Short Bio:

Lise Getoor is a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.   Her research areas include machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty; in addition she works in data management, visual analytics and social network analysis. She has over 200 publications and extensive experience with machine learning and probabilistic modeling methods for graph and network data. She is a Fellow of the Association for Artificial Intelligence, an elected board member of the International Machine Learning Society, serves on the board of the Computing Research Association (CRA), was co-chair for ICML 2011, has served as Machine Learning Journal Action Editor, Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions of Knowledge Discovery from Data, JAIR Associate Editor, and on the AAAI Council.  She is a recipient of an NSF Career Award and eight best paper and best student paper awards. She was recently recognized as one emerging research leaders in data mining and data science based on citation and impact according to KDD Nuggets. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2001, her MS from UC Berkeley, and her BS from UC Santa Barbara, and was a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland, College Park from 2001-2013.​

Website: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~getoor

Combining Statistics and Semantics to Turn Data into Knowledge

Addressing inherent uncertainty and exploiting structure are fundamental to turning data into knowledge. Statistical relational learning (SRL) builds on principles from probability theory and statistics to address uncertainty while incorporating tools from logic to represent structure. In this talk I will overview our recent work on probabilistic soft logic (PSL), an SRL framework for collective, probabilistic reasoning in relational domains. PSL is able to reason holistically about both entity attributes and relationships among the entities, along with ontological constraints. The underlying mathematical framework supports extremely efficient inference. Our recent results show that by building on state-of-the-art optimization methods in a distributed implementation, we can solve large-scale knowledge graph extraction problems with millions of random variables orders of magnitude faster than existing approaches.