Colin de la Higuera's Home Page

This is the World Wide Web home page for Colin de la Higuera from the LINA at Nantes University in Nantes, France.

What am I up to?

I have just moved from Saint-Etienne University to Nantes University and am involved more specifically in the following activities:

Teaching
- I currently teach mainly to students in Licence: first and third year of the French University. The courses I am involved in include basic computer science, automata theory and theory for computer scientists;
- I also give a course on methodology of research, both in Nantes and Saint-Etienne. Some material in French can be found here.
Research
- I am also interested in active learning, with a competition running right now (Zulu), in learning models and in swarm robotics (links with active learning);
- In a general sense I like all aspects of grammatical inference, with a book to be published in March 2010 (Book).

Publications

I have tried to organise these here

Some links

The Grammatical Inference Homepage, looked after by Menno van Zaannen.
SPECIF is the French society for Teachers and Researchers in Computer Science.
On this webpage (in French) contains different sets of slides concerning research methodology.
I have been giving lectures on grammatical inference in different places. Most of the stuff is here. On Videolectures there are some films corresponding to these lectures: Start here.
The slides of the tutorial Tim Oates and I gave at ICML 2006 are here.
I am member of the Network of Excellence PASCAL 2, where I am in charge of the Curriculum Development Programme. This means that anyone is interested in proposing an activity related with teaching and machine learning should consider contacting me.
I am member of the CNU 27, the National Council of Universities (for France) which is the national authority in charge of recruiting academics and following up their careers.
Here are some nice webpages done by some students to help teach graph theory (in French).
Frédéric Tantini built this webpage with data from bird songs.
Laurent Meiller implemented a learning algorithm I designed with Paul Goldberg. It is here (in French). The idea is to find a recurring pattern in a string which not only appears often but that also can appear as close (for the edit distance) variants.
The ERS website for evaluation of research journals. This project concerns evaluating the reputation of the main scientific journals in computer science. It corresponds to joint work with several colleagues, and specially with Emilie Samuel. Some papers can be found here.
The ANR project SATTIC is run between the laboratoire LIRIS in Lyon and the Laboratoire Hubert Curien in Saint-Etienne and here is its webpage.

Some events I am involved for the thext few months:

NIPS workshop Grammar Induction, Representation of Language and Language Learning NIPS Workshop: 11 December 2009, Whistler, Canada
I am organising the Zulu competition. All about learning DFA with membership queries.
Joint IAPR international workshops on Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition and Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition (SSPR-SPR) in Cesme, Izmir, Turkey, August 18-20, 2010.
ICGI 2010, the International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference in Valencia, September 2010.
ECML-PKDD in Barcelona in September 2010

Some events I have been involved with in the past few months:

CLAGI 2009 (Computational Linguistic Aspects of Grammatical Inference), will be a workshop of the EACL, was held in Athens, Greece, in March 2009. The co-chairs were Menno van Zaanen and myself.
GBR 2009 (Graph Based Representaions for Pattern Recognition), held in Venice, Italy, in May 2009.
IbPRIA 2009, the 4th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis in Póvoa do Varzim, Portugal, June 2009.
FSMNLP 2009, Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing 2009, was held in Pretoria, South Africa, July 2009. I gave a tutorial on learning finite state machines. Here are the slides
DS 2009, Discovery Science, in Oporto, Portugal, in October 2009.