Peter A. Flach

Professor of Artificial Intelligence

Intelligent Systems Laboratory

Department of Computer Science

University of Bristol

The Merchant Venturers Building, Room 3.31

Woodland Road

Bristol BS8 1UB, United Kingdom

Phone: +44-117-95-45162

Fax: +44-117-95-45208

School reception: +44-117-33-15201

Email: Peter.Flach@bristol.ac.uk

I may be travelling...

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News | Find out about my new book on machine learning | Read our JMLR paper on A Unified View of Performance Metrics | My book on Intelligent Reasoning freely available on-line | Read my encyclopedia entry on ROC analysis |

Short bio

Peter Flach has been Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol since 2003. An internationally leading researcher in the areas of mining highly structured data and the evaluation and improvement of machine learning models using ROC analysis, he has also published on the logic and philosophy of machine learning, and on the combination of logic and probability. He is author of Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example (John Wiley, 1994) and Machine Learning: the Art and Science of Algorithms that Make Sense of Data (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Prof Flach is the Editor-in-Chief of the Machine Learning journal, one of the two top journals in the field that has been published for 25 years by Kluwer and now Springer. He was Programme Co-Chair of the 1999 International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming, the 2001 European Conference on Machine Learning, the 2009 ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, and the 2012 European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases in Bristol.

Research interests

• ROC analysis in machine learning
• Learning from structured data
• Combining logic and probability
• Intelligent (non-deductive) reasoning
• CV (January '08) [ One page | Full ]

Current activities

Teaching

• COMS21202: Symbols, Patterns and Signals (undergraduate)
• COMS30106: Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming (undergraduate/MSc)
• Advanced Computing MSc in Machine Learning and Data Mining
• Available projects

Research and projects

• Exabyte Informatics
• Learning the morphology of complex synthetic languages

Editorial Boards

• Editor-in-Chief of Machine Learning (action editor 2001-5)
• Member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Machine Learning Research
• Member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (2002-8)
• Member of the Editorial Board of AI Communications
• Member of the Advisory Board of Theory and Practice of Logic Programming

Program Committees

• ECML-PKDD'11 (Area Chair)
• DS'11
• ECML/PKDD'12 (Programme Co-Chair)

Upcoming and Recent Invited Talks and Tutorials

• Invited talk at ACML'11

Professional Organisations

• Member of EPSRC College
• Local coordinator of KDnet (now ended)
• Administrative coordinator of ILPnet2 (now ended)
• Local coordinator of MLnet 2 (now ended)

Past activities

Research and projects

• The PRIMUS family of discovery systems
• Induction of first-order rules and constraints for knowledge discovery
• FDEP: Inducing functional dependencies from database relations
• Efficient first-order probabilistic models for inference and learning
• Sol-Eu-Net: Data Mining and Decision Support for business competitiveness
• METAL: A Meta-Learning Assistant for Providing User Support in Machine Learning and Data Mining
• The ILP2 project
• ILPnet
• The ILP(1) project

Talks and Tutorials

• Machine Learning: Unity in Diversity (Invited talk at BNAIC'09)
• Putting Things in Order: On the Fundamental Role of Ranking in Classification and Probability Estimation (Invited talk at ECML/PKDD'07)
  [ Video and slides ]
• ROC Analysis for Ranking and Probability Estimation (tutorial at UAI'07) [PDF]
• Reinventing Machine Learning with ROC Analysis (invited talk at SBIA/IBERAMIA'06)
• ROC Analysis for Model Improvement: Analysis and Open Questions (talk at UK KDD'05)
• The many faces of ROC analysis in machine learning (tutorial at ICML'04)
• Novelty and discovery: a machine learning approach (talk at Origins of novelty workshop)
• Probabilistic models for structured data (talk at 4th De Morgan workshop)
• Data Mining and Relational Knowledge Discovery (tutorial at ECAI'02, with Nada Lavrac)
• An Introduction to ILP and Propositionalisation (tutorial at Relational Data Mining Summerschool, with Nada Lavrac)
• Multi-Relational Data Mining: a perspective (invited talk at EPIA'01)
• Knowledge representation for Machine Learning (tutorial at ICML'01)
• The logic of learning (invited talk at LICS-2001 Workshop on Logic and Learning)
• A tutorial on rule induction (invited tutorial at Spring School on Intelligent Data Analysis)
• The use of functional and logic languages in machine learning (invited talk at WFLP2000)
• Knowledge Representation for Inductive Logic Programming (invited tutorial at CL2000)
• Knowledge Representation for Inductive Concept Learning (invited talk at ECSQARU'99)
• Inductive Logic Databases (invited talk at DOOD'97)

