David Belanger's Homepage

David Belanger

Department of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Amherst

140 Governors Drive
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
Email: belanger AT cs DOT umass DOT edu



I am a PhD student, working with Professor Andrew McCallum. I started in Fall 2011. Before that, I was an Associate Scientist in the Speech, Language, and Multimedia Department at Raytheon BBN Technologies, where I worked on multilingual optical handwriting recognition. I received a B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University, where I worked with Eric Dunham and Jim Rice. We developed methods for numerically simulating earthquake ruptures along rough fault surfaces. Currently, my research focus is on machine learning and natural language processing.



Machine Learning at UMass

Belanger, D., A. Passos, S. Riedel, A. McCallum. "MAP Inference in Chains using Column Generation." To appear in Neural Information Processing Systems 2012. pdf code

Belanger, D., A. Passos, S. Riedel, A. McCallum. "Speeding up MAP with Column Generation and Block Regularization." ICML 2012 Workshop on Inferning: Interactions between Inference and Learning. pdf video


Handwriting Recognition at BBN Technologies

Vitaladevuni, S., H. Cao, D. Belanger, K. Subramanian, R. Prasad, P. Natarajan. "Sparsity-based super-resolution for offline handwriting recognition," 2011 Joint Workshop on Multilingual OCR and Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data. pdf

Natarajan, P., D. Belanger, R. Prasad, M. Kamali, K Subramanian, P. Natarajan. "Baseline Dependent Percentile Features for Offline Arabic Handwriting Recognition," ICDAR 2011. pdf

Prasad, R., M. Kamali, D. Belanger, A.V. Rosti, S. Matsoukas, P. Natarajan. "Consensus Network Based Hypotheses Combination for Arabic Offline Handwriting Recognition," ICPR 2010. pdf


Earthquake Modeling at Harvard

Dunham, E. M., D. Belanger, L. Cong, and J. E. Kozdon (2011), "Earthquake ruptures with strongly rate-weakening friction and off-fault plasticity, 1: Planar faults," Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 101(5), 2296-2307. pdf

Dunham, E. M., D. Belanger, L. Cong, and J. E. Kozdon (2011), "Earthquake ruptures with strongly rate-weakening friction and off-fault plasticity, 2: Nonplanar faults," Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 101(5), 2308-2322. pdf

Dunham, E. M., D. Belanger, L. Cong, and J. E. Kozdon (2011), "Earthquake ruptures on rough faults," in Multiscale and Multiphysics Processes in Geomechanics (results of workshop at Stanford Univ., June, 2010), Springer Series in Geomechanics and Geoengineering, edited by Ronaldo I. Borja, pp. 145-148 pdf

Belanger, D. and Dunham, E. M. (2008), "Dynamic Rupture on Rough Faults and Production of High-Frequency Radiation." Poster, American Geophysical Union Fall 2008 Meeting. pdf

Belanger, D. and Dunham, E. M. (2008), “A Finite Difference Method for Irregular Geometries: Application to Dynamic Rupture on Rough Faults.” Poster, Southern California Earthquake Center 2008 Annual Meeting. pdf