Karthik Raman, a PhD student at Cornell University working with Prof. Thorsten Joachims, will be speaking at the Machine Learning and Friends lunch this Thursday, March 5 at 12:30 pm in CS 150. His talk is titled “Man + Machine: Machine Learning with Humans-in-the-loop” (abstract below).

“Man + Machine: Machine Learning with Humans-in-the-loop”

Intelligent systems, ranging from internet search engines and online retailers to personal robots and MOOCs, live in a symbiotic relationship with their users – or at least they should. On the one hand, users greatly benefit from the services provided by these systems. On the other hand, these systems can greatly benefit from the world knowledge that users communicate through their interactions with the system. These interactions — queries, clicks, votes, purchases, answers, demonstrations, etc. — provide enormous potential for economically and autonomously optimizing these systems and for gaining unprecedented amounts of world knowledge required to solve some of the hardest AI problems.

In this talk I discuss the challenges of learning from data that results from human behavior. I will present new machine learning models and algorithms that explicitly account for the human decision making process and factors underlying it such as human expertise, skills and needs. The talk will also explore how we can look to optimize human interactions to build robust learning systems with provable performance guarantees. I will also present examples, from the domains of search, recommendation and educational analytics, where we have successfully deployed systems for cost-effectively learning with humans in the loop.