Martin Michalowski Information Sciences Institute University of Southern California 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292 Email: Voice: (310) 448-8324 Fax: (310) 822-0751

[Research Interests | Education | Publications | Research Experience | Research Awards | Personal | Pictures ]

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I am a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. I am a member of the Information Agents research group led by Prof. Craig Knoblock. It is a part of the Information Sciences Institute here at USC.

Research Interests

My research interests include information integration, record linkage, heuristic-based planning, constraint satisfaction problems, and problem modeling. In particular, my research work began with the goal of building an information agent that can link two records from different sources with as little user intervention as possible. The sources are typically web sites that are wrapped and data is subsequently extracted from these pages. This process used wrapper and extraction technologies developed at ISI. The key challenges were to develop a system that can generate matches with a high level of accuracy while being highly unsupervised in nature. I have expanded my research to include working on solving the problem of geospatial data integration. I have explored the idea of using Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) solving techniques as a way to solve the problem of identifying buildings in images.

My current thesis work focuses on the customization of a constraint model using the information contained within a problem instance. My work exploits the features of a problem model to infer the applicable constraints and the context within which they apply. This work is a step towards automated modeling as it can handle the variability and heterogeneity of problem instances within a certain problem class.

Education

• PhD, Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA
• GPA: 3.72
• Screening: completed Fall 2005
• Thesis Proposal: completed March 2007
• Thesis Defense: June 16th 2008
• M.S., Computer Science (MSCS), 2003, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA
• B.S., Computer Engineering (B.CompEng), 2001, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis MN

Publications

2007

• Martin Michalowski, Craig A. Knoblock, Kenneth M. Bayer and Berthe Y. Choueiry. Exploiting Automatically Inferred Constraint-Models for Building Identification in Satellite Imagery, In Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS 2007), Seattle, WA, November 7-9, 2007, pp. 35-42.[PDF, PS, bib] [Presentation]
• Martin Michalowski, Craig A. Knoblock and Berthe Y. Choueiry. Exploiting Problem Data to Enrich Models of Constraint Problems, In Proceedings of 6th International Workshop On Constraint Modeling and Reformulation (ModRef'07), Providence, RI, September 23-27, 2007.[PDF, PS, bib] [Poster]
• Martin Michalowski. Exploiting Problem Data to Refine Models of Constraint Problems, In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP-07), Doctoral Programme, Providence, RI, September 23-27, 2007, pp. 97-102.[PDF, PS, bib] [Presentation]
• Kenneth M. Bayer, Martin Michalowski, Berthe Y. Choueiry and Craig A. Knoblock. Reformulating CSPs for Scalability with Application to Geospatial Reasoning, In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP-07), Providence, RI, September 23-27, 2007, pp. 164-179.[PDF, PS, bib] [Presentation]
• Martin Michalowski, Craig A. Knoblock, and Berthe Y. Choueiry. Reformulating Constraint Models Using Input Data, In Proceedings of the 7th Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation (SARA-07), Research Summary, Whistler, BC, Canada, July 18-21, 2007, pp. 402-404.[PDF, PS, bib] [Presentation]
• Kenneth M. Bayer, Martin Michalowski, Berthe Y. Choueiry, and Craig A. Knoblock. Reformulating Constraint Satisfaction Problems to Improve Scalability, In Proceedings of the 7th Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation (SARA-07), Whistler, BC, Canada, July 18-21, 2007, pp. 64-79.[PDF, PS, bib] [Presentation]

2006

• Martin Michalowski. A Generalized Query Framework for Geospatial Reasoning, In Proceedings of the Twenty First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06), Doctoral Consortium, Boston, MA, USA, July 16-20, 2006.[PDF, PS, bib] [Presentation]

2005

• Steven N. Minton, Claude Nanjo, Craig A. Knoblock, Martin Michalowski, and Matthew Michelson. A Heterogeneous Field Matching Method for Record Linkage, In Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM-2005), Houston, TX, November 2005, pp. 314-321.[PDF, PS, bib] [Presentation]
• Martin Michalowski and Craig A. Knoblock. A Constraint Satisfaction Approach to Geospatial Reasoning, In Proceedings of The Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05), Pittsburgh PA, July 2005, pp. 423-429.[PDF, PS, bib] [Presentation]
• Martin Michalowski, Snehal Thakkar, and Craig A. Knoblock. Automatically Utilizing Secondary Sources to Align Information Across Sources, AI Magazine, Special Issue on Semantic Integration, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 33-45, Spring 2005.[PDF, PS, bib]

2004

• Martin Michalowski, Snehal Thakkar, and Craig A. Knoblock. Exploiting Secondary Sources for Unsupervised Record Linkage, In Proceeding of the 2004 VLDB Workshop on Information Integration on the Web, Toronto Canada, August 2004, pp. 34-39.[PDF, PS, bib] [Presentation]
• Martin Michalowski, José Luis Ambite, Craig A. Knoblock, Steve Minton, Snehal Thakkar, and Rattapoom Tuchinda. Retrieving and Semantically Integrating Heterogeneous Data from the Web, IEEE Intelligent Systems., Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 72-79, May/June 2004.[PDF, PS, bib]

