hunch_net hunch_net-2006 hunch_net-2006-151 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: At the one year (+5 days) anniversary, the natural question is: “Was it helpful for research?” Answer: Yes, and so it shall continue. Some evidence is provided by noticing that I am about a factor of 2 more overloaded with paper ideas than I’ve ever previously been. It is always hard to estimate counterfactual worlds, but I expect that this is also a factor of 2 more than “What if I had not started the blog?” As for “Why?”, there seem to be two primary effects. A blog is a mechanism for connecting with people who either think like you or are interested in the same problems. This allows for concentration of thinking which is very helpful in solving problems. The process of stating things you don’t understand publicly is very helpful in understanding them. Sometimes you are simply forced to express them in a way which aids understanding. Sometimes someone else says something which helps. And sometimes you discover that someone else has already solved the problem. The
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 At the one year (+5 days) anniversary, the natural question is: “Was it helpful for research? [sent-1, score-0.269]
2 Some evidence is provided by noticing that I am about a factor of 2 more overloaded with paper ideas than I’ve ever previously been. [sent-3, score-0.676]
3 It is always hard to estimate counterfactual worlds, but I expect that this is also a factor of 2 more than “What if I had not started the blog? [sent-4, score-0.138]
4 A blog is a mechanism for connecting with people who either think like you or are interested in the same problems. [sent-7, score-0.252]
5 This allows for concentration of thinking which is very helpful in solving problems. [sent-8, score-0.26]
6 The process of stating things you don’t understand publicly is very helpful in understanding them. [sent-9, score-0.344]
7 Sometimes you are simply forced to express them in a way which aids understanding. [sent-10, score-0.281]
8 And sometimes you discover that someone else has already solved the problem. [sent-12, score-0.381]
9 A great deal of accumulated time and effort goes into writing posts. [sent-14, score-0.367]
10 Telling coauthors “I’m sorry, but I don’t have much time to actually write. [sent-16, score-0.1]
11 One of the things that I thought would be a problem was running out of ideas for posts, but this just didn’t happen. [sent-19, score-0.129]
12 I’m hoping to have more posts by others over the next year to help relieve (1). [sent-20, score-0.548]
13 (Also, I often find the posts of occasional posters more interesting. [sent-21, score-0.629]
14 ) Problem (2) is just an ill of success that must be coped with. [sent-22, score-0.125]
15 Some statistics: posts 1 every 2 days, on average (150) comments 3/post on average (492) posters 10 registered users 72 visits per day About 2000 (some uncertainty due to sharing of webserver with less-used sites). [sent-23, score-1.543]
16 unique IP addreses per month Perhaps 7000 (uncertainty due to same source). [sent-24, score-0.376]
17 I’ve been surprised by the growth of traffic to the site. [sent-25, score-0.225]
18 It is odd to realize that a post here is seen by more people than a talk at even the largest machine learning conference. [sent-26, score-0.289]
19 Radically more effort goes into any talk at nearly any conference. [sent-27, score-0.379]
20 Please comment on any particular thoughts, suggestions, changes, for the new year or the last. [sent-28, score-0.113]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('posts', 0.331), ('posters', 0.182), ('uncertainty', 0.169), ('days', 0.162), ('helpful', 0.156), ('goes', 0.156), ('else', 0.148), ('factor', 0.138), ('blog', 0.136), ('ideas', 0.129), ('average', 0.126), ('worlds', 0.125), ('ill', 0.125), ('anniversary', 0.125), ('noticing', 0.125), ('traffic', 0.125), ('sometimes', 0.118), ('per', 0.117), ('connecting', 0.116), ('webserver', 0.116), ('occasional', 0.116), ('someone', 0.115), ('effort', 0.114), ('year', 0.113), ('sites', 0.109), ('ip', 0.109), ('telling', 0.109), ('talk', 0.109), ('sharing', 0.104), ('concentration', 0.104), ('hoping', 0.104), ('aids', 0.104), ('registered', 0.104), ('overloaded', 0.104), ('coauthors', 0.1), ('growth', 0.1), ('stating', 0.097), ('accumulated', 0.097), ('odd', 0.094), ('ever', 0.094), ('express', 0.091), ('publicly', 0.091), ('month', 0.091), ('drawbacks', 0.089), ('forced', 0.086), ('largest', 0.086), ('provided', 0.086), ('unique', 0.085), ('users', 0.085), ('due', 0.083)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.99999994 151 hunch net-2006-01-25-1 year
