Sébastien Bratières

I am a member of the Machine Learning group of the Cambridge University Engineering Department, led by Zoubin Ghahramani.

My research area is statistical machine learning. More specifically, I work on non-parametric Bayesian models, and try to implement learning algorithms for them in a distributed fashion (for instance using Hadoop). I am interested in applications to natural language processing, speech recognition, dialogue systems.

I received my “Ingénieur” degree from Ecole Centrale Paris, and an MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing from the University of Cambridge in 2001. I have been working in the speech industry ever since, and started my PhD on a part-time basis in 2009. In my professional life, I work as the Deputy CTO of Voice-Insight, a Brussels-based company which produces embedded speech recognition solutions for the logistics industry.

News

September 2010: I received another AWS in Education Research Grant for my project A large-scale infinite HMM trained on raw text. This grant comes as a credit towards Amazon Web Services, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

August 2010: I have just been awarded the Yahoo! Key Scientfic Challenge Award in the machine learning area. Here is the press release.

August 2009: Jurgen van Gael, Andreas Vlachos and I received an AWS in Education Research Grant to carry out work with Elastic MapReduce, Elastic Compute Cloud, and Simple Storage Service, with the infinite HMM.

Publications

• Sébastien Bratières, Jurgen van Gael, Andreas Vlachos, Zoubin Ghahramani (2010)
  Scaling the iHMM: Parallelization versus Hadoop
  Workshop on Scalable Machine Learning and Applications, IEEE International Conference on Computing and Information Technology, Bradford, UK

Presentations

• Sébastien Bratières, Jurgen van Gael, Andreas Vlachos, Zoubin Ghahramani (2010)
  Learning the iHMM through iterative map-reduce
  Poster at Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2010).

Contact details

E-mail: sb358 usual-symbol cam dot ac and then dot uk

© University of Cambridge, Department of Engineering
Information provided by Sébastien Bratières