Ben M. Marlin

Interests

Machine learning, probabilistic models, approximate inference and learning techniques, non-likelihood-based model estimation, missing data, time series.

Research

Professor Marlin's research interests lie at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning and statistics. He is particularly interested in hierarchical graphical models and approximate inference/learning techniques including Markov Chain Monte Carlo and variational Bayesian methods. His current research has a particular emphasis on models and algorithms for multivariate time series data. His current applied work is focusing on machine learning-based analytics for clinical and mobile health (mHealth) data. In the past, he has worked on a broad range of applications including collaborative filtering and ranking, unsupervised structure discovery and feature induction, object recognition and image labeling, and natural language processing, and he continues to consult on projects in these areas.

Biography

Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Toronto (2008), M.S., Computer Science, University of Toronto (2004), B.S., Mathematics and Computer Science, McGill University (2002). Professor Marlin joined the faculty of the College of Information and Computer Sciences as an Assistant Professor in 2011. From 2008 to 2011, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia.

Activities & Awards

Professor Marlin is a 2014 National Science Foundation CAREER award recipient and a 2013 Yahoo! Faculty Research Engagement Program award recipient. He has received awards for his work on collaborative filtering and recommender systems including the Best Technical Paper award at the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems in 2009 and an invitation to the Best Papers track at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 2011. Professor Marlin was the general co-chair for the 2014 Meaningful Use of Complex Medical Data Symposium and has served on the senior program committees of top machine learning conferences including NIPS, ICML and UAI. Professor Marlin held fellowships from the Killam Trusts and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences while pursuing postdoctoral research at the University of British Columbia. He held a Canadian Graduate Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the top Canadian doctoral scholarship in the Sciences, while at the University of Toronto.