Konrad Scheffler
Lecturer
Introduction
Until recently, I was a lecturer at the Computer Science Department at the University of the Western Cape. During this time, my research interests broadened to include bioinformatics and mathematical biology - this is a continuation of two themes underlying all of my research thus far: probabilistic (i.e. Bayesian) modelling of data and application of statistical machine learning techniques to real world problems. The sequential nature of genetic data leads to many similarities with speech and language, the field in which I have done most of my previous research. I am currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the South African National Bioinformatics Institute. The following is what is left of my old UWC CS homepage.
Background and research focus
I completed my PhD in March 2002 at the Speech, Vision and Robotics group in the Cambridge University Engineering Department, where my research dealt with automatic design of spoken dialogue systems. This included quantitative modelling of speech recognition systems along with their users, quantitative simulation of human-computer dialogue, and the application of reinforcement learning to strategy design in spoken dialogue systems.
My research programme at UWC Computer Science formed part of the intelligent systems group at UWC. We focus on machine learning: creating software that can make decisions under uncertain conditions, predict future events, classify and find hidden patterns in noisy data, and lead to the development of autonomous agents (robots and programs) that can learn from, reason about and act upon the real world. My specific interests include:
- Fundamentals of statistical pattern recognition and learning theory
- Modelling of time series and other sequential (including biological) data using hidden Markov models
- Recognition and understanding of spoken and signed languages
- Learning intelligent behaviour for interactive agents
- Machine learning in games
Teaching
Machine Learning (graduate course)
Pattern Recognition (graduate course)
Algorithms and Complexity (2nd year course)
Links
My even older homepage.
My new homepage.