The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Sam T. Roweis with support for twelve months to work with Dr. Geoffrey E. Hinton at the University College of London's Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit (GCNU). This project in the field of machine learning and neural networks will focus on machine learning for pattern recognition and signal processing. The goal is to allow computers to interact intelligently with their human users by teaching them to analyze sensory inputs, synthesize sensory outputs, and to make decisions about what to do based on these inputs and outputs. This will have applications to computer speech recognition and synthesis, handwriting transcription and analysis, face identification, automatic control of robotic manipulators or vehicles, and failure detection for complex machines and industrial plants. Dr. Roweis will design new learning algorithms and will apply them to data from real world problems. Specifically, he will work on speech compression and speaker identification. He will build compression systems, which use statistical models that are automatically constructed by training on large databases of speech. GCNU is a new center, which has brought together researchers in the fields of machine learning and computational neuroscience. Dr. Hinton, Director of GCNU, is a leading figure in neural networks research, and is one of the researchers who introduced the back-propagation algorithm and the Boltzmann and Helmholtz machines. CGNU has affiliations with many nearby research organizations in England and Europe in this field. ***
