David Dowe (original) (raw)

• School of Computer Science & SE,Clayton School of I.T., Bldg 63, Monash University,Clayton, Vic. 3800, Australia Moving office: My office re-located in the not too distant past to theSTRIP Bldg. (the ugly grey and green thing in the middle of the car-park), Monash University, Clayton. But more recently I have had the privilege of being re-located again, this time to Bldg 63.

• Postdoc available (Postdoctoral Fellowship job available, deadline: 31 July 2016) :Research Fellow in Statistics, Machine Learning, Mixture Modelling, Latent Factor Analysis and Astrophysics (deadline 31/July/2016)

• Honours projects:D. Dowe 2012 Honours research projects.

• Ray Solomonoff (1926-2009) 85th memorial conference (Wedn 30 Nov - Fri 2 Dec 2011),3rd Call for Papers,2nd Call for Papers,1st Call for Papers.

• I worked primarily withProf.Chris Wallace- see, e.g.,"Foreword re C. S. Wallace",Computer Journal,Vol. 51, No. 5 (Sept. 2008)[Christopher Stewart WALLACE (1933-2004) memorial special issue],pp523-560(andhere).
  In Chris Wallace (1933-2004)'s posthumous ``Statistical and Inductive Inference by Minimum Message Length'' (2005),

• (a) I am given special mention in theprefaceonpage vi,

• (b) I am the only living person mentioned in thetable of contents(also here:pp ix-xv,p ix,pp x-xv), where my name appears twice,

• (c) I am the living person whose name and work are most mentioned in theindex(alsohere),

• (d) other than Chris Wallace himself, (in thereference list[andhere]) I am the most cited author (Wallace is cited 13 times, I am cited 7 times, nextmost is 4).

• Publications: most of my work andpublicationsare in the theory and applications of the (information-theoretic)Minimum Message Length(MML) principle ofstatisticalandinductive inferenceand machine learning (and econometrics and "knowledge discovery" and "data mining"), dating back toWallaceand Boulton (1968).MML andclosely related methods(see alsoMinimum Description Length[MDL]) have much to say about thephilosophy of science,philosophy of inference, the "Turing test",philosophy of mindandintelligence; and are useful inmedicine and many other fields.

• I was Program Chair of the Information, Statistics and Induction in Science (ISIS) conference, held in Melbourne, Australia on 20-23 August 1996; attended by R. J. Solomonoff(see alsoobituary:onlineandscanned),C. S. Wallace,J. J. Rissanenand others. (MML relates to the work of these people andGreg Chaitin, to the field variously known asKolmogorov complexityoralgorithmic information theoryand toClaude Shannon (1916-2001)'s work on information theory - see. e.g., "Minimum Message Length and Kolmogorov complexity".)

• I was an invited speaker at the iAstro Workshop and MC Meeting(Compliance and Conformity, Exception and Anomaly, in Science and Engineering), London, England, U.K., 8-9 July 2005.

• Chris WallaceandIare authors of theSnob program for unsupervisedclusteringand mixture modelling, whose documentationyou are invited to look at.Snob doesMinimum Message Length(MML)mixture modellingof Gaussian, discrete multi-state (Bernoulli or categorical), Poisson and von Mises circular distributions.Further details on Snob are given here. The Snob softwareis available - subject to conditions - for private, academic use. One of many other areas I have published in includes usingMML to make generalised Bayesian networks (or generalised MML Bayes nets, orgeneralised MML Bayesian nets, or generalised MML Bayesian networks) (or generalised directed graphical models, or generalised MML directed graphical models) with a mix of both continuous and discrete variables(Comley and Dowe, 2003) (Comley and Dowe, 2005).
  (Please see mypublicationsto find out other MML-related things that I get up to.)

• I am seminar co-ordinator for the departmentalMinimum Message Length(MML) Research group meetings.

• Introductory material that I have written onMMLincludes Wallace and Dowe (1993), "MML estimation of the von Mises concentration parameter", TR #93/193, Dept of Comp Sci, Monash. Other material includes Wallace and Dowe (1999a), "Minimum Message Length and Kolmogorov complexity",Comp. J., Vol 42, No. 4, pp270-283 [which is theComputer Journal's most downloaded ``full text as .pdf'' article - see, e.g.,here].
  See also my Monash University CSSE Hons. courseCSE455 Learning and Prediction II: MML Data Mining, onMML.
  Publications and academic interests
  My publicationsare listed here (fairly up-to-date) and here, and aselected list of some of my publications since 1992 is given here-- requestable in printed hard copy from either [more reliable] writing a letter to my ``snail mail'' postal address (see above) or [perhaps less reliable] e-mail toenquiries At cs.monash.edu.au. And a brief, sketchy outline of some of my academic interests is here (was here).
  Program committees

