Maria-Florina Balcan
  

Assistant Professor  School of Computer Science  Georgia Institute of Technology   Office: KACB 2144   Email:

---

My main research interests are computational and statistical machine learning, computational aspects in economics and game theory, and algorithms. Other interests include mathematical models for signal processing and computer vision. For more information on my research, see the publications and presentations links below. Additional information is in my resume.

 Publications by year, or by topic. Selected presentations.

 Ph.D. thesis: New Theoretical Frameworks for Machine Learning.

 Recent papers

• A Discriminative Model for Semi-Supervised Learning. With Avrim Blum. To appear in JACM.
• Finding Low Error Clusterings. With Mark Braverman. COLT 2009.
• Agnostic Clustering. With Heiko Roeglin and Shang-Hua Teng. ALT 2009.
  
• The Price of Uncertainty. With Avrim Blum and Yishay Mansour. EC 2009.
• Agnostic Active Learning. With Alina Beygelzimer and John Langford. JCSS 2009. (Originally in ICML 2006)
• Improved Equilibria via Public Service Advertising. With Avrim Blum and Yishay Mansour. SODA 2009.
• Approximate Clustering without the Approximation. With Avrim Blum and Anupam Gupta. SODA 2009.

 Selected older papers

• A Discriminative Framework for Clustering via Similarity Functions. With Avrim Blum and Santosh Vempala. STOC 2008.
  See also journal submission (2009).
• The True Sample Complexity of Active Learning. With Steve Hanneke and Jennifer Wortman. COLT 2008.
  
• Reducing Mechanism Design to Algorithm Design via Machine Learning. With Avrim Blum, Jason Hartline, and Yishay Mansour. JCSS 2008.
• On a Theory of Learning with Similarity Functions. With Avrim Blum. ICML 2006.
  Combined with subsequent paper by Nathan Srebro in journal version, Machine Learning Journal, 2008.
• Approximation Algorithms and Online Mechanisms for Item Pricing. With Avrim Blum. Theory of Computing 2007. (Originally in EC 2006)

---

Teaching and Service

• Upcoming Courses
• Machine Learning Theory (Spring 2010).
• Past Courses
• Machine Learning Theory (Spring 2007, CMU)
• Artificial Intelligence (Spring 2002, University of Bucharest)


• Program Committees
• FOCS 2009 (Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science)
• COLT 2009 (Conference on Learning Theory)
• Organizer: NIPS 2008 Workshop on Learning with Data-dependent Concept Spaces.

---

Brief Bio

In 2008, I graduated from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where my advisor was Prof. Avrim Blum. From October 2008 until July 2009, I was a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England. More information is in my resume.