Steve Omohundro

Where Passion Meets Thought

CV

Stephen M. Omohundro, Ph.D.

http://steveomohundro.com

EXPERIENCE

SELF-AWARE SYSTEMS, Palo Alto, CA

July 03 - Present
  • President. Development of a new kind of intelligent technology that learns to understand and improve itself.
  • Advisory Board. Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
  • Scientific Advisory Board. Lifeboat Foundation
OLO SOFTWARE, Palo Alto, CA

November 97 - June 03
  • Principal. Consulting on machine learning, computer vision, digital security, information retrieval, and computational chemistry at: Ask Jeeves, Inc., Emeryville, CA; Molecular Objects, Los Altos, CA; InterTrust Technologies Corporation, Sunnyvale, CA; Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory, Palo Alto, CA; Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA; VideoScribe, Oakland, CA; LinuxMatix, Sunnyvale, CA; and Video Memoirs, Oakland, CA.
NEC RESEARCH INSTITUTE, INC., Princeton, NJ

January 95 - October 97
  • Research Scientist. Machine learning and computer vision.
  • Awarded U.S. patent # 5,696,964 for the PicHunter image database retrieval system based on Bayesian learning techniques.
  • Invented the family discovery algorithm for discovering and learning the structure of parameterized families of models.
  • Co-designed and implemented the RCL C++ library for probabilistic modelling and machine vision.
  • Invited talks: University of Toronto, Erice Summer School on Learning Systems in Sicily, Siemens Corporate Research, CUNY Stony Brook.
  • Program committee member:1997 International Workshop on AI and Statistics, the 1996 and 1995 conferences on Neural Information Processing Systems, the 1996 International Conference on Pattern Recognition, and the 1996 Conference on Computational Learning Theory.
INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER SCIENCE INSTITUTE, Berkeley, CA

October 88 - December 94
  • Research Scientist. Machine learning and object-oriented programming languages.
  • Principal architect of the efficient, strongly typed, object-oriented Sather programming language. Supervised the implementation of the compiler, debugger, libraries, and programming environment. Developed a worldwide community of users.
  • Co-developed a flexible visual lip-reading system based on new manifold learning algorithms.
  • Co-invented the first accurate structure learning algorithms for Hidden Markov Models and stochastic context-free grammars with applications to speech recognition.
  • Invented the bumptree data structure which provided up to a factor of 50 speedup over traditional methods for geometric learning tasks in robotics.
  • Invited talks: VII Escola de Computacao in Sao Paulo, BMFT in Berlin, University of Karlsruhe, CMU, UCSD, OGI, Stanford, Berkeley, Sante Fe Institute, Thinking Machines Corporation, IJCNN, Clearpoint, BMFT Berlin, TOOLS in Santa Barbara, IFIP 2.4 in Asilomar, MIT.
  • Program commmitte member: 1991 conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
  • Editorial board member: Eiffel Outlook.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, Urbana-Champaign, IL

June 86 - September 88
  • Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Vision, graphics, neural networks, parallel algorithms.
  • Supervised two Ph.D. theses and four masters theses. Elected to UIUC list of excellent teachers as ranked by students.
  • Co-founder of the Center for Complex Systems Research.
  • One of the seven original developers of the Mathematica software package for Wolfram Research Incorporated. Designed and implemented the original three-dimensional graphics portion of the program.
  • Editorial board member: Complex Systems.
THINKING MACHINES CORPORATION, Cambridge, MA

June 85 - June 86
  • Scientist. Parallel programming languages, parallel algorithms, machine vision.
  • Co-designer of Star-Lisp, the first delivered parallel programming language for the massively parallel Connection Machine.
  • Developed parallel algorithms and machine vision applications for the Connection Machine.
OM SONIC SYSTEMS, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA

January 75 - September 76
  • Founder. Design and manufacture of custom electronic music synthesizers.

EDUCATION

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, Berkeley, CA

September 80 - June 85
  • Ph.D. in Physics. My dissertation was the basis for a 560 page book entitled Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics published by World Scientific Publishing.
STANFORD UNIVERSITY, Stanford, CA

September 76 - June 80
  • B.S. with Honors and Distinction in Physics and with Distinction in Mathematics.

