Colloquium Tijn van der Zant

Cognitive Developmental Pattern Recognition

It can be very difficult to create software systems which capture the
knowledge of an expert. It is an expensive and laborious process that often results in a suboptimal solution. This presentation discusses an approach which is different from 'manual' knowledge construction. The described system is relevant and usable for the end user, from the
beginning of its development. It is continuously being trained by the
experts while they are using it. I show show an example and explain how the computer learns from the
experts. In order to provide a general mechanism, the principle of
learning to learn is proposed and applied to the problem of handwriting recognition. The study pays attention
to the development of the hypotheses that the developing system uses as
it adapts to feedback it receives from its own actions on itself, on objects, on the users of the system and the reflection on this feedback. The ultimate goal is the creation of a system that learns to 'google' through handwritten documents, starting from
scratch with a pile of raw images.