Borja de Balle Pigem
PhD Student in Computing
News: I will soon be graduating and looking for post-docs! Have a peek at my CV.
More News: I am co-organizing a workshop on Spectral Learning at ICML 2013.
I am currently a PhD student in the LARCA research group at UPC under the supervision of Jorge Castro and Ricard Gavaldà. From December 2011 until June 2012 I was a visiting student at the Courant Institute (NYU) under the supervision of Mehryar Mohri.
Before this, I got a MsC in Mathematics from the FME and wrote a master's thesis on Combinatorial Group Theory advised by Enric Ventura.
And before all that, I studied Telecommunication Engineering and Mathematics at CFIS and did a final year project on Linear Feedback Shift Registers directed by Josep M. Fuertes and Enric Ventura, for which I won an award from the SCT.
Address
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Campus Nord, Edif. Omega, S109
Jordi Girona 1-3, 08034, Barcelona
bballe /at/ lsi /dot/ upc /dot/ edu
Machine Learning, Computational Learning Theory, and Analysis of Algorithms are my main interests.
My current research is on efficient and provably correct algorithms for learning Finite State Machines.
I strive for algorithms that can help solve real-world problems in Natural Language Processing and other fields.
Papers available here may be subject to copyright and are intended for personal, non-commercial use only.
B. Balle and M. MohriSpectral Learning of General Weighted Automata via Constrained Matrix Completion
Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2012
(Honorable Mention for the Outstanding Student Paper Award)
B. Balle, J. Castro, and R. Gavaldà
Bootstrapping and Learning PDFA in Data Streams
International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI), 2012
(Best Student Paper Award)
B. Balle, A. Quattoni, and X. Carreras
Local Loss Optimization in Operator Models: A New Insight into Spectral Learning
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2012
F. M. Luque, A. Quattoni, B. Balle, and X. Carreras
Spectral Learning for Non-Deterministic Dependency Parsing
Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), 2012
(Best Paper Award)
B. Balle, J. Castro, and R. Gavaldà
Learning Probabilistic Automata: A Study In State Distinguishability
Theoretical Computer Science, 2012 (DOI)
B. Balle, A. Quattoni, and X. Carreras
A Spectral Learning Algorithm for Finite State Transducers
European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD), 2011
B. Balle, J. Castro, and R. Gavaldà
A Lower Bound for Learning Distributions Generated by Probabilistic Automata
International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT), 2010
B. Balle
Implementing Kearns-Vazirani Algorithm for Learning DFA Only with Membership Queries
Zulu Workshop, 2010
(The algorithm described in this paper finished in 2nd place in the Zulu Competition)
B. Balle, J. Castro, and R. Gavaldà
Learning PDFA with Asynchronous Transitions
International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI), 2010
B. Balle, E. Ventura, and J.M. Fuertes
An Algorithm to Design Prescribed Length Codes for Single-Tracked Shaft Encoders
IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics (ICM), 2009
J.M. Fuertes, B. Balle, and E. Ventura
Absolute-Type Shaft Encoding Using LFSR Sequences With a Prescribed Length
IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, Vol. 57, No. 5, 2008
Spectral Methods for Learning Finite State Machines — McGill University, September 2012
Recuperació de la Informació — FIB, Primavera 2011
Teoria de la Computació — FIB, Maig 2011
Entropi Fylms (at Facebook, at Vimeo) — Ràdio 90
