Syllabus
Probabilistic Models of
Human and Machine Intelligence

CSCI 7222
Fall 2012

Tu, Th 14:00-15:15
ECCR 1B51

Instructor

Professor Michael Mozer
Department of Computer Science
Engineering Center Office Tower 741
(303) 492-4103
Office Hours:  Tu 15:30-16:30, Th 13:00-13:45

Course Objectives

A new paradigm has emerged in cognitive science and artificial intelligence which views the mind as a computer extraordinarily tuned to the statistics of the environment in which it operates, and views learning and adaptation in terms of changes to these statistics over time. The goal of the course is to understand the latest advances in theory in cognitive science and artificial intelligence that take a statistical and probabilistic perspective.

One virtue of probabilistic models is that they straddle the gap between cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. The same methodology is useful for both understanding the brain and building intelligent computer systems.  Indeed, for much of the research we'll discuss, the models contribute both to machine learning and to cognitive science.  Whether your primary interest is in engineering applications of machine learning or in cognitive modeling, you'll see that there's a lot of itnerplay between the two fields.

The course participants are likely to be a diverse group of students, some with primarily an engineering/CS focus and others primarily interested in cognitive modeling (building computer simulation and mathematical models to explain human perception, thought, and learning).

Prerequisites

The course is open to any students who have some background in cognitive science or artificial intelligence and who have taken an introductory probability/statistics course.  If your background in probability/statistics is weak, you'll have to do some catching up with the text.

Course Readings

We will be using a new text by Kevin Murphy (Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective, MIT Press, 2012).  Unfortunately, the text is so new that it will not arrive from the printer until early September.  I chose this book because it is accessible and includes matlab software that students can download and run (follow the book link to grab the software).

For additional references, wikipedia is often a useful resource.  The pages on various probability distributions are great references. If you want additional reading, I recommend the following two texts:
We will also be reading research articles from the literature, which can be downloaded from the links on the class-by-class syllabus below.

Course Requirements

Readings

In the style of graduate seminars, your will be responsible to read chapters from the text and research articles before class and be prepared to come into class to discuss the material (asking clarification questions, working through the math, relating papers to each other, critiquing the papers, presenting original ideas related to the paper).

Homework Assignments

We can all delude ourselves into believing we understand some math or algorithm by reading, but implementing and experimenting with the algorithm is both fun and valuable for obtaining a true understanding.  Students will implement small-scale versions of as many of the models we discuss as possible.  I will give 5-10 homework assignments that involve implementation over the semester, details to be determined. My preference is for you to work in matlab, both because you can leverage software available with the Murphy text, and because matlab has become the de facto work horse in cognitive modeling and machine learning.

Written Commentaries

For some of the research articles, I'll ask you to write a one-page commentary on the paper, The commentary consists of approximately one page of comments, questions, or critiques of the assigned reading(s) for that class. This page will be due the day of class, and can include one or more of the following:
  • a summary of what you think the main or most interesting ideas are behind the reading(s).
  • questions about the material for further discussion, either clarification questions or points of disagreement with the authors (``I don't see how such and such will work as the author claims...'').
  • comments on how the assigned reading relates to other course readings, or, if you feel ambitious and want to track down some related work in the field, how the assigned reading compares to this other work.
  • a critique of the work.
  • What are the flaws in the ideas presented? What are the limitations? Do the authors place their work in the appropriate theoretical perspective? Do the authors overstate their results? In what direction might the work be extended?
These commentaries are intended to promote careful thought about a paper before the session in which it is discussed. The point is not to give you more busy work, but rather to encourage you to jot down notes and questions as you read the papers. They will not be accepted after the class in which the paper is discussed.

Semester Grades

Semester grades will be based 5% on class attendance and participation and 95% on the homework assignments and commentaries.  I will weight the assignments and commentaries in proportion to their difficulty, in the range of 5% to 10% of the course grade.  Students with backgrounds in the area and specific expertise may wish to do in-class presentations for extra credit.

Class-By-Class Plan and Course Readings

This schedule is tentative and will be adjusted as the semester goes on.  The number and homework assignments is subject to change. The assignments are listed on the date I expect to hand them out, and they will typically be due 1 week later.  