• Previous program committees I have served on are: Information, Statistics and Induction in Science (ISIS, 1996) (as Program Chair and General Chair),8th Australian Joint Conf. on Artif. Intell. (1995),4th Pacific Rim Conf. on Artif. Intell. (also 9th Austr. Joint Conf. on AI) (1996), the 1st Pacific-Asia Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD'97),IDA-97,5th World Meeting, International Soc. for Bayesian Analysis(ISBA-97) and the 10th Australian Joint Conf. on Artif. Intell. (and tutes) (1997). I also co-chaired a track on Complexity and information-theoretic approaches to biologyfor the 3rd Pacific Symposium on BioComputing (PSB-3), Hawaii, Jan. 1998; and I was on the Program Committee for the 6th Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology(ISMB '98), the 4th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference(ICGI-98) and the 7th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (Uncertainty99). I have also co-chaired a track onInformation-theoretic approaches to biology(with review form) with Dr. Klaus Prankfor the4th Pacific Symposium on BioComputing(PSB99), Hawaii, Jan. 1999 (withmy tutorial and panel,other tutorialsandaccepted papers); and I was on the Program Committee for the3rd Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining(PAKDD-99) andPKDD'99(3rd Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases). Other Program Committees I have been on include:8th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, theInternational Symposium on Adaptive Systems (La Habana, Cuba), the5th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining(PAKDD-01),ICML 2002(as area chair, andmy ICML 2002 tutorial notes),PRICAI-02andICML 2003.
  Visitors : Dr Murray Jorgensen,University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand; Jan - Mar 1999, Jun 2000, Nov 2000, etc.
  Prof. Geoff McLachlan,Univ. of Qld., Nov 2000.
  MML tutorials and finding out more about MML
  in Brisbane, Australia on 16th August '98.
  Past tutorials were given atAI'97, and atANLPF in 1998, and anInformation theory in biology tutorial atPSB99; and atutorialat AI'99on 6 December 1999 in Sydney; and atPRICAI'2000; and most recently myICML'2002 tutorialon 9 July 2002 atICML'2002. See alsoCSC423 Learning and Predictionbelow.
  Consulting
  Consulting,RUUGandRUUG Consulting.
  Tertiary undergraduate (1st, 2nd and 3rd Yr), 4th Yr (Hons) and postgraduate students
  First Year CS: I was and am now againfirst year CS co-ordinator.Fees advice for 2001-2002 summer semester.

• Third Year CS: I am again third year co-ordinator. Link to CSE3301: Third Year Project.

• My 2006teachingincludesCSE455 Minimum Message Length[which is the Comp Sci & SE4th Year Hons. course on onMinimum Message Length(MML)].
  Dr David Dowe's consultation times: Fridays at 4pm in Bldg 25 straight after the lecture.

• Please contact me if interested inmy 2005 Hons. projects;other 2005 student projects.

• My postgraduatestudents are :Josh Comley,Dean McKenzie, both jointly or associately supervised by Dr Lloyd Allison; andGreg Collie; andLara Kornienkoand Suzie Molloy, jointly supervised with Dr David Albrecht; and Peter Tan andAdrian Bickerstaffe.
  Some other possible Master's and Ph.D. postgrad.projectsare givenhere, but others are definitely possible.

• My 2002 Hons. students includedRyan Baird,Andrew RuanandAndy Serelis.

• My 2001 Hons. students includeLara Kornienko(co-supervised with Dr David Albrecht),Peter Jing TanandRyan Baird.

• My 2000 Hons. students includedEdmund Lam(MML),Scott Needham(MMLand Ockham's razor), andRichard Wallbrink(chess- andgame-player behaviour).

• My 1999 Hons. students includedLachlan Champion,Joshua Comley, (with Alan Dorin)Terry Lee, andCuong Ta.

• My 1997 Hons. studentprojectswere on :
  MML factor analysis in mixture modelling (& Snob) withR. Edwards,
  (co-supervised with G. Farr) on MML inductive inference of game-player behaviour with A. Jansen, (co-supervised with G. Farr and A.J. Hurst) onprobabilistic prediction offootball withM. Doran, and (co-supervised with K.B. Korb, who turned up to a few meetings) onMML Forecasting of Financial Markets with A. Pan.

• Past teachingandpast students.

• Undergraduate subject,Honours(project) andPostgraduateCourse Information.

• Minimum message length(MML) [compare withAIC or with MDL],

• Chris Wallace (1933-2004)(developer of MML in1968),

• Wallace, C.S. (2005) [posthumous]Book:Statistical and Inductive Inference by Minimum Message Length, Springer (Series: Information Science and Statistics), 2005, XVI, 432 pp., 22 illus., Hardcover, ISBN: 0-387-23795-X. (Link totable of contents,chapter headings andmore.)

• Wallace, C.S. (with D.L. Dowe), "Minimum Message Length and Kolmogorov complexity",Comp. J., Vol 42, No. 4 (1999a),pp270-283[which is theComputer Journal's most downloaded ``full text as .pdf'' article - see, e.g.,here; and which is also Chris Wallace's most cited work which is co-authored by a still active MML researcher]

• Wallace and Dowe (1999b),Wallace and Dowe (1999c), and other publications byC. S. Wallaceand by D.L. Dowe(on, e.g.,MML decision trees,MML decision graphs,MML and generalised hybrid Bayes nets,MML SVM, etc.)

• Bayesian belief networks,

• clustering and mixture modelling,

• comparisons betweenMML and the subsequent MDL principle,

• data repositories,

• decision trees,

• David Dowe publications,

• Occam's razor(Ockham's razor),

• Snob(program for MML clustering and mixture modelling,MML finite mixture models),

• (econometric)time seriesusing MML,

• medical research,

• a probabilistic sports prediction competition(and further reading on probabilistic scoring),

• chess and game theory research;

• some useful links,TheHungerSite,TheRainforestSite, "do-goody"/"do-goody stuff, improving the world and saving the planet";

• CSSE Clayton seminars;an internal link,FAQsandsemester dates;

• David Dowe's computerfooty tipswere in Friday's The Australian, starting Sat. 28th March 1998 through till the end of 2000.

• Please e-mail me if you would like to know more.

• This page,http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~dld, was last updated no earlier than 23rd July 1998.
  Copyright David L. Dowe,Monash University, Australia, 1995, 23 Apr 1998, 23 July 1998, etc.
  Copying is not permitted without expressed permission fromDavid L. Dowe.