Publications

• Collection: Abduction and Induction -- essays on their relation and integration
• Textbook: Simply Logical -- intelligent reasoning by example
• PhD thesis: Conjectures -- an inquiry concerning the logic of induction
• List of publications (some downloadable)

Organised Events

• International Workshop on the Integration of Abduction and Induction in AI (AIAI'05)
• ECAI'04 workshop on ROC Analysis in AI
• ECML'01
• Ninth International Workshop on Inductive Logic Programming
• ECAI'98 workshop on Abduction and Induction in AI
• Benelearn'97
• CompulogNet Area Meeting "Representation issues in reasoning and learning"
• IJCAI'97 workshop on Abduction and Induction in AI
• ECAI'96 workshop on Abductive and Inductive Reasoning

Program Committees

• AAAI'10 (area chair)
• ALT'04, ALT'95, ALT'94
• Benelearn'05, Benelearn'04
• DS'02, DS'00, DS'99, DS'98
• ECAI'10, ECAI'08 (area chair), ECAI'06 (area chair), ECAI'02
• ECML/PKDD'10, ECML/PKDD'08, ECML/PKDD'07 (area chair), ECML/PKDD'06 (area chair), ECML/PKDD'05 (area chair), ECML'04, ECML'03, ECML'02, ECML'01 (PC co-chair), ECML'00
• ECSQARU'03, ECSQARU'01
• ICDM'07, ICDM'06, ICDM'05, ICDM'04, ICDM'03
• ICML'11, ICML'10 (area chair), ICML'08 (area chair), ICML'07, ICML'05 (area chair), ICML'04 (area chair), ICML'02
• IDA'05, IDA'03
• IJCAI'11 (Senior PC), IJCAI'03 Poster Track
• ILP'10, ILP'09, ILP'08, ILP'07, ILP'06, ILP'05, ILP'04, ILP'03, ILP'02, ILP'01, ILP'00, ILP'99 (PC co-chair), ILP'98, ILP'97, ILP'96, ILP'95
• ISMIS'02
• KDD'09 (Program Co-Chair), KDD'08, KDD'07 (senior PC), KDD'05, KDD'01
• PAKDD'05
• PKDD'04, PKDD'03 PKDD'02, PKDD'01
• PRICAI'08 (area chair)
• SBIA'08, SBIA'04, SBIA/IBERAMIA'00
• SDM'08, SDM'07, SDM'06, SDM'05, SDM'04, SDM'03, SDM'02
• UKCI'05, UKCI'04, UKCI'03
• Workshops:
  • Fifth International Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs (MLG'07)
  • AAAI'07 workshop on Evaluation Methods for Machine Learning
  • First International Symposium on Skill Science (ISSS'07)
  • ECML/PKDD'07 workshop on Multi-Relational Data Mining
  • ECML/PKDD'07 workshop on Constraint-Based Mining and Learning
  • ICML'06 workshop on ROC Analysis in Machine Learning
  • AAAI'06 workshop on Evaluation Methods for Machine Learning
  • ECAI'06 Workshop on Abduction and Induction in AI and Scientific Modelling (AIAI'06)
  • ECML/PKDD'06 workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs (MLG'06)
  • KDD'05 workshop on Multi-Relational Data Mining
  • ICML'05 workshop on ROC Analysis in Machine Learning
  • ECML/PKDD'04 workshop on Advances in Inductive Rule Learning
  • KDD'04 workshop on Multi-Relational Data Mining
  • ECML/PKDD'03 workshop on Graph, Tree, and Sequence Mining
  • KDD'03 workshop on Multi-Relational Data Mining
  • ECML/PKDD'02 Workshop on Integration and Collaboration Aspects of Data Mining, Decision Support and Meta-Learning
  • KDD'02 workshop on Multi-Relational Data Mining
  • IJCAI'01 Workshop on Abductive Reasoning
  • ECML'01 workshop on Machine Learning as Experimental Philosphy of Science
  • ECML/PKDD'01 workshop on Integrating Aspects of Data Mining, Decision Support and Meta-Learning
  • FLAIRS'01 Special Track on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
  • ECAI'00 Workshop on Scientific Reasoning in AI and Philosophy of Science
  • UAI'00 Workshop on Fusion of Domain Knowledge with Data for Decision Support

Archives

• Paper archive
• Presentation archive