This talk will address recent developments in grammatical inference, with emphasis on the ADIOS approach (Automatic DIstillation Of Structure), a system for the inference of natural language grammars that has been shown to perform well in language proficiency tests. The methods achieves this remarkable result by using better statistical techniques for distinguishing constituents from non-constituents.

Pieter Adriaans, a reference name in machine learning and computer science, is the author of numerous articles and a number of books on topics related to both computer science and philosophy, which include books on machine learning, systems analysis, and, more recently, on client/server and distributed databases as well as data mining. He has been involved in numerous projects, of which the most famous may be the RobotSail project, that had as one result the Syllogic Sailing Lab., a sailing boat that learned how to sail from experienced skippers and participated in the Singlehanded TransAtlantic Race 2000. He is currently a professor at the University of Amsterdam and senior research advisor of Perot Systems Corporation.