Introduction: At the one year (+5 days) anniversary, the natural question is: “Was it helpful for research?” Answer: Yes, and so it shall continue. Some evidence is provided by noticing that I am about a factor of 2 more overloaded with paper ideas than I’ve ever previously been. It is always hard to estimate counterfactual worlds, but I expect that this is also a factor of 2 more than “What if I had not started the blog?” As for “Why?”, there seem to be two primary effects. A blog is a mechanism for connecting with people who either think like you or are interested in the same problems. This allows for concentration of thinking which is very helpful in solving problems. The process of stating things you don’t understand publicly is very helpful in understanding them. Sometimes you are simply forced to express them in a way which aids understanding. Sometimes someone else says something which helps. And sometimes you discover that someone else has already solved the problem. The
2 0.2639541 225 hunch net-2007-01-02-Retrospective
Introduction: It’s been almost two years since this blog began. In that time, I’ve learned enough to shift my expectations in several ways. Initially, the idea was for a general purpose ML blog where different people could contribute posts. What has actually happened is most posts come from me, with a few guest posts that I greatly value. There are a few reasons I see for this. Overload . A couple years ago, I had not fully appreciated just how busy life gets for a researcher. Making a post is not simply a matter of getting to it, but rather of prioritizing between {writing a grant, finishing an overdue review, writing a paper, teaching a class, writing a program, etc…}. This is a substantial transition away from what life as a graduate student is like. At some point the question is not “when will I get to it?” but rather “will I get to it?” and the answer starts to become “no” most of the time. Feedback failure . This blog currently receives about 3K unique visitors per day from
3 0.24841744 25 hunch net-2005-02-20-At One Month
Introduction: This is near the one month point, so it seems appropriate to consider meta-issues for the moment. The number of posts is a bit over 20. The number of people speaking up in discussions is about 10. The number of people viewing the site is somewhat more than 100. I am (naturally) dissatisfied with many things. Many of the potential uses haven’t been realized. This is partly a matter of opportunity (no conferences in the last month), partly a matter of will (no open problems because it’s hard to give them up), and partly a matter of tradition. In academia, there is a strong tradition of trying to get everything perfectly right before presentation. This is somewhat contradictory to the nature of making many posts, and it’s definitely contradictory to the idea of doing “public research”. If that sort of idea is to pay off, it must be significantly more succesful than previous methods. In an effort to continue experimenting, I’m going to use the next week as “open problems we
4 0.22986601 96 hunch net-2005-07-21-Six Months
Introduction: This is the 6 month point in the “run a research blog” experiment, so it seems like a good point to take stock and assess. One fundamental question is: “Is it worth it?” The idea of running a research blog will never become widely popular and useful unless it actually aids research. On the negative side, composing ideas for a post and maintaining a blog takes a significant amount of time. On the positive side, the process might yield better research because there is an opportunity for better, faster feedback implying better, faster thinking. My answer at the moment is a provisional “yes”. Running the blog has been incidentally helpful in several ways: It is sometimes educational. example More often, the process of composing thoughts well enough to post simply aids thinking. This has resulted in a couple solutions to problems of interest (and perhaps more over time). If you really want to solve a problem, letting the world know is helpful. This isn’t necessarily
5 0.19227095 383 hunch net-2009-12-09-Inherent Uncertainty
Introduction: I’d like to point out Inherent Uncertainty , which I’ve added to the ML blog post scanner on the right. My understanding from Jake is that the intention is to have a multiauthor blog which is more specialized towards learning theory/game theory than this one. Nevertheless, several of the posts seem to be of wider interest.
6 0.1646297 137 hunch net-2005-12-09-Machine Learning Thoughts
7 0.13637964 91 hunch net-2005-07-10-Thinking the Unthought
8 0.1235344 116 hunch net-2005-09-30-Research in conferences
9 0.11956178 322 hunch net-2008-10-20-New York’s ML Day
10 0.11347529 22 hunch net-2005-02-18-What it means to do research.
