Ben Williams

Benjamin H Williams
PhD Student
Room 2.40
Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton St
Edinburgh EH8 9AB
Scotland, UK

Email: ben.williams <at> ed.ac.uk
My CV

Research:
I am a 4th year PhD student at Edinburgh University, being supervised by Amos Storkey and Marc Toussaint. I am interested in modelling Handwriting, and am using a Factorial Hidden Markov Model (fHMM) to extract motor primitives from natural handwriting data. These handwriting primitives are time extended blocks of movement, arising from blocks of muscle activation known as motor primitives. They are superimposed upon each other, to create coherent motion, in this case a character. The primitives are extracted by using EM to fit a constrained fHMM to handwriting data and as such are not predefined by their location within the data, or fixed in size or number. The posterior distribution over the fHMM can then be approximated using a spike timing representation, which allows smaller and faster higher level models to generalise across character samples, and produce generative samples of characters.

I use a combination of Matlab and C++ to learn models of handwriting based on primitives. Here are some software links.

Classical Music in Edinburgh
When I'm not working on my PhD, I spend most of my time playing double bass or cello in local orchestras. Here are some classical music links.

Publications:
Williams, B., M. Toussaint and A.J. Storkey (2006) Extracting Motion Primitives from Natural Handwriting Data. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN) Pdf (322K)

Williams, B., M. Toussaint and A.J. Storkey (2007) A Primitive Based Generative Model to Infer Timing Information in Unpartitioned Handwriting Data. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) Pdf (231K)

Williams, B., M. Toussaint and A.J. Storkey (2007) Modelling motion primitives and their timing in biologically executed movements. In Proceedings of Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Pdf (734K)

Presentations:
IJCAI 2007 Presentation pdf
ICANN 2006 Presentation pdf open office
ANC 6/3/07 pdf
ANC 5/9/06 open office
ANC 11/4/06 open office

Other:
First year PhD report pdf
Poster of first year's work pdf
Second year PhD report pdf
Third year PhD report pdf
Thesis pdf