Automatic Optimization of Intelligent Information Systems: Eric Nyberg, CMU (Distinguished Alumnus of 2013)

Boston University Department of Computer Science 2013 Distinguished Alum Talk and Award Presentation Prof. Eric Nyberg (BA 1983) http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ehn/ Date: Friday, September 27, at 11am Location: Hariri Institute Automatic Optimization of Intelligent Information Systems Software frameworks which support integration and scaling of text analysis algorithms make it possible to build complex, high performance information systems for information extraction, information retrieval, and question answering; IBM¹s Watson is a prominent example. As the complexity and scaling of information systems become ever greater, it is much more challenging to effectively and efficiently determine which toolkits, algorithms, knowledge bases or other resources should be integrated into an information system in order to achieve a desired or optimal level of performance on a given task. This talk presents a formal representation of the space of possible system configurations, given a set of information processing components and their parameters, and discusses algorithmic approaches to determine an optimal configuration. We introduce the Configuration Space Exploration framework, an extension to the UIMA framework which provides a general distributed solution for building and exploring configuration spaces for information systems. Using the CSE framework, we explored over one trillion combinations of components and parameter values for a biomedical information system evaluated on TREC Genomics datasets, and achieved results which are significantly better than prior published work. Biography: Dr. Eric Nyberg is a Professor in the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is Director for the M.S. program in Very Large Information Systems, and co-Director for the M.S. Program in Biotechnology, Innovation, and Computation. He has made significant research contributions to the fields of automatic text translation, information retrieval, and automatic question answering. Dr. Nyberg received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (1992), and his BA from Boston University (1983). He has pioneered the Open Advancement of Question Answering, an architecture and methodology for accelerating collaborative research in automatic question answering. In 2012, Dr. Nyberg received the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence for his scientific contributions to the field of question answering and his work on the Watson project. More about the BU Computer Science Distinguished Alumna/Alumnus Award: http://www.bu.edu/cs/people/alumni/bu-computing-alumni-network/alumni-award