Alexandre Bouchard-Côté

General

• Email: bouchard AT stat.ubc.ca
• Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at UBC
• Path: McGill -> UCB -> UBC.
• AKA: Alex, Bouchard, or 卜利森. See also: how to typeset my last name.
• Office: ESB, Room 3124
• Resumé (last updated: Oct. '12)

Research Interests

My main field of research is in statistical machine learning. I am interested in the mathematical side of the subject as well as in applications in linguistics and biology.

On the methodology side, I am interested in Monte Carlo methods such as SMC and MCMC, graphical models, non-parametric Bayesian statistics, randomized algorithms, and variational inference.

My favoriate applications, both in linguistics and biology, are related to phylogenetics in one way or another. Some examples of things I have currently/recently been working on: automated reconstruction of proto-languages; cancer phylogenetics; population genetics; pedigrees, tree and alignment inference.

In the past, I also did some work on machine translation, on logical characterization and approximation of labeled Markov processes, and on reinforcement learning.

Refereed Publications

• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, David Hall, Thomas L. Griffiths and Dan Klein. (2013) Automated reconstruction of ancient languages using probabilistic models of sound change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 10.1073/pnas.1204678110
  [paper][supplementary material][bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and Michael I. Jordan. (2012) Evolutionary inference via the Poisson indel process. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 10.1073/pnas.1220450110
  [paper][supplementary material][bib]
• Seong-Hwan Jun, Liangliang Wang and Alexandre Bouchard-Côté. (2012) Entangled Monte Carlo. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (NIPS). (In Press)
  [paper][supplementary material][bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and Bonnie Kirkpatrick. (2012) Bayesian Pedigree Analysis using Measure Factorization. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (NIPS). (In Press)
  [paper][supplementary material][bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Sriram Sankararaman and Michael I. Jordan. (2012) Phylogenetic Inference via Sequential Monte Carlo. Systematic Biology. 61:579-593
  [paper][code][bib]
• Ardavan Saeedi and Alexandre Bouchard-Côté. (2011) Priors over Recurrent Continuous Time Processes. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 24 (NIPS). 24:2052-2060
  [paper][supplementary material][code][bib] Best paper award
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and Michael I. Jordan. (2010) Variational Inference over Combinatorial Spaces. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23 (NIPS). 23:280-288
  [paper][slides][supplementary material][bib]
• Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, John DeNero and Dan Klein. (2010) Painless Unsupervised Learning with Features. Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL10). 8:582-590
  [paper][supplementary material][bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Slav Petrov and Dan Klein. (2009) Randomized Pruning: Efficiently Calculating Expectations in Large Dynamic Programs. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22 (NIPS). 22:144-152
  [paper][slides][bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and Michael I. Jordan. (2009) Optimization of Structured Mean Field Objectives. Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI09). 25:67-74
  [paper][slides][poster][bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Thomas L. Griffiths and Dan Klein. (2009) Improved Reconstruction of Protolanguage Word Forms. Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL09). 7:65-73
  [paper][slides][bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Michael I. Jordan and Dan Klein. (2009) Efficient Inference in Phylogenetic InDel Trees. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 21 (NIPS). 21:177-184
  [paper][slides][poster][bib]
• John DeNero, Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and Dan Klein. (2008) Sampling Alignment Structure under a Bayesian Translation Model. Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP08). 13:314-323
  [paper][bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Percy Liang, Thomas Griffiths and Dan Klein. (2008) A Probabilistic Approach to Language Change. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 20 (NIPS).
  [paper][poster][bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Percy Liang, Thomas Griffiths, and Dan Klein. (2007) A Probabilistic Approach to Diachronic Phonology. Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP07). 12:887-896
  [paper][slides][data][bib]
• Percy Liang, Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Dan Klein, and Ben Taskar. (2006) An End-to-End Discriminative Approach to Machine Translation. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL06). 21:761-768
  [paper][bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Norm Ferns, Prakash Panangaden, and Doina Precup. (2005) An Approximation Algorithm for Labelled Markov Processes: towards Realistic Approximation. Proceedings of the International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems. 2:54-62
  [paper][slides][code][bib]

Workshop Papers, Discussions, Reports, Presentations

• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté. (2013) A Note on Probabilistic Models over Strings: Inference and  Representation with Indexed Matrices. arXiv.
  [paper][bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and Michael I. Jordan. (2012) The Poisson Indel Process. arXiv.
  [paper][bib]
• Liangliang Wang and Alexandre Bouchard-Côté. (2012) Harnessing Non-Local Evolutionary Events for Tree Inference. Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.
  [bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and James V. Zidek. (2011) Discussion: Bayesian priors for loss matching. International Statistical Review. 80:83-86
  [paper][bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Sriram Sankararaman and Michael I. Jordan. (2010) Bayesian Phylogenetic Inference using Sequential Monte Carlo Algorithms. Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.
  [slides][bib]
• Sriram Sankararaman, Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and Michael I. Jordan. (2010) Joint Probabilistic Modeling of Languages and Genes. Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.
  [bib]
• John DeNero and Alexandre Bouchard-Côté. (2009) A Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Prior for a Conditional Model of Phrase Alignment. Workshop on statistical NLP at Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 21 (NIPS).
  [bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté (2005). Domaines et languages. CUMC 2005. Kingston, Canada.
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté (2004). Sparse distributed memories: some theoretical and empirical results. Report and presentation for the Courtemanche Scholarship (first prize).
  [slides][report][code]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté (2004). Reinforcement learning and function approximation. CUMC 2004. Halifax, Canada.
  [slides]

Teaching

• Stat 460/560, "Statistical Theory I"
• Stat 547C, "Topics in probability"
• Stat 302, "Introduction to Probability"
• Stat 547C, "Topics in probability"
• Stat 100, "Statistical Thinking," co-taught with P. Gustafson, C. Riddell, M. Salibian-Barrera, and W. Welch
• Stat 547Q, "Statistical Modeling with Stochastic Processes"

Old Scribbles

• Notes prepared about LMP approximation,
• A java program that computes the minimal bisimilar system of a given finite LMP,
• Notes on a specialized data structure used by the SDM architecture,
• C++ code (mostly written by Bohdana Ratitch) implementing SDM,
• An AI for the game knockabout.

How to typeset my last name

There are only two accents in my last name, but it's amazing how many mistakes I have seen in these two letters. Here is a guide on how to do it correctly:

• In WYSIWYGs, you can usually just copy and paste: Alexandre Bouchard-Côté
• In Latex: Alexandre Bouchard-C\^ot\'e
• In HTML: Alexandre Bouchard-Côté
• If that does not work, I prefer you just write "Alexandre Bouchard" rather than "Alexandre Bouchard-Cote", or a combination of missing/wrong accents