11 0.11346111 142 hunch net-2005-12-22-Yes , I am applying
12 0.10722635 352 hunch net-2009-05-06-Machine Learning to AI
13 0.10664552 358 hunch net-2009-06-01-Multitask Poisoning
14 0.09714561 132 hunch net-2005-11-26-The Design of an Optimal Research Environment
15 0.097140543 437 hunch net-2011-07-10-ICML 2011 and the future
16 0.095383242 29 hunch net-2005-02-25-Solution: Reinforcement Learning with Classification
17 0.092827372 297 hunch net-2008-04-22-Taking the next step
18 0.092300624 454 hunch net-2012-01-30-ICML Posters and Scope
19 0.091834202 343 hunch net-2009-02-18-Decision by Vetocracy
20 0.089174211 76 hunch net-2005-05-29-Bad ideas
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.217), (1, -0.085), (2, -0.093), (3, 0.115), (4, -0.118), (5, 0.002), (6, 0.076), (7, -0.259), (8, 0.099), (9, -0.053), (10, -0.057), (11, -0.003), (12, 0.012), (13, -0.018), (14, 0.004), (15, -0.038), (16, -0.045), (17, -0.092), (18, 0.003), (19, 0.064), (20, -0.087), (21, 0.093), (22, -0.039), (23, -0.079), (24, 0.018), (25, -0.014), (26, 0.033), (27, 0.037), (28, -0.036), (29, -0.048), (30, -0.049), (31, -0.043), (32, -0.113), (33, -0.066), (34, 0.049), (35, -0.007), (36, 0.074), (37, 0.078), (38, -0.171), (39, -0.035), (40, -0.006), (41, -0.039), (42, 0.036), (43, -0.045), (44, -0.037), (45, 0.062), (46, 0.027), (47, 0.022), (48, -0.129), (49, 0.038)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.97284377 151 hunch net-2006-01-25-1 year
Introduction: At the one year (+5 days) anniversary, the natural question is: “Was it helpful for research?” Answer: Yes, and so it shall continue. Some evidence is provided by noticing that I am about a factor of 2 more overloaded with paper ideas than I’ve ever previously been. It is always hard to estimate counterfactual worlds, but I expect that this is also a factor of 2 more than “What if I had not started the blog?” As for “Why?”, there seem to be two primary effects. A blog is a mechanism for connecting with people who either think like you or are interested in the same problems. This allows for concentration of thinking which is very helpful in solving problems. The process of stating things you don’t understand publicly is very helpful in understanding them. Sometimes you are simply forced to express them in a way which aids understanding. Sometimes someone else says something which helps. And sometimes you discover that someone else has already solved the problem. The
2 0.82166952 25 hunch net-2005-02-20-At One Month
Introduction: This is near the one month point, so it seems appropriate to consider meta-issues for the moment. The number of posts is a bit over 20. The number of people speaking up in discussions is about 10. The number of people viewing the site is somewhat more than 100. I am (naturally) dissatisfied with many things. Many of the potential uses haven’t been realized. This is partly a matter of opportunity (no conferences in the last month), partly a matter of will (no open problems because it’s hard to give them up), and partly a matter of tradition. In academia, there is a strong tradition of trying to get everything perfectly right before presentation. This is somewhat contradictory to the nature of making many posts, and it’s definitely contradictory to the idea of doing “public research”. If that sort of idea is to pay off, it must be significantly more succesful than previous methods. In an effort to continue experimenting, I’m going to use the next week as “open problems we
3 0.81463534 96 hunch net-2005-07-21-Six Months
Introduction: This is the 6 month point in the “run a research blog” experiment, so it seems like a good point to take stock and assess. One fundamental question is: “Is it worth it?” The idea of running a research blog will never become widely popular and useful unless it actually aids research. On the negative side, composing ideas for a post and maintaining a blog takes a significant amount of time. On the positive side, the process might yield better research because there is an opportunity for better, faster feedback implying better, faster thinking. My answer at the moment is a provisional “yes”. Running the blog has been incidentally helpful in several ways: It is sometimes educational. example More often, the process of composing thoughts well enough to post simply aids thinking. This has resulted in a couple solutions to problems of interest (and perhaps more over time). If you really want to solve a problem, letting the world know is helpful. This isn’t necessarily
4 0.78480458 225 hunch net-2007-01-02-Retrospective
Introduction: It’s been almost two years since this blog began. In that time, I’ve learned enough to shift my expectations in several ways. Initially, the idea was for a general purpose ML blog where different people could contribute posts. What has actually happened is most posts come from me, with a few guest posts that I greatly value. There are a few reasons I see for this. Overload . A couple years ago, I had not fully appreciated just how busy life gets for a researcher. Making a post is not simply a matter of getting to it, but rather of prioritizing between {writing a grant, finishing an overdue review, writing a paper, teaching a class, writing a program, etc…}. This is a substantial transition away from what life as a graduate student is like. At some point the question is not “when will I get to it?” but rather “will I get to it?” and the answer starts to become “no” most of the time. Feedback failure . This blog currently receives about 3K unique visitors per day from
5 0.70165759 383 hunch net-2009-12-09-Inherent Uncertainty
Introduction: I’d like to point out Inherent Uncertainty , which I’ve added to the ML blog post scanner on the right. My understanding from Jake is that the intention is to have a multiauthor blog which is more specialized towards learning theory/game theory than this one. Nevertheless, several of the posts seem to be of wider interest.
6 0.6615383 137 hunch net-2005-12-09-Machine Learning Thoughts
7 0.53360862 182 hunch net-2006-06-05-Server Shift, Site Tweaks, Suggestions?
8 0.53347135 257 hunch net-2007-07-28-Asking questions
9 0.52918458 142 hunch net-2005-12-22-Yes , I am applying
10 0.52268112 91 hunch net-2005-07-10-Thinking the Unthought
11 0.49172369 246 hunch net-2007-06-13-Not Posting
12 0.47456467 480 hunch net-2013-03-22-I’m a bandit
13 0.46643996 354 hunch net-2009-05-17-Server Update
14 0.4651233 367 hunch net-2009-08-16-Centmail comments
15 0.45250776 296 hunch net-2008-04-21-The Science 2.0 article
16 0.42597491 22 hunch net-2005-02-18-What it means to do research.
