPS 2009). Syed, U., Bowling, M., Schapire, R. E. (2008) Apprenticeship learning using linear programming. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2008). Syed, U., Williams, J. D. (2008) Using automatically transcribed dialogs to learn user models in a spoken dialog system. Proceedings of the Forty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2008). Syed, U., Yona, G. (2008) Enzyme function prediction with interpretable models. Methods in Molecular Biology: Computational Systems Biology, edited by J. McDermott, K. Montgomery, R. Bumgarner and R. Samudrala. Humana Press. [Book chapter] Syed, U., Schapire, R. E. (2007) A game-theoretic approach to apprenticeship learning. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 21 (NIPS 2007). Syed, U., Schapire, R. E. (2007) Imitation learning with a value-based prior. Uncertainty in Articial Intelligence: Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Conference (UAI 2007). Syed, U., Yona, G. (2003) Using a mixture of probabilistic decisions trees for direct prediction of protein function. Proceedings of the Seventh Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Biology (RECOMB 2003). *Denotes alphabetical author order. References Robert E. Schapire Department of Computer Science Princeton University [email protected] Jennifer Rexford Department of Computer Science Princeton University [email protected] Michael L. Littman Department of Computer Science Rutgers University [email protected] Ben Taskar Department of Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania [email protected] Michael Kearns Department of Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania [email protected]