Simon Lacoste-Julien

I'm a 5th year PhD student in Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence at U.C. Berkeley. My advisor is Mike Jordan. I graduated from McGill University with (basically) a B.Sc. Triple Honours in Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science in May 2003.

My primary research interest is machine learning, with applications in natural language processing, computer vision, computational biology and information retrieval. I have been working on exploiting different types of structure in discriminative learning methods: structure on outputs, as in structured prediction (see publications below); structure on inputs, such as in latent variable models (see my Snowbird 2008 abstract: Conditionally Trained Latent Dirichlet Allocation for Text Modeling and Categorization).

Publications

[5] Word Alignment via Quadratic Assignment. S. Lacoste-Julien, B. Taskar, D. Klein, and M. Jordan. Human Language Technology conference - North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL06), New York, June 2006.

[4] Structured Prediction, Dual Extragradient and Bregman Projections. B. Taskar, S. Lacoste-Julien, and M. Jordan, Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), Special Topic on Machine Learning and Large Scale Optimization, 7, 1627-1653, 2006.

[3] Structured Prediction via the Extragradient Method. B. Taskar, S. Lacoste-Julien, and M. Jordan, Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS05), Vancouver, British Columbia, December 2005. [Longer version]

[2] A Discriminative Matching Approach to Word Alignment. B. Taskar, S. Lacoste-Julien, and D. Klein, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP05), Vancouver, British Columbia, October 2005.

[1] Meta-Modelling Hybrid Formalisms. S. Lacoste-Julien, H. Vangheluwe, J. de Lara and P. Mosterman, IEEE International Symposium on Computer Aided Control System Design, special section on multi-paradigm modelling. Taiwan, September 2004.

cs281a class project: An introduction to Max-Margin Markov Networks. S. Lacoste-Julien, 2003.

About me

• my personal blog
• my picture website
• myspace profile
• my old homepage created when I was at McGill University
• my swing dancing profile in the San Francisco area
• a CV

(Outdated) News

• [Sept 2006]: A video of my latest swing dancing performance [.AVI 50 MB] for a performance class taught by Carla Heiney at Swing Central.
• [July 2005]: I was gone for 5 weeks in Europe. You can read (the beginning of) a billingual account of the journey in my travel journal.
• [Fall 2004] Stuff that I am involved with this semester:
  • I'm on the Orientation Committee and Faculty Candidate Committee of the CSGSA (Computer Science Graduate Student Association).
  • I'm a rookie on the UC Ballroom Dancing team. My ballroom dance partner is Rasna Sandhu.
  • I'm participating in a swing dance choreography with The Movement, another UC Berkeley student dance group. My partner for this choregraphy is Winnie Kam. Date of the shows: Wednesday Nov 10 and Tuesday Nov 16 from 12:00 to 1:00pm on Lower Sproul; Wednesday Nov 17 and Friday Nov 19 from 7:00 to 9:00 pm in Zellerbach Playhouse. - Update 3/1/2005: You can download a video of our swing dancing performance [.wmv 14 MB] of Wednesday Nov 17 in the Playhouse. The Friday show was a lot better (and was sold out!), but unfortunately the camcorder was badly set and we don't have a clean video of it. We were also invited to a few other performances. You can have a look at a duo of Jean and Bromley with Winnie and I for the Asian American Association showcase [.AVI 42 MB] This one was one of our best performances.
  • I'm again on the EECS Intramural soccer team. Our team is getting better and better...
  • You can also find me on Saturday mornings at Lindy on Sproul. Check out the webcam if you want to take a peek!
• [December 2003] I was the captain of the EECS Intramural soccer team last semester (picture). We had a good team. And this year will be even better...
• [December 2003] My cs281a project report which gives a tutorial about the Max-Margin Markov Networks, a new formalism invented by B. Taskar, C. Guestrin and D. Koller which combines the power of SVMs with the one of graphical models for the task of multi-class multi-label supervised classification.
• My resume (March 1st 2004): I was looking for a summer internship in machine learning for the period of mid-May to mid-July. -- Internship found: I'm going to Finland from May 19 to June 28. I'll have a look at the Next Generation Information Retrieval group, at the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology.
• 5/2/2004: I want to sublet my studio while I am gone. Have a look at the webpage with the details, pictures and video! -- 5/9/04 Sublessee found! A girl from NYC who is going to take a summer class at UCB.

Random stuff

Weather here in Berkeley is just simply gorgeous (especially during the summer). Compare the temperature and precipitation rate from Berkeley (scroll a bit down) with Montreal !

Not only is the weather in Berkeley gorgeous, but we have access to world-class ski resorts at 3h30 drive from Berkeley! Yes, there is snow in California! Have a look at a ski trip that I did on March 27, 2004, in Sugar Bowl, close to Lake Tahoe. I am actually training for the next Warren Miller movie. ;o) Have a look at the following video showing my debut at cliff jumping (.mpg 12 Mb)...