Christopher C. Johnson

PhD Student in Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin

Contact:

1 University Station C0500

Austin, TX 78712-0233

Email:

Research:

Update: I'm currently at Spotify NYC working on intelligent methods for music discovery, music recommendation, and automatic playlist generation.

My research interests span the areas of Statistical Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and Graphical Models. I am particularly interested in problems involving sparse parameter estimation in a high dimensional setting, such as graphical model structure learning, as well as problems involving sparse representations of big data, such as low rank matrix factorization. Finally, I am interested in applying Graphical Models to internet scale problems involving massive data sets for social network analysis, user modeling, and personalization. My advisor is Pradeep Ravikumar.

I am also a member of the UT Algorithms and Computational Theory Group and UT Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Projects / Publications:

"High-Dimensional Sparse Inverse Covariance Estimation using Greedy Methods" [pdf] [slides] [poster] [video]

Christopher C. Johnson, Ali Jalali, Pradeep Ravikumar - AISTATS 2012 (Oral Presentation)

"On Learning Discrete Graphical Models Using Greedy Methods" [pdf] [slides]

Ali Jalali, Christopher C. Johnson, Pradeep Ravikumar - NIPS 2011 (Spotlight)

"Greedy Structure Learning of Markov Random Fields" (Masters Thesis) [pdf]

Christopher C. Johnson (committee: Pradeep Ravikumar, Inderjit Dhillon) - 2011

"Parallel Collaborative Filtering for Streaming Data" [pdf] [code]

Christopher C. Johnson, Alex Tang, Muqeet Ali - 2011

"On Classifying the Political Sentiment of Tweets" [pdf] [code]

Christopher C. Johnson, Shilpa Shukla, Parul Shukla - 2011

"Parallel Fault Tolerant Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning" [pdf]

Christopher C. Johnson - 2011

"A Named Entity Recognizer for Semi-Structured Data" [slides]

Christopher C. Johnson, Michael Yee (MIT) - 2010

Education:

PhD in Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin: 2010 - present

MS in Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin: 2010 - 2011

BS in Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin: 2002 - 2006

TA Information:

Spring 2012: SSC 321 - Introduction to Probability and Statistics

Discussion Section: Thursdays 3-4pm WCH 2.112, 4-5pm JES A203A

Personal:

Resume:

[pdf]