Jonathan Huang

	email:	jch1@cs.cmu.edu
	office:	210 Smith Hall
		Robotics Institute
		School of Computer Science
		Carnegie Mellon University
		5000 Forbes Avenue
		Pittsburgh, PA 15213
	office phone:	+412 268 8809
	cell phone:	+650 248 7029

About Me:

I am a fourth year Ph.D. student in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. My advisor is Carlos Guestrin and I'm also a part of the SELECT Lab run by Carlos Guestrin and Geoff Gordon. Before coming to CMU, I studied math at Stanford University. And before Stanford, I attended Oakton High School and for a time, also Lynbrook High School.

Research Interests

My research goals revolve around developing efficient probabilistic reasoning algorithms. I am currently interested in reasoning with uncertainty over permutations. Permutations appear in a variety of real world problems but present a challenging problem for inference due to the fact that there are n! permutations. I have been using Fourier theoretic methods to develop principled and efficient approximate methods for reasoning with permutations.

Publications

• Fourier Theoretic Probabilistic Inference over Permutations ,
  Jonathan Huang, Carlos Guestrin, Leonidas Guibas.
  Journal of Machine Learning (JMLR), Volume 10
  pp. 997-1070, May 2009.
  [pdf]
  
• Hilbert Space Embeddings of Conditional Distributions with Applications to Dynamical Systems,
  Le Song, Jonathan Huang, Alex Smola, and Kenji Fukumizu.
  In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2009)
  Montreal, Canada, June 2009
  [pdf] [slides] [poster] [proofs]
  
• Exploiting Probabilistic Independence for Permutations ,
  Jonathan Huang, Carlos Guestrin, Xiaoye Jiang, and Leonidas Guibas.
  In Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2009)
  Clearwater Beach, Florida USA, April 2009.
  [pdf] [slides] [proofs]
  
• Efficient Inference for Distributions on Permutations ,
  Jonathan Huang, Carlos Guestrin, and Leonidas Guibas.
  In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2007) ,
  Vancouver, Canada, December 2007.
  Honorable Mention for Outstanding Student Paper.
  [pdf] [slides] [poster] [spotlight] [talk]
  
• A Database of Vocal Tract Resonance Trajectories
  for Research in Speech Processing ,
  Li Deng , Xiaodong Cui, Robert Pruvenok, Jonathan Huang, Safiyy Momen, Yanyi Chen, Abeer Alwan .
  In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2006) ,
  Toulouse, France, May 2006, pp. 60-63
  [pdf] [poster]

Talks (online)

• Adaptive Fourier-Domain Inference on the Symmetric Group
  
  
• Probability Distributions on Permutations: Compact Representations and Inference
  
  

Teaching

• 16-831 (Statistical Techniques in Robotics), Fall '07
• 10-701 (Graduate Machine Learning), Spring '07

Code

• Littlewood-Richardson rule
  Jonathan Huang
  A matlab implementation of the Littlewood-Richardson rule.
  
  • enumeratelrtabs.m
  • lrtabvis.m
• (LDA) Latent Dirichlet Allocation
  Jonathan Huang and Tomasz Malisiewicz,
  An implementation of the mean field inference/learning algorithms from Blei et al. (2003)
  
  • ldainference.m
  • lda_param_est.m
  • trainLDA.m
  Sample output on 20 Newsgroups dataset: [Link]
• Matlab function for visualizing a 2d Dirichlet distribution,
  Jonathan Huang
• HLNfit,
  Jonathan Huang and Tomasz Malisiewicz,
  Code for fitting a Hierarchical Logistic Normal distribution

Data

• Puzzle Data: [View][Download]
• Clebsch-Gordan series/coefficients: [Download]

Miscellaneous

• Probabilistic Reasoning with Permutations: A Fourier-Theoretic Approach,
  Jonathan Huang,
  My thesis proposal document.
• Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Dirichlet Distributions ,
  Jonathan Huang,
  Notes on several ways to numerically find the MLE of a Dirichlet Distribution. This was done for a Math Fundamentals for Robotics course taught by Mike Erdmann.
• Sperner's Lemma ,
  Jonathan Huang,
  Some theorems/corollaries of Sperner's Lemma that I collected for a combinatorics class. Sperner is an easy combinatorial fact about labelings on a simplicial complex, but it has several surprising applications in topology and analysis.
• Notes on the Kalman Filter ,
  Jonathan Huang,
  A derivation of the Kalman filter updates.
• Cup Products in Computational Topology ,
  Jonathan Huang,
  Senior Honors Thesis (advisor: Gunnar Carlsson). We show an application of topological persistence to computing invariants related to the cohomology (cup product structure) of a finite simplicial complex.

Personal

• Garden of Weedin' (joint work w/Karl Goodman)

  Most people do not know this about me, but I have gardening on my list of former hobbies.

• Photorealistic rendering, Scientific visualization, and Computer games

  In a previous life, I was really interested in computer graphics. Actually I still am, but I never have time for it anymore.

• I've been getting into photography recently, but I haven't had time to put anything online =/