Bob West

Hi, I'm Robert West, but you can call me Bob, or His Bobness, or Bobber, or El Boberino if you're not into the whole brevity thing. I'm a second-year Ph.D. student in computer science at Stanford University. My main research interests lie within artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language understanding, and social and information network analysis. My advisor is Jure Leskovec. Previously, I was a Master's student in the Reasoning and Learning Lab at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Before that, I received a Diplom degree working in the Robotics and Embedded Systems Lab of Technische Universität München in Munich, Germany.

St. Anford shields us from memleaks and segfaults.

Publications

Data mining, machine learning, and network analysis

• Robert West and Jure Leskovec. Human Wayfinding in Information Networks. To appear in Proceedings of the 21st International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'12), Lyon, France, 2012. [PDF]
• Robert West, Ingmar Weber, and Carlos Castillo. Smart but Fun: A Data-Driven Portrait of Wikipedia Editors. Submitted for review. [PDF preprint]
• Robert West, Doina Precup, and Joelle Pineau. Automatically Suggesting Topics for Augmenting Text Documents. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'10), pp. 929–938, Toronto, Ont., 2010. [PDF]
• Robert West, Doina Precup, and Joelle Pineau. Completing Wikipedia's Hyperlink Structure through Dimensionality Reduction. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'09), pp. 1097–1106, Hong Kong, 2009. [PDF] — [Project website]
• Robert West, Joelle Pineau, and Doina Precup. Wikispeedia: An Online Game for Inferring Semantic Distances between Concepts. In Proceedings of the 21st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'09), pp. 1598–1603, Pasadena, Calif., 2009. [Play it!] — [PDF] — [Project website] — [Press]

Intelligent wheelchair 'Smartwheeler'

• Joelle Pineau, Robert West, Amin Atrash, Julien Villemure, François Routhier. On the Feasibility of Using a Standardized Test for Evaluating a Speech-Controlled Smart Wheelchair. International Journal of Intelligent Control and Systems, 16(2):121–128, 2011. [PDF]
• Joelle Pineau, Robert West, Amin Atrash, Julien Villemure, and François Routhier. Towards a Standardized Test for Intelligent Wheelchairs. In Proceedings of the 2010 Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems Workshop (PerMIS'10), Baltimore, Md., 2010. [PDF]
• Wormser Honoré, Amin Atrash, Patrice Boucher, Robert Kaplow, Sousso Kelouwani, Hai Nguyen, Julien Villemure, Robert West, François Routhier, Paula Stone, Claude Dufour, Jean-Paul Dussault, Daniel Rock, Paul Cohen, Louise Demers, Robert Forget, and Joelle Pineau. Human-Oriented Design and Initial Validation of an Intelligent Powered Wheelchair. RESNA Annual Conference, Las Vegas, Nev., 2010. [PDF] — [HTML]
• Amin Atrash, Robert Kaplow, Julien Villemure, Robert West, Hiba Yamani, and Joelle Pineau. Development and Validation of a Robust Speech Interface for Improved Human-Robot Interaction. International Journal of Social Robotics, 1(4):345–356, 2009. [PDF]

Theses

• Robert West. Extracting Semantic Information from Wikipedia Using Human Computation and Dimensionality Reduction. Master's thesis, McGill University, 2010. [PDF]
• Robert West and Roland C. Aydin. The Barrier. A Prototype for a New HCI Framework. Report compiled from two Diplom theses, Technische Universität München, 2007. [PDF]

Writings &c.

• Wikipedia's fixed point
• Reinforcement Learning by Example (by Cosmin Păduraru, Robert West, and Imad Khoury), winner of the award for "best educational video" at the IJCAI-09 AI Video Competition (I'm accepting the reward at minute 8:30 in the award ceremony).
• A letter of mine once made it into Time magazine (it's the third letter on the page).
• A Chilean newspaper once called me "El extraño personaje".
• Blips 'n' quips.
• Clumsyboard – A Program for Entering Patterns over the Keyboard. [PDF]

Deutsches

• Über Latein
  • A long time ago I had my three minutes of fame on Bavarian state TV.
  • About ten years later, I made a three-line reappearance in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
  • Ein rechnergestützter Vergleich von Jacob Baldes Encomium toruitatis mit der übrigen lateinischen Literatur. [PDF] — Ergebnisse (siehe PDF für Erklärung): [sortiert nach Stelle bei Balde] [sortiert nach Stelle bei anderem Autor]
  • Venus' Rede in der Götterversammlung (Vergil, Aeneis 10.18–62). [PDF]
  • Inhalt der Bücher VII, VIII und XII von Vergils Aeneis. [PDF]
  • Agricolas Statthalterschaft in Britannien (Tacitus, Agricola 19–21). [PDF]
• Miscellanea
  • Einst hatte ich ein alter (oder Walter) ego: Walter Hrobecký.
  • Vier Versuche, gesund zu werden: Bertl und sein Katarrh.

Contact

Email: click here to see it
Office location: William Gates Computer Science Building, Room 450