Alona Fyshe

Machine Learning PhD Student

Carnegie Mellon University

About

I am a PhD Candidate at Carnegie Mellon University in the Machine Learning Department. I began my degree in 2009 and joined the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) in 2011. I proposed my thesis in March 2013.

My advisor is Tom Mitchell and I am a member of the Brain Imaging Group. We develop Machine Learning techniques to better understand how the human brain represents and combines semantics and meaning. My research specifically focuses on the composition of meaning for minimal phrases, like adjective-noun pairs.

I have a BSc and MSc in Computing Science from the University of Alberta and completed a research internship with University of Alberta bioinformatics lab. My advisor there was Duane Szafron.

After I completed my MSc, I joined Google as a Software Engineer. Though I loved working at Google (and learned a great deal while there!), I missed research, and so returned to grad school.

Here's my CV.

I also have a blog, to which I post very rarely. I post when I solve a technical problem after finding no help on Google (my way of contributing to the internet knowledge base) or for interesting discoveries that are too small for a paper, but I still feel are worth sharing.

That's a funny looking name....

Though my name looks complicated, it's really quite simple. Fyshe is just pronounced fish, and here's a limerick to help you remember the rest:

There once was a girl named Alona,
Whose parents gave her an iguana.
But the iguana grew mold,
The clime was too cold!
The reptile desires a hot sauna.

Interesting factoid: though my mom swears she made up the name, Alona means oak tree in Hebrew.

Publications

Alona Fyshe, Partha Talukdar, Brian Murphy and Tom Mitchell. Documents and Dependencies: an Exploration of Vector Space Models for Semantic Composition International Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2013), Sofia, Bulgaria., 2013. pdf Supplementary Material
Alona Fyshe, Gustavo Sudre, Leila Wehbe, Brian Murphy and Tom Mitchell. Decoding Word Semantics from Magnetoencephalography Time Series Transformations 2nd NIPS Workshop on Machine Learning and Interpretation in NeuroImaging (MLINI), 2012. pdf
Gustavo Sudre, Dean Pomerleau, Mark Palatucci, Leila Wehbe, Alona Fyshe, Riitta Salmelin, Tom Mitchell. Tracking Neural Coding Of Perceptual And Semantic Features Of Concrete Nouns. Neuroimage 62(1) 451-463, 2012 . Link
Alona Fyshe, Emily Fox, David Dunson and Tom Mitchell. Hierarchical Latent Dictionaries for Models of Brain Activation Fifteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2012 pdf Supplementary Material
Alona Fyshe, Yifeng Liu, Duane Szafron, Russ Greiner, and Paul Lu. Improving Subcellular Localization Prediction using Text Classification and the Gene Ontology Bioinformatics, 24(21):2512-2517 2008 pdf
Alona Fyshe and Duane Szafron. Term Generalization and Synonym Resolution for Biological Abstracts: Using the Gene Ontology for Subcellular Localization Prediction BioNLP Workshop (HLT-NAACL), 2006 pdf
Brett Poulin, Roman Eisner, Duane Szafron, Paul Lu, Russ Greiner, D.S. Wishart, Alona Fyshe, Brandon Pearcy, Cam MacDonell and John Anvik. Visual Explanation of Evidence in Additive Classifiers Eighteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI), July 2006 pdf
Paul Lu, Duane Szafron, Russell Greiner, David S. Wishart, Alona Fyshe, Brandon Pearcy, Brett Poulin, Roman Eisner, Danny Ngo and Nicholas Lamb. PA-GOSUB: a searchable database of model organism protein sequences with their predicted Gene Ontology molecular function and subcellular localization Nucleic Acids Research, 33:D147-D153, 2005 pdf
Duane Szafron, Paul Lu, Russell Greiner, David S. Wishart, Brett Poulin, Roman Eisner, Zhiyong Lu, John Anvik, Cam Macdonell, Alona Fyshe, and David Meeuwis. Proteome Analyst: Custom Predictions with Explanations in a Web-based Tool for High-throughput Proteome Annotations Nucleic Acids Research, 32:W365-W371 2005 pdf
Nicholas Lamb, Paul Lu, and Alona Fyshe. Trellis Driver: Distributing a Java Workflow Across a Network of Workstations, International Workshop on High Performance Scientific and Engineering Computing (HPSEC), 2004 pdf