Kevin B. Korb

Degrees

Previous Appointments

• 1981 - 1988: Software Engineer, Hewlett-Packard, Synapse Computer, Tandem Computers.
• 1988 - 1990: Education Specialist, Tandem Computers, Cupertino, California.
• 1991: Instructor, Indiana Vocational Technical College, Bloomington, Indiana (during Ph.D. studies).
• 1992: Associate Instructor, Dept. of the History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University
• 1992 - 1995: Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Monash University.
• 1996 - 2002: Senior Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Monash University.

Teaching

Postgraduate completions

• Colin Thompson, MS, 1998.
• Julian Neil, PhD, 2001.
• Michael Stillwell, MS, 2001.
• Murli Viswanathan, PhD, 2003.

Subjects

I both developed and taught the following subjects at Monash University:

• Machine Learning (3rd year and hon, 1993-1997)
• Bayesian Reasoning (hon, 1993)
• Causal Reasoning (hon, 1994-1996)
• The Computer Industry: historical, social and professional issues (3rd year, 1997)
• Research Methods (hon, 1997-2003; now taught by David Green)
• Bayesian Models (hon, developed with A Nicholson in 2000. I taught it at Linkoping Uni, Sweden, in 2000; taught by A Nicholson and D Albrecht at Monash since then)
• Causal Discovery (hon, 2000-2003; now taught by Geoff Webb)
• Epistemology of Computer Simulation (hon, 2003; with Bernd Meyer, Alan Dorin and Jon McCormack)
• The Art of Causal Modeling (hon, 2004; with Charles Twardy, Toby Handfield and Graham Oppy)

In 2005 I am teaching: Third-Year Project, Formal Methods II (3rd year), and Artificial Intelligence (2nd & 3rd year). I also guest lecture for ASP1022 (Life and the Universe).

Administration and Service

I represent FIT on the GLC (General Library Committee). I am the second-year Bachelor of Computer Science coordinator and coordinator of research seminars for Clayton School of IT.

I am a member of AAAI, the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, Philosophy of Science Association, British Society for the Philosophy of Science, Society for Machines and Mentality, Australasian Association for the Historical, Philosophical and Social Study of Science, and a founding member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. I have co-organized the international conferences ISIS'96 and PAKDD'98 and served as a program committee member of PAKDD since then. I have been a program committe member of numerous other conferences, including 2002 International Conference on Machine Learning, 2003 Australasian Artificial Life, 2003 Uncertainty in AI. I was co-organizer of the workshop ``Machine Learning as Experimental Philosophy of Science'' for ECML/PADD'01. I have recently refereed articles for: Minds and Machines, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Annals of Mathematics and AI. In 2004 I organized a special issue of Minds and Machines on machine learning.

Research and Publications since 1999

Research Grants since 1999

Grant money won or spent from 1999-2005 amounts to $1.56M ($874K ARC, $685K Monash).

• Bayesian Induction of Causal Models (with Chris Wallace).
  
  1999: ARC Research Project Grant - $61,000.
• The Data Mining Environment (DME) (with Lloyd Allison et al.)

  1998-9: Faculty of Information Technology - $55,000.

• Automatic Argument Generation and Understanding (with Ingrid Zukerman).
  
  1999: ARC Research Project Grant - $73,000.
  2000: ARC Research Project Grant - $73,000.
  2001: ARC Research Project Grant - $45,000.
• Centre for Bayesian Data Mining (with Trevor Dix and David Dowe)

  2000-2001: Strategic Monash University Research Fund (SMURF) - $480,000.

• Improving Meteorological Forecasting with Knowledge Management Systems (with Henry Linger, Frada Bustein, Ann Nicholson; with James Kelly, Bureau of Meteorology).
  
  2000: ARC Linkage Project Grant - $45,000.
  2001: ARC Linkage Project Grant - $45,000.
  2002: ARC Linkage Project Grant - $45,000.

• A Software Tool for Bayesian Knowledge Engineering (with Ann Nicholson)

  2001: Monash University Small Grant- $15,000.