PUBLICATIONS

  1. Ian Stewart, “A Puzzle for Pirates”, Mathematical Recreations, Scientific American, May 1999, pp. 98-99 is devoted to a problem in game theory that I discovered.
  2. U.S. Patent 5,696,964, “Multimedia Database Retrieval System Which Maintains a Posterior Probability Distribution That Each Item in the Database is a Target of a Search”, Ingemar J. Cox, Matthew L. Miller, Stephen M. Omohundro, and P. N. Yianilos, granted December 9, 1997, assigned to NEC Research Institute, Inc.
  3. Christoph Bregler, Stephen Omohundro, Michelle Covell, Malcolm Slaney, Subutai Ahmad, David Forsyth, Jerry Feldman, “Probabilistic Models of Verbal and Body Gestures” in Computer Vision in Man-Machine Interfaces, eds. R. Cipolla and A. Pentland, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  4. Christoph Bregler and Stephen M. Omohundro, “Learning Visual Motion Models for Lip Reading” in Motion-Based Recognition, eds. M. Sha and R. Jain, Kluwer Academic Press, 1997.
  5. Ingemar J. Cox, Matt L. Miller, Stephen M. Omohundro, and Peter N. Yianilos, “PicHunter: Bayesian Relevance Feedback for Image Retrieval”, in the Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 1996, pp. 361-369.
  6. I. J. Cox, M. L. Miller, S. M. Omohundro, and P. N. Yianilos, “Target Testing and the PicHunter Bayesian Multimedia Retrieval System”, in the Proceedings of the 3rd Forum on Research and Technology Advances in Digital Libraries, DL’96, 1996, pp. 66-75.
  7. Stephen M. Omohundro, “Family Discovery”, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 8, eds. D. S. Touretzky, M. C. Mozer and M. E. Hasselmo, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996.
  8. Stephan Murer, Stephen M. Omohundro, David Stoutamire, and Clemens Szyperski, “Iteration Abstraction in Sather”, Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, Volume 18, Number 1, January 1996, pp. 1-15.
  9. David Stoutamire and Stephen M. Omohundro, “The Sather 1.0 Specification”, International Computer Science Institute Technical Report TR-95-057, October 1995.
  10. Christoph Bregler and Stephen M. Omohundro, “Nonlinear Manifold Learning for Visual Speech Recognition”, in the Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Computer Vision, ed. W. Eric L. Grimson, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, June 1995, pp. 494-499.
  11. Christoph Bregler and Stephen M. Omohundro, “Nonlinear Image Interpolation using Manifold Learning”, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 7, eds. Gerry Tesauro, David S. Touretzky, and Todd K. Leen, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995, pp. 973-980.
  12. Andreas Stolcke and Stephen M. Omohundro, “Inducing Probabilistic Grammars by Bayesian Model Merging”, Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, Alicante, Spain, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 862, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, September 1994, pp. 106-118.
  13. Andreas Stolcke and Stephen M. Omohundro, “Best-first Model Merging for Hidden Markov Model Induction”, ICSI Technical Report TR-94-003, January 1994.
  14. Christoph Bregler and Stephen M. Omohundro, “Surface Learning with Applications to Lipreading”, in Cowan, J. D., Tesauro, G., and Alspector, J., (eds.) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 6, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, CA, 1994, pp. 43-50. ICSI Technical Report TR-94-001.
  15. Chris Bregler, Stephen M. Omohundro, and Yochai Konig, “A Hybrid Approach to Bimodal Speech Recognition”, Proceedings of the 28th Annual Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, Pacific Grove, California, November 1994.
  16. Stephen M. Omohundro, “Toward a Synthesis of Symbolic AI and Connectionism”, in the Proceedings of the BMFT-Statusseminar on Artificial Intelligence, edited by Gottfried Wolf, Bundesministerium fur Forschung und Technologie, Berlin, April 1993, pp. 3-15.
  17. Clemens Szyperski, Stephen M. Omohundro, and Stephan Murer, “Engineering a Programming Language: The Type and Class System of Sather”, in Jurg Gutknecht, ed. Programming Languages and System Architectures, Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 782, Springer-Verlag, Berlin (1994) pp. 208-227.
  18. Stephen M. Omohundro, “The Sather Programming Language”, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Volume 18, Issue 11, October 1993, p. 42.
  19. Heinz Schmidt and Stephen M. Omohundro, “CLOS, Eiffel, and Sather: A Comparison”, in Object-Oriented Programming: The CLOS Perspective, ed. Andreas Paepcke, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993, pp. 181-213.
  20. Andreas Stolcke and Stephen M. Omohundro, “Hidden Markov Model Induction by Bayesian Model Merging”, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 5, ed. Steve J. Hanson and Jack D. Cowan, J. D. and C. Lee Giles, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., San Mateo, California, 1993, pp. 11-18.
