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About us Faculty of Science and Engineering Data Science & Systems Complexity (DSSC) DSSC COFUND programme

Supervisor: Dr. Marco Wiering (ALICE)

Dr. Wiering studied computer science at the University of Amsterdam and graduated Cum Laude in 1995. After that he went to Lugano in Switzerland to perform his PhD research in the Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale (IDSIA) in the area of reinforcement learning. After his graduation in 1999, he did a short post-doc in the Intelligent Systems Group from the University of Amsterdam. He became assistant professor in 2000 at Utrecht University, and joined ALICE in Groningen in 2007 as tenure tracker.

Description of research:

In my research I focus on machine learning algorithms that use data to compute a model that can be used to accurately predict the target value of new unseen examples. I focus on using machine learning algorithms for training computer vision systems that automatically recognize visual content and on autonomous agent that use reinforcement learning to optimize their behavior. I have researched many different computer vision problems. As an example, I worked on developing face recognition systems that classify the identity of a person given a picture containing a human face. There are different challenges that make it hard to create very accurate computer vision systems, such as variances in pose and scales, differences in illumination, the many possible appearances of the same person or object, and the many possible object classes or people we would like to classify. I have developed many different algorithms for supervised learning and reinforcement learning, and applied the methods to (a.o): object recognition, face recognition, scene recognition, traffic light control,  computer games, and forest fire control. Recently I developed the multi-layer support vector machine, which is a novel and promising machine learning algorithm that outperforms other algorithms in case of high-dimensional input spaces with few training images. Recently I started to research different interesting applications of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) together with computer vision algorithms to mmonitor the environment from the sky. One of the goals is to deal with a continuously increasing amount of images and other data from agricultural fields to aid farmers in their daily practices.       

Keywords: machine learning, computer vision, big data analytics, reinforcement learning, deep learning, optimization, robotics

Corporate webpage: http://www.rug.nl/staff/m.a.wiering/

Personal webpage: http://www.ai.rug.nl/~mwiering/

Website of group: http://www.rug.nl/research/alice

Last modified:04 May 2017 6.03 p.m.