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. Recipient of the CMU SCS Distinguished Dissertation Award.

 NEWS: I am a recipient of a 2011 Microsoft Faculty Research Fellowship and of an NSF CAREER Award.

---

Teaching and Service

• Past Courses
• Machine Learning Theory (Fall 2011, GATech).
• Design and Analysis of Algorithms.(Spring 2011, GATech).
• Connections between Learning, Game Theory, and Optimization.(Fall 2010, GATech).
• Machine Learning Theory (Spring 2010, GATech).
• Machine Learning Theory (Spring 2007, CMU)
• Artificial Intelligence (Spring 2002, University of Bucharest)


• Program Committees
• Main PC: COLT 2012, UAI 2012, NIPS 2011,COLT 2011, ICS 2011, NIPS 2010, ALT 2010, FOCS 2009, COLT 2009.
• Extended PC: EC 2011, ECML PKDD 2010, WWW 2010, ICML 2008, ICML 2007.


• Organizer
  • ARC Workshop on Modern Aspects of Submodularity.
  • Invited Session Chair: INFORMS Annual Meeting 2009.
  • Invited Session Chair: The 20th International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, ISMP 2009.
  • NIPS 2008 Workshop on Learning with Data-dependent Concept Spaces.

---

Selected papers

Recent papers

• Learning Submodular Functions. With Nick Harvey. STOC 2011. See related talk.
• Robust Hierarchical Clustering. With Pramod Gupta. COLT 2010.
• Circumventing the Price of Anarchy: Leading Dynamics to Good Behavior. With Avrim Blum and Yishay Mansour. ICS 2010.
• A Discriminative Model for Semi-Supervised Learning. With Avrim Blum. Journal of the ACM 2010. See related talk.
• The True Sample Complexity of Active Learning. With Steve Hanneke and Jennifer Wortman. Machine Learning Journal 2010.
  
• The Price of Uncertainty. With Avrim Blum and Yishay Mansour. EC 2009.
• Agnostic Active Learning. With Alina Beygelzimer and John Langford. Journal of Computer and System Sciences 2009.
• Approximate Clustering without the Approximation. With Avrim Blum and Anupam Gupta. SODA 2009.
  See journal submission (2010). See related talk.

 Older papers

• A Discriminative Framework for Clustering via Similarity Functions. With Avrim Blum and Santosh Vempala. STOC 2008.
  See also journal submission (2009).
• 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. See related talk.
  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.

---

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.