  21. Stephen M. Omohundro, “Sather Provides Nonproprietary Access to Object-Oriented Programming”, Computers in Physics, Vol.6, No. 5, September, 1992, p. 444-449.
  22. Stephen M. Omohundro and Chu-Cheow Lim, “The Sather Language and Libraries”, ICSI Technical Report No. TR-92-017, 1992.
  23. Stephen M. Omohundro, “Best-First Model Merging for Dynamic Learning and Recognition” in Moody, J. E., Hanson, S. J., and Lippmann, R. P., (eds.) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 4, pp. 958-965, San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, (1992).
  24. Stephen M. Omohundro, “Building Faster Connectionist Systems with Bumptrees” in W. Brauer and D. Hernandez, (eds.) Verteilte Kunstliche Intelligenz und kooperatives Arbeiten, the Proceedings of the Fourth International GI-Congress, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 459-466, (June 1991).
  25. Stephen M. Omohundro, “Sather’s Design”, Eiffel Outlook, 1:3, (June 1991).
  26. Stephen M. Omohundro, “The Differences Between Sather and Eiffel”, Eiffel Outlook, 1:1, (April 1991).
  27. Subutai Ahmad and Stephen M. Omohundro, “Efficient Visual Search: A Connectionist Solution”, Proceedings of the 13th Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Chicago, (1991).
  28. Subutai Ahmad and Stephen M. Omohundro, “A Network for Extracting the Locations of Point Clusters Using Selective Attention”, ICSI Technical Report No. TR-90-011, (1990).
  29. Subutai Ahmad and Stephen M. Omohundro, “Equilateral Triangles: A Challenge for Connectionist Vision”, Proceedings of the 12th Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, MIT, (1990).
  30. Bartlett Mel and Stephen M. Omohundro, “How Receptive Field Parameters Affect Neural Learning” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 3, edited by Lippmann, Moody, and Touretzky, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. (1991) 757-766.
  31. Stephen M. Omohundro, “Bumptrees for Efficient Function, Constraint, and Classification Learning” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 3, edited by Lippmann, Moody, and Touretzky, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. (1991) 693-699.
  32. Stephen M. Omohundro, “Geometric Learning Algorithms” Physica D, 42 (1990) 307-321, and in Emergent Computation, edited by Stephanie Forrest, MIT Press (1991) 307-321.
  33. Stephen M. Omohundro, “The Delaunay Triangulation and Function Learning”, ICSI Technical Report TR-90-001 (January 1990).
  34. Stephen M. Omohundro, “Five Balltree Construction Algorithms”, ICSI Technical Report TR-89-063 (December 1989).
  35. Darrell Hougen and Stephen M. Omohundro, “Fast Texture Recognition Using Information Trees”, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Computer Science Technical Report UILU-ENG-88-1714 (February 1988).
  36. Stephen M. Omohundro, “Fundamentals of Geometric Learning”, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Computer Science Technical Report UILU-ENG-88-1713 (February 1988).
  37. Three-dimensional graphics for the Mathematica program, Wolfram Research Inc., Ill., 1988.
  38. Bartlett Mel, Stephen Omohundro, Arch Robison, Steven Skiena, Kurt Thearling, Luke Young, and Stephen Wolfram, “Academic Computing in the Year 2000″, Academic Computing, 2:7 (198 8) 7-62.
  39. Bartlett Mel, Stephen Omohundro, Arch Robison, Steven Skiena, Kurt Thearling, Luke Young, and Stephen Wolfram, “Tablet: Personal Computer in the Year 2000″, Communications of the ACM, 31:6 (198 8) 638-646.
  40. Stephen M. Omohundro, “Efficient Algorithms with Neural Network Behavior”, Complex Systems 1:2 (1987) 273-347.
  41. Stephen M. Omohundro, Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., Singapore (1986) 560 pages.
  42. Clifford Lasser and Stephen M. Omohundro, The Essential Star-lisp Manual, Thinking Machines Corporation (1986).
  43. Stephen M. Omohundro, “Geometric Hamiltonian Structures and Perturbation Theory”, in Local and Global Methods of Nonlinear Dynamics, Proceedings of a Workshop, Silver Spring, Maryland, 1984, Lecture Notes in Physics Volume 252, Springer-Verlag, Berlin (1986) 91-120.
  44. Peter Blicher and Stephen M. Omohundro, “Unique Recovery of Motion and Optic Flow via Lie Algebras”, Proceedings of the Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1985).
  45. Stephen M. Omohundro, “Modelling Cellular Automata with Partial Differential Equations”, Physica D, 10D (1984) 128-134.
  46. John David Crawford and Stephen M. Omohundro, “On the Global Structure of Period Doubling Flows”, Physica D, 12D (1984), pp. 161-180.
  47. Stephen M. Omohundro, book review of “Bifurcations and Chaos in the Lorenz Equations” by Collin Sparrow, Mathematical Biosciences 68:2 (1984).
  48. Alan Weinstein and Stephen M. Omohundro, “A Geometric Approach to the Equations of Plasma Physics, notes on a lecture by Alan Weinstein”, in Seminar on Partial Differential Equations edited by S. S. Chern, Springer-Verlag (1984).