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Machine Learning: Pattern Recognition

Here are the lecture notes

Cover illustration

I teach the Machine Learning: Pattern Recognition master's course at the UvA. This is a challenging course for master's students, which provides a solid introduction to Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition, with a focus on probabilistic modelling. The book of the course is Chris Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, and we cover pretty much all of the topics in the book with this course, with occasional side-excursions to cover additional material. I also wrote some additional lecture notes to spend some more time on the more basic aspects of the course. You are encouraged to use a recent version of acrobat reader to read those, as the PDF contains animations which some PDF readers cannot render.

The course consists of a weekly two-hour lecture, a two-hour exercise session and a two-hour lab. The exercise sessions follow the lectures and reinforce the material by providing exercises that prove or illustrate items seen in the preceding lecture. The computer labs provide more hands-on interaction with the material. Examples of labs include: implementing logistic regression, the E.M. algorithm for mixtures of Gaussians, an email spam filter, face recognition using principal component analysis, etc.

Prof. Dariu Gavrila provides two guest lectures where the application of pedestrian detection from a moving vehicle is used to highlight such issues as feature selection, very high accuracy recognition, dealing with very large datasets, real-time constraints, etc.

Here are the slides to the lectures:

Lecture 1: Introduction
Introductory material and practical stuff.
Lecture 2: Training and Testing
This covers overfitting and generalisation, regularisation, etc.
Lecture 3: Linear discriminants
Simple classifiers
Lecture 4: Bayesian decision theory
Probabilistic modelling, and making decisions based on probabilities.
Lecture 5: Graphical Models
Bayesian Networks, Markov Random Fields and algorithms for efficient inference with these models.
Lecture 6: Expectation Maximisation
Learning in Graphical Models
Lecture 7: Sequential Data
Hidden Markov Models and Kalman Filters (but no CRFs, for now)
Lecture 8: Neural Networks
Multilayer Perceptrons, and techniques to train them
Lecture 9: Kernel Methods
Gaussian Processes and Support Vector Machines
Lecture 10: Dimensionality Reduction
Linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction: Principal Component Analysis, Factor analysis, autoencoders, locally linear embedding, etc.
Lecture 11: Sampling
Basic sampling algorithms and Markov-chain Monte Carlo.
Lecture 12: Combining Models
Bagging, boosting, etc.

Student supervision

Ph.D. Students

I am supervising the following PhD students at the moment:

The Ph.D. students who are now doctors

M.Sc. Students

MSc students that I am currently supervising

M. Dethmers
T. Hoppe
D. Vinke
J. van Geel
C. Bourbon de Parme
A. Günev
T. Bianchi
S. de Graaf
D. Lammers
C. Asbreuk

Students that whose M.Sc. projects I have supervised in the past

A. Sabermanesh
Blink and You Miss It: Exploring Event-Related Blinks in a Purpose-Designed Simulated High-Performance Flight Environment
M.B. Bîndilă
Grounding Detailed Symbolic Descriptions in Paintings: A Novel Dataset and Embedding Approach
Ho Tak Fong
Sensor-Based 3D Reconstruction of Pillow Deformation for Shoulder Surgery Recovery
N. Kezins
Selective Knowledge Transfer via communication-aware Model Alignment
R.A. Gaibar
Decoding Emotion in Motion : Affective Communication Through Wheeled Telepresence Robot Movement
S. Onrust
The influence of the perception of social touch on human-robot interaction
V. Krishnaswamynathan
Decoding Neural Signatures of Language Comprehension and Production through EEG based Brain-Computer Interfaces
E. Mytaros
Enhancing socially aware navigation of robots in healthcare environments through predicting human trajectories
O. Solovyeva
How Hard Can It Prompt? Adventures in Cross-model Prompt Transferability
L.P.W. van den Heuvel
Diffuse more objects with fewer labels
A. Bachir Kaddis Beshay
Cold-start Active Learning for Text Classification of Business Documents
M.W. Muller
SPaS: Sparse Parameterized Shortcut Connections for Dynamic Sparse-to-Sparse Training
Y. Jia
Exploring Emotional Transmission Through Haptics in Mediated Social Interaction : Transmit happiness through haptic hugs
J. Koning
Reducing loneliness in seniors using an automated calling system for activity invitation
M. Bui
Optimal care for geriatric hip fracture patients : an interdisciplinary perspective on preoperative decision-making and postoperative rehabilitation
A.-M. Jutte
The smart annotation tool : optimizing semi-automated behavioural annotation using an AutoML framework supported by classification correctness prediction
A. A. Singhal
Improving extreme multi-label text classification with sentence level prediction
T.J.J. Wittendorp
Pig localization using computer vision
N.D. Deshpande
Machine learning techniques for the analysis of affective components of sign language
D. Gulhane
What Face Would You Like To Have? : The Effects of an Avatar's Facial Features on Social Presence
S.D. Meijer
The implementation of LiDAR-based traffic detection and tracking
L. Schoot Uiterkamp
Classification of Empathy and Call for Empathy in Child Help Forum Messages
K.J.W. te Voortwis
A picture is worth 1000 words : Introducing the visual modality to the query dependent video clip selection process
R. Ma
Anomaly detection for Linux system log
G.D. Nayanar
Autonomy, AI Perception and Safety : a Safety Evaluation Framework for AI Perception Models Used In Agricultural Autonomous Vehicles
M.W. van Veen
Normal map prediction from light field data through deep learning
R. Fasel
Adapting the variational auto encoder for datasets with large amounts of missing values.
A. Sadananda Bhat
Hierarchical deep neural networks for MeSH subject prediction
D.R. de Meij
Predicting blood glucose for type 2 diabetes patients
S. van Waveren
Automatic image caption generation for digital cultural emages collections
R. Knuppe
Drift correction using a multi-rate extended Kalman filter
J. Kleine Deters
Therapeutic exercise assessment automation, a hidden Markov model approach.
X. Jia
Understanding social signals from nonverbal behaviors in a mobile setting
K.K. Thirukokaranam Chandrasekar
Tracking and Control of Soft, Self-Folding Miniaturized Agent using Ultrasound Images
Nourolhoda Alemi
Hoda investigated how active learning can be applied to object detection, when very large datasets of unlabelled images are available, but labelling is labour-intensive
Cem Özalp
Cem worked on recognising emotions in (non-violent) interpersonal touch, as measured by pressure sensors. Volunteers touch each other's lower arm, with the touch conveying different emotions.
Kirstin Rieping (together with Ben Kröse)
Kirstin investigated how feature extraction and unsupervised models can be combined.
Tjeerd van Dijk
Gesture Recognition using a Time-of-Flight Camera and Hidden Markov Models
Jeroen Kools
Recognizing Non-verbal Social Behavior with Accelerometers
Wouter Josemans
fall detection of elderly people with combined 2D and 3D cameras
Bram Stoeller
Recognizing individuals by appearance across non-overlapping stereo cameras
Domenic Vossen
Detecting Speaker Status in a Social Setting with a Single Triaxial Accelerometer
Silvia-Laura Pintea
Orientation Estimation from ceiling-mounted cameras
Nimrod Raiman
Move and I will tell you who you are: detecting deceptive roles in low-quality [video] data
Yanxia Zhang
Multi-people Tracking using Graph Representation with Ceiling-Mounted Video Cameras