2003

• Martin Michalowski, Snehal Thakkar, and Craig A. Knoblock. Exploiting Secondary Sources for Automatic Object Consolidation, In Proceeding of the 2003 KDD Workshop on Data Cleaning, Record Linkage, and Object Consolidation, Washington DC, August 2003, pp. 34-36.[PDF, PS, bib] [Presentation]
• M. Carman, and M. Michalowski: 3rd International Summer School on AI Planning - A Student's Perspective. The PLANET Newsletter - Issue 7, Pg. 10-12, August 2003. [PDF, PS]

• Program Committee member for the AAAI-07 AI Video Competition, Summer 2007
• Student Activities co-chair at the AAAI06 and AAAI07 conferences. Responsible for the organization of the Student Reception, "Lunch with an AAAI Fellow" event as well as the maintenance of the student information website, including a message board, blog, and general information for conference attendees. Also responsible for the setup and maintenance of the conference research blog, Summer 2006 & Summer 2007
• Reviewer of academic articles submitted to the SIGKDD03, ICSOC03, ISWC04, ACMGIS05, AAAI05, ICTAI07, ACMGIS07, and GeoS07 conferences
• Presenter and attendee at the ICAPS03, IJCAI03, SIGKDD03, ICAPS04, AAAI04, VLDB04, AAAI05, AAAI06, SARA07, and AAAI07 conferences
• Teaching assistant, lecturer and guest speaker for the computer science graduate class Information Integration on the Web, Spring 2004 and 2005
• Advisor to a Masters student during their directed research appointment at the Information Sciences Institute, Summer 2003

• Accepted Grants: InfoFuse: Interleaved Information Gathering and Reasoning for Information Fusion (AFSOR Award #FA9550-07-1-0416)
• Receipient of the Best Poster award at the second annual Graduate Student Symposium. Press coverage is provided here. Fall 2007
• Receipient of the Best Paper and Runner-up Presentation awards at the first annual Graduate Student Symposium. Press coverage is provided here. I was also one of the co-founders of this event, Fall 2006
• Recipient of the Canadian National Sciences and Engineering Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship (research scholarship given to outstanding applicants by the Canadian granting agency through a competitive process), Spring 2005
• Member of Upsilon Pi Epsilon Computer Science Honor Society (membership open to graduate students with a 3.7 GPA and above), Fall 2003 - present
• Member of the 300 Club (3.0 GPA or higher as a student-athlete for a given semester) 6 times at the University of Minnesota, 1997-2000

Personally, I love above all my best friend and beautiful wife Sarah. I was born in Warsaw Poland and my entire family is Polish. We immigrated to Canada in 1985 and Ottawa, Ontario is where my family lives. My parents both have PhDs in econometrics, my father being a professor and researcher at the University of Ottawa and my mother working at Statistics Canada as a very well respected demographer in the Demography Division. I also have an extremely intelligent sister who is currently attending McGill University.

Before coming to USC, I was a competitive tennis player. During my career, I reached a personal best ranking of 2nd in singles and 1st in doubles in Canada. While at the University of Minnesota (where I received a tennis scholarship). I was ranked 6th in the country and reached the NCAA tournament in doubles my senior year, was captain of the team twice, and led our team to the Sweet 16 two out of the four years I played, culminating with a top 15 finish (13th) my senior year.

I enjoy all new and exciting electronics (especially ones produced by Apple computers), reading, skateboarding, and playing tennis. I also have a very deep passion for skiing(I was a member of the USC ski team) and I head to Mammoth as often as possible. You can find some clips of me and my friends here.

I also co-founded a little web venture so if you ever need to buy books of any kind online, try Campusbooks4less.

Below you'll find pictures from different trips I've taken recently:

• Mammoth - January 26th 2008
• Poland/Prague Trip - August 2007
• AAAI 2006(Boston MA) - July 2006
• Joshua Tree National Park with Sarah - Feb 2006
• AAAI 2005(Pittsburgh PA) - July 2005
• My honeymoon in Italy - May 2005
• Backcountry skiing around Mammoth - March 2005
• More backcountry touring in the Sierras - February 2005
• Backcountry tour of Basin Moutain (Sierra Nevada mtn range) - January 2005
• ICAPS 2004(Whistler, British Columbia) - June 2004
• Trip with my family and Sarah(Maui/Big Island, Hawaii) - December 2003/January 2004
• SIGKDD 2003(Washington, DC) - August 2003
• IJCAI 2003(Acapulco, Mexico) - August 2003
• ICAPS 2003(Trento, Italy) and 3rd International Summer School on AI Planning(Madonna di Campiligio, Italy) - June 2003

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