Date Activity Required Reading Optional Reading Lecture Notes Assignments
Aug 28 introductory meeting Murphy 1.1-1.4
Chater, Tenenbaum, & Yuille (2006)
lecture
Aug 30 basic probability, Bayes rule Murphy 2.1-2.3, 3.5 Griffiths & Yuille (2006) lecture Assignment 0
OPTIONAL
Sep 4 concept learning,
Bayesian Occam's razor
Murphy 3.1-3.2, 5.3 Tenenbaum (1999)
Jefferys & Berger (1991)
lecture
Assignment 1
Sep 6 continuous distributions
Murphy 2.4-2.6 lecture
Sep 11 Gaussians, intro to motion illusions
Murphy 4.1-4.6, 5.4
motion demo 1
motion demos 2


Sep 13 motion illusions as optimal percepts
Weiss, Simoncelli, Adelson (2002)
Murphy 5.1-5.2
lecture Commentary due on Weiss et al.
Sep 18 Bayesian statistics (conjugate priors, hierarchical Bayes) Murphy 3.3-3.4, 5.5-5.6 (5.7 for fun) lecture Assignment 2
Sep 20 Bayes nets: Representation Murphy 10.1-10.5 Cowell (1999)
Jordan & Weiss (2002)
lecture

Sep 25 Bayes nets: Inference

Murphy 20.1-20.5 optional:
Huang & Darwiche, (1994)

lecture
Sep 27 Assignment 3
Oct 2 Bayes nets: Approximate inference Murphy 23.1-23.6, 24.1-24.3 Murphy 21.1-22.6, 21.1-21.8
Andrieu et al. (2003)
ppt pdf
Oct 4
Oct 9 Assignment 4
Oct 11 Bayes nets: Learning

Murphy 26.1-26.7,
Heckerman (1995)
ppt pdf
Oct 16 text mining
latent Dirichlet allocation
Murphy 27.1-27.3 Griffiths, Steyvers & Tenenbaum (2007)

Blei, Ng, & Jordan (2003)

video tutorial on Dirichlet Processes by Teh or Teh introductory paper
pdf
Oct 18 text mining
Inferring social networks  
Murphy 27.4 McCallum, Corrado-Emmanuel, & Wang (2005) ppt
pdf

Assignment 5
Oct 23 text mining
nonparametric Bayes
Murphy 25.1-25.2
Orbanz & Teh (2010) ppt
pdf

Oct 25 text mining
hierarchical models
Teh (2006)
lecture 
Oct 30 vision/attention
search
Mozer & Baldwin (2008)
lecture Assignment 6
Nov 1 vision/attention
search
Najemnik & Geisler, (2005)
supplemental material

ppt  pdf
Nov 6 project discussion
PLEASE ATTEND
Baker, Goldstein, & Heffernan (2012)
lecture

Nov 8 sequential models
hidden markov models
Murphy 17.1-17.6 Gharamani (2001) ppt  pdf
pdf2
Assignment 7
Nov 13 sequential models
Kalman filters
Murphy 18.1-18.3
Koerding, Tenenbaum, & Shadmehr (2007)

ppt
pdf


Nov 15 sequential models
conditional random fields
Murphy 19.1-19.6 Sutton & McCallum
Mozer et al. (2010)
Lafferty, McCallum, Pereira (2001)
pdf
Nov 27 sequential models
particle filters,
changepoint detection
Adams & MacKay (2008) optional:  Wagle  & Frew (2010) ppt
pdf
Nov 29 sequential models
sequential dependencies
Yu & Cohen (2009) Wilder, Jones, & Mozer (2010) pdf
Assignment 8
Dec 4 sequential models
implementating Bayesian sampling [Matt Wilder, guest lecturer]

lecture
Dec 6 NO CLASS
Dec 11 Gaussian processes
Murphy 15.1-15.6 part 1 (pdf)
part 2 (ppt)

Dec 13 Deep learning
Student presenter: Karl Ridgeway (deep learning for acoustic modeling)
Murphy 28.1-28.5 part 1 pptx
part 2 pptx
Assignment  9

Queue


Poon & Domingos (2011) Sum-Product Networks: A new deep architecture.

Gens & Domingos (2012). Discriminative learning of sum-product networks.

Ullman, T.D., Baker, C.L., Macindoe, O., Evans, O., Goodman, N.D., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2010). Help or hinder: Bayesian models of social goal inference. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (Vol. 22, pp. 1874-1882).

Baker, C.L., Saxe, R., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2009). Action Understanding as Inverse Planning. Cognition, 113, 329-349. [Supplementary material].

Kemp & Tenenbaum, PNAS, Discovery of Structural Form

Peter Welinder, Steve Branson, Serge Belongie, Pietro Perona
The Multidimensional Wisdom of Crowds


The Wisdom of Crowds in the Recollection of Order Information (2009)
Mark Steyvers, Michael Lee, Brent Miller, Pernille Hemmer

Interesting Links

Tutorials

Modeling tools

UCI Topic modeling toolbox (requires 32-bit matlab)
Mallet (machine learning for language, Java based implementation of topic modeling)
Mahout (Java API that does topic modeling)
C implementatoni of topic models
windows executable of C implementation  (runs from the command line)
Stanford Topic Modeling Toolkit
UCLA's samiam
Murphy's probabilistic modeling  toolbox
BUGS
OpenBayes
Orange
Bayesian reasoning and machine learning software in matlab (associated with David Barber's book)
Chris DeHoust comments on software

Additional information for students (click to read)