Brendan Frey

Professor Frey will describe a method called 'affinity propagation', which takes as input measures of similarity between pairs of data points. Real-valued messages are exchanged between data points until a high-quality set of exemplars and corresponding clusters gradually emerges. He will discuss aspects of affinity propagation that could impact its efficient implementation in multi-core architectures, FPGA hardware and VLSI hardware.

Bio:  Brendan Frey is a Professor in ECE at U of T and is cross-appointed to Computer Science and the Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research. Dr. Frey studies machine learning algorithms, probabilistic graphical models, molecular biology and computer vision. His most highly-cited work is on 'factor graphs and the sum-product algorithm'. In 2005, Dr. Frey's work on computational 'epitomes' with applications in vision received honorable mention for Best Paper at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. Dr. Frey's 2005 Nature Genetics paper reporting the first-ever exon-resolution analysis of the mammalian genome stirred up controversy in the molecular biology and genomics communities, which was reconciled in his favour in the March 2006 issue of Science.