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: L. S. Klinck building, 6356 Agricultural Road, Room 330
• Resumé (last updated: Oct. 09)

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 statistical Natural Language Processing (NLP) and in computational biology.

I am currently working on high-resolution computational models for evolutionary processes, which can be used to automatically reconstruct proto-languages or to align proteins. This work has the potential to bring methods from computer science to bear on significant problems in both historical linguistics and biology.

Other current research projects include: MCMC, SMC, and variational inference; non-parametric Bayesian statistics.

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

Other topics of interest include: probability theory, design and analysis of randomized algorithms.

Teaching

• 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"

Refereed Publications

• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Sriram Sankararaman and Michael I. Jordan. (2011) Phylogenetic Inference via Sequential Monte Carlo. Systematic Biology (In Press).
  [code][bib]
• Ardavan Saeedi and Alexandre Bouchard-Côté. (2011) Priors over Recurrent Continuous Time Processes. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 24 (NIPS). Granada, Spain
  [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). Vancouver, Canada
  [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). Los Angeles, USA
  [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). Vancouver, Canada
  [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). Montreal, Canada
  [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). Boulder, USA
  [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). Vancouver, Canada
  [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). Waikiki, USA
  [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). Vancouver, Canada
  [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). Prague, Czech Republic
  [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). Sydney, Australia
  [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. Torino, Italy
  [paper][slides][code][bib]

Workshop Papers, Discussions, Reports, Presentations

• Liangliang Wang and Alexandre Bouchard-Côté. (2012) Harnessing Non-Local Evolutionary Events for Tree Inference. Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. Dublin, Ireland
  [bib]
• Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and James V. Zidek. (2011) Discussion: Bayesian priors for loss matching. International Statistical Review (In Press).
  [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. Lyon, France
  [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. Lyon, France
  [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). Whistler, Canada
  [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]

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