海韵讲座第73期

讲座题目：Streaming Consciousness on Streaming Clustering

主讲人：Jim Keller

讲座时间：2019年12月6日（周五）上午9:30 – 10:30

讲座地点：海韵园行政楼A104

摘要：

As one who has been involved in research and applications of clustering for many years, I’ve come to view the clustering enterprise through three basic questions.

1. Do you believe there are any clusters in your data?

2. If so, can you come up with a technique to find the natural grouping of your data?

3. Are the clusters you found good groupings of the data?

These questions have fueled many advances to both feature vector analytics and relational data analytics. Question1 probably draws the least attention since us clustering folk want to get about our business. However for example, some nice visualization techniques have been advanced to assist with this assertion. A side benefit of not skipping this aspect of the problem is that the methods to provide an idea of whether the data has natural clusters also give hints about the big question of how many clusters to search for. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of answers to question 2, and always room for more. Question 3 looks at the issue of cluster validity, usually optimizing the number of clusters to provide compact and well separated groups of data.

With the explosion of ubiquitous continuous sensing (something Lotfi Zadeh predicted as one of the pillars of Recognition Technology in the late 1990s), on-line streaming clustering is attracting more and more attention. I was drawn into this world mainly due to our desire to continuously monitor the activities, and health conditions, of older adults in a large interdisciplinary eldercare research group. Roughly, the requirements are that the streaming clustering algorithm recognize and adapt clusters as the data evolves, that anomalies are detected, and that new clusters are automatically formed as incoming data dictate. Several groups are building algorithms to perform on-line clustering. But, how do those requirements conform to the long-held trust in the three questions of clustering? The purpose of this talk is to examine (my thoughts on) these questions as they relate to streaming clustering, illustrating with synthetic and real problem data. I chose to call it “streaming consciousness” to highlight that this is not a completely defined answer, but more a flow of thoughts about this overall area. In fact, is it really clustering at all? Stayed turned to find out (or at least form an opinion).

主讲人介绍：

Jim is a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA), and a past President of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS). He received the 2007 Fuzzy Systems Pioneer Award and the 2010 Meritorious Service Award from the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS). He has been a distinguished lecturer for the IEEE CIS and the ACM. Jim finished a full six year term as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, followed by being the Vice President for Publications of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society from 2005-2008, then as an elected CIS Adcom member, and is in another term as VP Pubs (2017-2020). He was the IEEE TAB Transactions Chair as a member of the IEEE Periodicals Committee, and is a member of the IEEE Publication Review and Advisory Committee from 2010 to 2017. Among many conference duties over the years, Jim was the general chair of the 1991 NAFIPS Workshop, the 2003 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, and co-general chair of the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems.

邀请人 江敏 人工智能系