• Arguments: Enhancing Skills in Critical Thinking and Reasoning (with Ian Gold, John Bigelow, Graham Oppy)

  2001: Monash Strategic Innovations Fund - $95,000.

• Effective Pedagogy for Improving Critical Thinking (with Ian Gold, Graham Oppy, John Bigelow).
  
  2002: ARC Linkage Grant - $30,000.
  2003: ARC Linkage Grant - $30,000.
  2004: ARC Linkage Grant - $30,000.
• Causal Foundations for Bayesian Networks, 2004-07 (with Ann Nicholson).
  
  2004: Monash Research Fund Grant - $30,000
• The Art of Causal Modeling (with C. Twardy, G. Oppy, T. Handfield).
  
  2004: Monash Arts/IT Collaboration Grant - $10,000
• Bayesian Networks for Predicting and Preventing Cardiovascular Death, 2004-07 (with John McNeil, Ann Nicholson, Richard Neapolitan).

  2004: ARC Discovery Grant - $50,000
  2005: ARC Discovery Grant - $50,000
  2006: ARC Discovery Grant - $50,000
  

• Resource-bounded adaptive inference of accurate conditional probability estimates from data, 2005-07 (with Geoff Webb and Kai Ming Ting).

  2004: ARC Discovery Grant - $90,000
  2005: ARC Discovery Grant - $76,000
  2006: ARC Discovery Grant - $81,000
  

Research Publications since 1999

Books

1. X. Wu, R. Kotagiri and K. B. Korb (editors): Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 1394: Research and Development in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Second Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD-98, Melbourne Australia, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Germany, ISBN 3-540-643383-4.

2. K. B. Korb (Assoc. Editor, Journal) (1999). Psyche: An interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness, Vol. 4, ISSN 1324-454X.

3. K. B. Korb (Assoc. Editor, Journal) (2000). Psyche: An interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness, Vol. 5, ISSN 1324-454X.

4. K.B. Korb and A.E. Nicholson (2004). Bayesian Artificial Intelligence. Chapman Hall/CRC Press, Boca Raton, Fl.

5. K.B. Korb and H. Bensusan (2004), guest editors. Special issue of Minds and Machines: Machine Learning as Experimental Philosophy of Science.

Refereed Book Chapters

1. Korb, K.B. (1999). Probabilistic Causal Structure. In H. Sankey (Ed.) Causation and Natural Laws: Australasian Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Kluwer.

2. C.S. Wallace and K.B. Korb (1999) Learning Linear Causal Models by MML Sampling. To appear in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Verlag.

Refereed Journal Articles

1. K. B. Korb and J. J. Oliver (1999) Comment on Nick Bostrom's ``The Doomsday Argument is Alive and Kicking.'' Mind, 108, 551-553.

2. K. B. Korb and A. E. Nicholson (2000) The Essential Roles of Emotion in Cognitive Architecture. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

3. K.B. Korb C. R. Twardy (2004). A Criterion of Probabilistic Causality. Philosophy of Science, 71, 241-262.

4. K.B. Korb (2005). Bayesian Informal Logic and Fallacy. Informal Logic, forthcoming.

Refereed Conference Articles

1. K. B. Korb, A.E. Nicholson and N. Jitnah (1999) Bayesian Poker. Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, Stockholm, Sweden, August, 1999.

2. J R Neil and K B Korb (1999). The evolution of causal models: a comparison of Bayesian metrics and structure priors. In N Zhong and L Zhou (eds) Proceedings of the Third Pacific-Asia Conference, (PAKDD-99), pp 432-437.

3. I. Zukerman, R. McConachy, K.B. Korb and D. Pickett (1999) Exploratory Interaction with a Bayesian Argumentation System. IJCAI-99, Stockholm, Sweden, August, 1999.

4. K.B. Korb (1999) Calibration and the Evaluation of Predictive Learners. IJCAI Empirical AI Workshop, Stockholm, Sweden, August, 1999.

