About me: I'm a PhD student at the University of Toronto (I started in September 2007). I'm co-advised by Craig Boutilier and Rich Zemel.

Before: I finished a Master's at the University of Waterloo in the AI group of the CS school, in December 2006. My work, under the supervision of Pascal Poupart, focused on discovering abstractions in planning problems modelled as partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). For more information, look at our NIPS '07 paper (or at my Master's thesis).

My research interests are in machine learning as a whole. Specifically, I'm really interested in reasoning/decision-making under uncertainty (markov models), applying learning methods to different problems as well as in learning theory.

• Hierarchical POMDP Controller Optimization by Likelihood Maximization -- Best paper award runner-up
  Marc Toussaint, Laurent Charlin, Pascal Poupart
  In proceedings of Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), Helsinki, 2008.
  [ps] [ps.gz] [pdf] [bibtex] [video lecture]

• Hierarchical POMDP Controller Optimization by Likelihood Maximization
  Marc Toussaint, Laurent Charlin, Pascal Poupart
  In proceedings of the AAAI workshop on Advancements in POMDP Solvers, Chicago, 2008. (A longer version has also appeared in UAI'08, see above)
  [pdf]

• Automated Hierarchy Discovery for Planning in Partially Observable Environments
  Laurent Charlin, Pascal Poupart and Romy Shioda
  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19 (NIPS), 2007.
  [ps] [ps.gz] [pdf] [bibtex] [bibtex of references]

• MAXSM: A MultiHeuristic Approach to XML Schema Matching
  Mirza Beg, Laurent Charlin and Joel So
  University of Waterloo Technical Report, CS-2006-47, 2006.
  [pdf]

• Automated Hierarchy Discovery for Planning in Partially Observable Domains,
  Master's Thesis, School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, December 2006.
  [ps] [ps.gz] [pdf] [bibtex][slides]

• Machine Learning Seminar, TU-Berlin, Germany - Automated Hierarchy Discovery for Planning in Partially Observable Environments, 07/2007.
• MITACS Machine Learning Seminar, McGill University - Automated Hierarchy Discovery for Planning in Partially Observable Environments, 05/2007.
• CoGS Seminars, University of Toronto, Automated Hierarchy Discovery for Planning in Partially Observable Environments, 02/2007.
• AI seminar, University of Waterloo - Automated Hierarchy Discovery for Planning in Partially, 01/2007.