Distinguished Lecture: Masashi Sugiyama

Interview with Masashi Sugiyama

As part of the 60 years of computer science and AI celebration, distinguished researchers from both disciplines have been invited to visit the School of Informatics. We have asked them to tell us about their research. Masashi Sugiyama is a professor at the University of Tokyo and director of the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP).

Title: Towards Reliable Machine Learning

Lecture abstract

When training and deploying machine learning systems in the real world, we face several types of uncertainty. For example, the available training data may contain insufficient information, label noise, and bias. In this talk, I will give an overview of our research on reliable machine learning, including weakly supervised classification (positive unlabeled classification, positive confidence classification, complementary label classification, etc.), noisy label classification (noise transition estimation, instance-dependent noise, clean sample selection, etc.), and transfer learning (joint importance-predictor estimation for covariate shift adaptation, dynamic importance estimation for full distribution shift, continuous distribution shift, etc.). Finally, we discuss how basic machine learning technology should be further developed.

Speaker's bio

Masashi Sugiyama received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2001. He has been a professor at the University of Tokyo since 2014, and also the director of the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP) since 2016. His research interests include theories and algorithms of machine learning. He is (co-)author of Machine Learning in Non-Stationary Environments (MIT Press, 2012), Density Ratio Estimation in Machine Learning (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Statistical Reinforcement Learning (Chapman & Hall, 2015), and Machine Learning from Weak Supervision (MIT Press, 2022). In 2022, he received the Award for Science and Technology from the Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. He was program co-chair of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference in 2015, the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) in 2019, and the Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML) in 2010 and 2020.