5. C. Leslie, N. Thomason, K. B. Korb and J. Price (1999) Neyman-Pearson statistics are inconsistent with frequentism. Eleventh International Congress of Logic, Methodology and the Philosophy of Science, Krakow, Poland.

6. K. B. Korb (1999) Inductive Acceptance. Eleventh International Congress of Logic, Methodology and the Philosophy of Science, Krakow, Poland.

7. J R Neil, C S Wallace and K B Korb (1999). Learning bayesian networks with restricted causal interactions. In K B Laskey, H Prade (Eds) Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-99), pp. 486-493.

8. M Viswanathan, C S Wallace, D L Dowe and K B Korb (1999). Finding cutpoints in noisy binary sequences - a revised empirical evaluation. In N Foo (ed)Proceedings of the Twelfth Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI'99),pp 405-416.

9. I Zukerman, R McConachy and K B Korb (2000) Using argumentation strategies in automated argument generation, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG'2000), pp 55-62.

10. Russell Kennett, Kevin B. Korb, Ann E. Nicholson (2001). Seabreeze Prediction Using Bayesian Networks. PAKDD-01, Hong Kong.

11. K B Korb, L R Hope and M J Hughes (2001). The evaluation of predictive learners: some theoretical and empirical results. In Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Machine Learning, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Volume 2167. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany, pp. 276-287.

12. S Mascaro, K B Korb and A E Nicholson (2001). Suicide as an evolutionarily stable strategy. In Proceedings of the 6th Europeal Conference on Advances in Artificial Life, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol 2159. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany, pp. 120-132.

13. L. R. Hope and K. B. Korb (2002). Bayesian Information Reward. In B McKay and J Slaney (eds), AI'02. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol 2557, pp 272-283.

14. S. Mascaro, K. B. Korb and A. E. Nicholson (2003). ALife Investigation of Parental Investment in Reproductive Strategies. In R K Standish, M A Bedau and H A Abbass (eds), Eighth International Conference on Artificial Life (ALife VIII). MIT Press, pp 358-361.

15. K. B. Korb and M. Stillwell (2003). The Story of The Hot Hand: Powerful Myth or Powerless Critique? International Conference on Cognitive Science, Sydney, July, 2003.

16. Oboler, A., Squire, D. and Korb, K. Why don't we practice what we teach? Engineering Software for Computer Science Research in Academia. International Conference on Software Engineering Research and Applications (SERA 2003),

17. Korb, K.B., Hope, L., Nicholson, A. and Axnick , K. (2004) Varieties of Causal Intervention, in C Zhang, H W Guesgen and W K Yeap (eds), Proceedings of the 8th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence,[PRICAI 2004], Auckland, Springer, pp 322-331.

18. Hope, L., and Korb, K.B. (2004). A Bayesian Metric for Evaluating Machine Learning Algorithms. Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Cairns, Australia, Springer.

19. Woodberry, O., Nicholson, A., Korb, K.B., Pollino, C. (2004) Parameterizing Bayesian Networks. Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Cairns, Australia, Springer.

20. Woodberry, O., Nicholson, A., Korb, K.B., Pollino, C. (2005) Parameterizing Bayesian Networks: A Case Study in Ecological Risk Assessment. Simulation and Modelling. Thailand.

21. Woodbery, O., Korb, K. and Nicholson, A.E. (2005) The Evolution of Aging. The Second Australian Conference on Artificial Life (ACAL 2005). Sydney, Australia, 2005.

22. S. Mascaro, K.B. Korb and A.E. Nicholson (2005) An ALife investigation of the origins of dimorphic parental investments. The Second Australian Conference on Artificial Life (ACAL 2005). Sydney, Australia, 2005.

23. L. Hope and K.B. Korb (2005) An Information-theoretic Causal Power Theory. The 18th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Sydney, Australia,

24. Ying Yang, Kevin Korb, KaiMing Ting, Geoff Webb (2005) Ensemble Selection for SuperParent-One-Dependence Estimators. The 18th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Sydney, Australia,