Myself

Borja de Balle Pigem

PhD Student in Computing

News: From December 2011 until June 2012 I am visiting Mehryar Mohri at NYU.

I am currently a PhD student in the LARCA research group at UPC under the supervision of Jorge Castro and Ricard Gavaldà.

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

Email

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 Probabilistic 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, 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
To appear in: Theoretical Computer Science

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

Recuperació de la Informació   —   FIB, Primavera 2011

Teoria de la Computació   —   FIB, Maig 2011

Entropi Fylms (at Facebook, at Vimeo)

Ràdio 90

Aiki O Kami

Obskené