March 2013: Congratulations to MLO members Ming-Jie Zhao, Narayanan Edakunni, Adam Pocock and Gavin Brown, on their new JMLR paper Beyond Fano's inequality: bounds on the optimal F-score, balanced error rate, and cost-sensitive risk using conditional entropy and their implications .

December 2012: Congratulations to MLO members Joe Mellor and Jon Shapiro on their accepted AISTATS paper Thompson Sampling in Switching Environments with Bayesian Online Change Detection.

August 2012: Congratulations to MLO members Hassan Bashir and Richard Neville on two new papers now available on IEEExplore. A Hybrid Evolutionary Computation Algorithm for Global Optimization, and Convergence measurement in evolutionary computation using Price's theorem, which were published in the IEEE Conference on Evolutionary Computation in June.

June 2012: Congratulations to MLO member Peter Glaus on the publication of a new article in the Journal of Bioinformatics, titled Identifying differentially expressed transcripts from RNA-seq data with biological variation.

June 2012: Gavin Brown delivered a talk at ICML on the recent JMLR paper.

January 2012: Gavin Brown was interviewed on BBC Radio Manchester regarding the REUNITE project. The University has also issued a press release, and the Manchester Evening News also ran the story. UPDATE: The BBC World Service's flagship technology programme "Click" also featured the project. The podcast is available here.

December 2011: Congratulations to MLO members Adam Pocock, Gavin Brown and (APT member) Mikel Lujan, on acceptance of their paper to AISTATS 2012, titled 'Informative Priors for Markov Blanket Discovery'.

November 2011: Joshua Knowles went to the Smart Cities conference in Westminster to learn about opportunities for ML and Optimization in the future of power distribution, waste management, transportation, communications...and a lot more, to help our cities become greener and more sustainable.

November 2011: Congratulations to Gavin Brown, Adam Pocock, Ming-Jie Zhao, and Mikel Lujan on acceptance of their JMLR paper 'Conditional Likelihood Maximisation: A Unifying Framework for Mutual Information Feature Selection'. Check back for a pre-print in a few weeks!

October 2011: We are pleased to report the successful completion of the REUNITE project.

October 2011: Congrats to MLO members Richard Allmendinger and Joshua Knowles for their paper "Evolutionary Search in Lethal Environments" at ECTA 2011, which was nominated for the Best Paper Award !

September 2011: Congrats to MLO members Ahmad Salman and Ke Chen, for two recent publications accepted in IEEE TNN and NIPS 2011 !!
       Chen K. & Salman A., Learning speaker-specific characteristics with a deep neural architecture.
       IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, vol. 23, 2012.
       Chen K. & Salman A., Extracting speaker-specific information with a regularized Siamese deep network.
       Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (NIPS'11), MIT Press, 2011.

September 2011: MLO group members Xiaojun Zeng and Ke Chen are hosting the UKCI 2011 workshop here at Manchester, Sept 7-9. The keynote lectures will be given by Prof Steve Furber and Prof Sheng Chen.

August 2011: New paper published by MLO members Joshua Knowles and Richard Allmendinger.
B.G. Small, B.W. McColl, R. Allmendinger, J. Pahle, G. Lopez-Castejon, N.J. Rothwell, J. Knowles, P. Mendes, D. Brough, and D.B. Kell (2011): Efficient discovery of anti-inflammatory small molecule combinations using evolutionary computing . Nature Chemical Biology, (In Press).

July 2011: Nara Edakunni is joining the group as an RA on the iTLS project - welcome Nara!

July 2011: Paper on "Boosting as a Product of Experts" (Edakunni, Brown, Kovacs) appearing at UAI 2011.

July 2011: Paper on "Policy Learning in Resource-Constrained Optimization." (Allmendinger, Knowles) appearing at GECCO 2011.

July 2011: The group has invested in a high-performance multi-core machine for compute intensive applications of machine learning. The new Dell PowerEdge 610 server has 12 Intel Xeon 3.46ghz cores, with 32gb RAM. This resource will support our current research into various avenues, including large scale image analysis with deep neural network architectures and multi-objective optimisation problems.

July 2011: AstraZeneca Research are sponsoring 5 MSc bursaries this year, to study machine learning technologies for drug analysis. This is part of their predictive safety science initiative. MSc students Eli Marinoiu and Ahmed Osman are part of the MLO group team awarded this project. Well done!

July 2011: Ke Chen will be presenting a tutorial on learning in deep neural architectures at IJCNN in California.

July 2011: UG student Matt Leach has joined the group as a summer intern, studying hardware plausible implementations of machine learning algorithms.

June 2011: Joshua Knowles gave an invited talk, "Evolutionary algorithms for multiobjective optimization: current trends" to the Decision Analysis Special Interest Group (DASIG) of the Operations Research Society, University of Portsmouth, June 9th 2011.

June 2011: Gavin Brown delivered an invited series of doctoral lectures on Feature Selection methods at the University of Cagliari, Sardinia.

April 2011: Joshua Knowles ran a stand at the National Science and Engineering Week Fair, University of Manchester, with 3rd year project students, Osman Osman and James Whittaker. The fair ran for three days and was visited by pupils from 58 local schools. The stand had two interactive visual simulators of "Swarm Intelligence" algorithms.

RESEARCH PROFILE

speech recognition, reinforcement learning, ensemble methods, multiobjective optimisation, systems biology, probabilistic models, evolutionary algorithms, image processing, deep neural nets, dynamical systems, boosting, information theory, bayesian methods, online learning, fuzzy systems, speaker identification, optimisation algorithms, semi-supervised learning, unsupervised learning, biochemical networks, neural networks, concept drift, feature selection, game theory, dimensionality reduction,