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SGES Evening Lectures Birkbeck College University of London The Evening Lectures are free to both members and non-members of SGES. Further information is available on the SGES website: http://www.bcs-sges.org Wednesday June 23rd 1999 (6 p.m.) Marco Ramoni and Paola Sebastiani (The Open University) Discovering Knowledge in Databases using Bayesian Networks ABSTRACT The automated extraction of structured and reusable knowledge from databases is a challenging task with spectacular applications and vast potential reward. This talk will describe the use of Bayesian networks to discover knowledge in database. Bayesian networks are a knowledge representation formalism grounded in the well-established mathematics of Bayesian statistics and graph theory. The talk will start by describing how to extract Bayesian networks from databases. It will then tackle the problem of handling incomplete databases and under which assumptions this approach can scale up to large databases. Finally, the talk will show how to discover knowledge when data are represented as sequences or are displaced along temporal tracks. As illustrative examples, the talk will use applications from financial management, military simulation, cognitive robotics, and music composition. MARCO RAMONI is Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, where he is Project Leader of the project BaKE (Bayesian Knowledge Extractor) funded by the ESPRIT program of the European Community. He received a PhD in Bioengineering (Artificial Intelligence in Medicine) from the joint program of the Polytechnic of Milan and the University of Pavia and a degree in Philosophy from the University of Pavia. He held research positions at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, McGill University, and University of Geneva. PAOLA SEBASTIANI is Lecturer in the Statistics Department of the Open University, where she is Principal Investigator (Open University) of the project BaKE (Bayesian Knowledge Extractor) funded by the ESPRIT program of the European Community. She received a degree in Mathematics from the University of Perugia, Italy, a MSc in Statistics from the University College London, and a PhD in Statistics from the University of Rome, Italy. Before joining the Open University, she held academic positions at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the City University, and the University of Perugia, and visiting positions at the University College London and the London School of Economics and Political Science. For further information contact: Dr. Hui Liu, Department of Computer Science, Birkbeck College [log in to unmask] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%