Katherine Heller

I have moved to Duke University! Visit my new website here.

I am currently an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in the Computational Cognitive Science group at MIT. I was previously an EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and received my Ph.D from the Gatsby Unit on a UCL Graduate Research Scholarship. My Ph.D. advisor was Zoubin Ghahramani.

My research interests lie in the fields of machine learning and Bayesian statistics. Specifically, I develop new methods and models to discover latent structure in data, including cluster structure, using Bayesian nonparametrics, hierarchical Bayes, techniques for Bayesian model comparison, and other Bayesian statistical methods. I also leverage computer science algorithms and ideas to perform inference efficiently.

I apply these methods to problems in cognitive science, where I strive to model human behavior, including human categorization, and human social interactions in online environments. I have also applied methods that I have developed to some problems in computational biology, information retrieval, computer security and computer vision.

News

I am serving as a probabilistic models and methods area chair for NIPS 2011.

I have been awarded an NSF postdoctoral fellowship on "Bayesian Models of Social Behavior using Online Resources"!

Curriculum Vitae

My CV is in pdf format.

Papers

J.T. Abbott, K.A. Heller, Z. Ghahramani, and T.L. Griffiths
"Testing a Bayesian Measure of Representativeness Using a Large Image Database",
To appear in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2011).
S. Mohamed, K.A. Heller and Z. Ghahramani
"Bayesian and L1 Approaches to Sparse Unsupervised Learning",
Arxiv 1106.1157, 2011.
S. Williamson, C. Wang, K.A. Heller, and D.M. Blei
"Nonparametric Mixed Membership Models using the IBP Compound Dirichlet Process",
In K.L. Mengerson, C.P. Robert, and D.M. Titterington, editors, Mixture Estimation and Applications. John Wiley and Sons, 2011.
C. Blundell, Y.W. Teh and K.A. Heller
"Discovering Non-binary Hierarchical Structures with Bayesian Rose Trees",
In K.L. Mengerson, C.P. Robert, and D.M. Titterington, edtiors, Mixture Estimation and Applications. John Wiley and Sons, 2011.
E. Airoldi, K.A. Heller and R. Silva
"Small sets of interacting proteins suggest functional linkage mechanisms via Bayesian analogical reasoning",
Bioinformatics (Proceedings of the ISMB) 27, 2011.
C. Blundell, Y.W. Teh and K.A. Heller
"Bayesian Rose Trees",
In the 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2010).
S. Williamson, C. Wang, K.A. Heller, and D.M. Blei
"The IBP Compound Dirichlet Process and its Application to Focused Topic Modeling",
In the 27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2010).
H. Wallach, S.T. Jensen, L. Dicker, and K.A. Heller,
"An Alternative Prior Process for Nonparametric Bayesian Clustering",
In the 13th International Conference on AI and Statistics (AISTATS 2010).
R. Silva, K.A. Heller, Z. Ghahramani, and E. Airoldi,
"Ranking Relations using Analogies in Biological and Information Networks",
In Annals of Applied Statistics 2010.
K.A. Heller, A. Sanborn, and N. Chater,
"Hierarchical Learning of Dimensional Biases in Human Categorization",
In Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2009).
R.S. Savage, K.A. Heller, Y. Xu, Z. Ghahramani, W.M. Truman, M. Grant, K.J. Denby, and D.L. Wild,
"R/BHC:Fast Bayesian Hierarchical Clustering for Microarray Data",
BMC Bioinformatics 2009, 10:242.
K.A. Heller, Y.W. Teh, and D. Gorur,
"The Infinite Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model",
In the 12th International Conference on AI and Statistics (AISTATS 2009).
Y. Xu, K.A. Heller, and Z. Ghahramani,
"Tree-Based Inference for Dirichlet Process Mixtures",
In the 12th International Conference on AI and Statistics (AISTATS 2009).
K.A. Heller,
"Efficient Bayesian Methods for Clustering",
Ph.D. Thesis 2008.
S. Mohamed, K.A. Heller and Z. Ghahramani,
"Bayesian Exponential Family PCA",
In Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2008).
K.A. Heller, S. Williamson and Z. Ghahramani,
"Statistical Models for Partial Membership"
In the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2008).
K.A. Heller and Z. Ghahramani,
"A Nonparametric Bayesian Approach to Modeling Overlapping Clusters",
In the 11th International Conference on AI and Statistics (AISTATS 2007).
R. Silva, K.A. Heller and Z. Ghahramani,
"Analogical Reasoning with Relational Bayesian Sets",
In the 11th International Conference on AI and Statistics (AISTATS 2007).
K.A. Heller and Z. Ghahramani,
"A Simple Bayesian Framework for Content-Based Image Retrieval",
In the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2006).
Z. Ghahramani and K.A. Heller,
"Bayesian Sets",
In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2005).
K.A. Heller and Z. Ghahramani,
"Randomized Algorithms for Fast Bayesian Hierarchical Clustering" ,
PASCAL Workshop on Statistics and Optimization of Clustering 2005.
K.A. Heller and Z. Ghahramani,
"Bayesian Hierarchical Clustering"
In the Twenty-second International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2005).
There is also a longer version, Gatsby Unit Technical Report GCNU-TR 2005-002. [ps] [pdf]
S.J. Stolfo, F. Apap, E. Eskin, K.A. Heller, S. Hershkop, A. Honig, K.M. Svore,
"A Comparitive Evaluation of Two Algorithms for Windows Registry Anomaly Detection",
Journal of Computer Security 2005 13(4):659-693.
K.A. Heller, K.M. Svore, A. Keromytis, S.J. Stolfo,
"One Class Support Vector Machines for Detecting Anomalous Windows Registry Accesses"
In the proceedings of the workshop on Data Mining for Computer Security (ICDM 2003).
X.I. Zhang, K.A. Heller, I. Hefter, C.S. Leslie, and L.A. Chasin,
"Sequence Information for the Splicing of Human Pre-mRNA Identified by Support Vector Machine Classification",
Genome Research 2003 13:2637-2650.

Personal

A website about the trip to Egypt that I took in 2006.

Contact Info

Katherine Heller
46-4053H
Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139

Email: kheller (a-t) mit.edu