Lars Otten
| Position: | Graduate student |
| Email: |  (GPG key) |
| Office: | 4099 Bren Hall |
| Address: | Department of Computer Science University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3435 |
I am a graduate student in Prof. Rina Dechter's group, working towards a Ph.D. in the School of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine since the fall of 2006.
Research
My area of concentration is artificial intelligence, where I am trying to exploit structure in problem solving. The reasoning tasks I deal with can typically be expressed as graphical models and comprise constraint satisfaction and optimization problems as well as queries over Bayesian belief networks (e.g., P(e), MPE, belief updating).
My research circles around the two central approaches of inference (variable elimination) vs. conditioning (search). I have been looking at different complexity measures for reasoning problems represented as graphical models and how to bound instance-based complexity in the presence of determinisnm. This is in the context of a recent project, in which our group has started applying our techniques to problems originating in human genetics. Lately I have also explored ways to parallelize our algorithms on a grid of computers.
Our research group recently launched a website where we make available implementations of the algorithms we develop: http://graphmod.ics.uci.edu/.
I have been involved in the UAI'08 Probabilistic Inference Evaluation.
Teaching
In Spring 2009 I am the teaching assistant for CS 174 "Bioinformatics".
I was a reader for ICS 11 / Econ 11 "The Internet and Public Policy" in Winter 2009 and teaching assistant for CS 175 "Project in AI" in Fall 2008.
Personal
Before coming to UCI I was a student at RWTH Aachen University in Aachen, Germany and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
The best way to get in touch with me is via email at . For encrypted email, you can obtain the respective GnuPG key from a key server
(here for instance), its ID is 0x830EB280 with the following
fingerprint:
869A 685A 0951 E946 92C0 8C7F A9A6 C83A 830E B280.
Finally, if you are curious, you can visit my (non-academic) personal webpage.
Refereed Conference Publications
- Maximum Likelihood Haplotying through Search on a Grid of Computers, Lars Otten, Rina Dechter, Mark Silberstein, and Dan Geiger. In Proceedings of RECOMB'09, Tucson, AZ, USA, May 2009.
- Refined Bounds for Instance-Based Search-Complexity of Counting and Other #P Problems, Lars Otten and Rina Dechter. In Proceedings of CP'08, Sydney, Australia, September 2008. [LNCS Link] (also available: extended workshop version)
- On the Practical Significance of Hypertree vs. Tree Width, Rina Dechter, Lars Otten, and Radu Marinescu. In Proceedings of ECAI'08, Patras, Greece, July 2008.
- Bounding Search Space Size via (Hyper)tree Decompositions, Lars Otten and Rina Dechter. In Proceedings of UAI'08, Helsinki, Finland, July 2008.
- Randomization in Constraint Programming for Airline Planning, Lars Otten, Mattias Grönkvist, and Devdatt Dubhashi. In Proceedings of CP'06, Nantes, France, September 2006. [LNCS link]
Workshops
- Refined Bounds for Instance-Based Search-Complexity of Counting and Other #P Problems (Extended version), Lars Otten and Rina Dechter. In Counting Workshop '08, at CP'08, Sydney, Australia, September 2008.
- Bounding Graphical Models Processing by Hypertree Width, Lars Otten and Rina Dechter. In Doctoral Programme of CP07, Providence, RI, USA, September 2007.