We are an interdisciplinary group with students coming from Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics. We work on a variety of projects analyzing and synthesizing systems that can be trained to perform their task. Learning is a topic that can be approached from different angles. Another project develops techniques for selecting high-level features for pattern recognition. A third project applies learning to forecasting in the financial markets.
Hints come in as a learning aid to improve the situation.
We usually have, in addition to the set of examples, some prior knowledge of certain facts about the system. We wish to use this side information to our advantage. For instance, we may know that is scale-invariant and monotonic, and we want to put this information together with the training set of examples to come up with a good implementation. We want this process to be automated, so that the system is genuinely learning from hints. Our group has pioneered the use of hints in learning, and we continue to work on all aspects of the technique.