Prof. David Jensen (University of Massachusetts Amherst) - "Empirical Research in Machine Learning: Perspectives and Strategies"

David Jensen is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He directs the Knowledge Discovery Laboratory and currently serves as the Director of the Computational Social Science Institute, an interdisciplinary effort at UMass to study social phenomena using computational tools and concepts. From 1991 to 1995, he served as an analyst with the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency of the United States Congress. His current research focuses on methods for constructing accurate causal models from observational and experimental data. He regularly serves on program committees for several conferences, including the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, the International Conference on Machine Learning, and the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. He has served on the Board of Directors of the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (2005-2013), the Defense Science Study Group (2006-2007), and DARPA's Information Science and Technology Group (2007-2012). In 2011, he received the Outstanding Teacher Award from the UMass College of Natural Sciences.