17 0.42387924 76 hunch net-2005-05-29-Bad ideas
18 0.41916355 107 hunch net-2005-09-05-Site Update
19 0.41828799 358 hunch net-2009-06-01-Multitask Poisoning
20 0.41582316 223 hunch net-2006-12-06-The Spam Problem
topicId topicWeight
[(27, 0.186), (53, 0.156), (55, 0.147), (87, 0.258), (94, 0.067), (95, 0.1)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.92951065 80 hunch net-2005-06-10-Workshops are not Conferences
Introduction: … and you should use that fact. A workshop differs from a conference in that it is about a focused group of people worrying about a focused topic. It also differs in that a workshop is typically a “one-time affair” rather than a series. (The Snowbird learning workshop counts as a conference in this respect.) A common failure mode of both organizers and speakers at a workshop is to treat it as a conference. This is “ok”, but it is not really taking advantage of the situation. Here are some things I’ve learned: For speakers: A smaller audience means it can be more interactive. Interactive means a better chance to avoid losing your audience and a more interesting presentation (because you can adapt to your audience). Greater focus amongst the participants means you can get to the heart of the matter more easily, and discuss tradeoffs more carefully. Unlike conferences, relevance is more valued than newness. For organizers: Not everything needs to be in a conference st
same-blog 2 0.8927421 151 hunch net-2006-01-25-1 year
Introduction: At the one year (+5 days) anniversary, the natural question is: “Was it helpful for research?” Answer: Yes, and so it shall continue. Some evidence is provided by noticing that I am about a factor of 2 more overloaded with paper ideas than I’ve ever previously been. It is always hard to estimate counterfactual worlds, but I expect that this is also a factor of 2 more than “What if I had not started the blog?” As for “Why?”, there seem to be two primary effects. A blog is a mechanism for connecting with people who either think like you or are interested in the same problems. This allows for concentration of thinking which is very helpful in solving problems. The process of stating things you don’t understand publicly is very helpful in understanding them. Sometimes you are simply forced to express them in a way which aids understanding. Sometimes someone else says something which helps. And sometimes you discover that someone else has already solved the problem. The
3 0.73286265 141 hunch net-2005-12-17-Workshops as Franchise Conferences
Introduction: Founding a successful new conference is extraordinarily difficult. As a conference founder, you must manage to attract a significant number of good papers—enough to entice the participants into participating next year and to (generally) to grow the conference. For someone choosing to participate in a new conference, there is a very significant decision to make: do you send a paper to some new conference with no guarantee that the conference will work out? Or do you send it to another (possibly less related) conference that you are sure will work? The conference founding problem is a joint agreement problem with a very significant barrier. Workshops are a way around this problem, and workshops attached to conferences are a particularly effective means for this. A workshop at a conference is sure to have people available to speak and attend and is sure to have a large audience available. Presenting work at a workshop is not generally exclusive: it can also be presented at a confe
4 0.70102155 116 hunch net-2005-09-30-Research in conferences
Introduction: Conferences exist as part of the process of doing research. They provide many roles including “announcing research”, “meeting people”, and “point of reference”. Not all conferences are alike so a basic question is: “to what extent do individual conferences attempt to aid research?” This question is very difficult to answer in any satisfying way. What we can do is compare details of the process across multiple conferences. Comments The average quality of comments across conferences can vary dramatically. At one extreme, the tradition in CS theory conferences is to provide essentially zero feedback. At the other extreme, some conferences have a strong tradition of providing detailed constructive feedback. Detailed feedback can give authors significant guidance about how to improve research. This is the most subjective entry. Blind Virtually all conferences offer single blind review where authors do not know reviewers. Some also provide double blind review where rev
5 0.70093739 437 hunch net-2011-07-10-ICML 2011 and the future
Introduction: Unfortunately, I ended up sick for much of this ICML. I did manage to catch one interesting paper: Richard Socher , Cliff Lin , Andrew Y. Ng , and Christopher D. Manning Parsing Natural Scenes and Natural Language with Recursive Neural Networks . I invited Richard to share his list of interesting papers, so hopefully we’ll hear from him soon. In the meantime, Paul and Hal have posted some lists. the future Joelle and I are program chairs for ICML 2012 in Edinburgh , which I previously enjoyed visiting in 2005 . This is a huge responsibility, that we hope to accomplish well. A part of this (perhaps the most fun part), is imagining how we can make ICML better. A key and critical constraint is choosing things that can be accomplished. So far we have: Colocation . The first thing we looked into was potential colocations. We quickly discovered that many other conferences precomitted their location. For the future, getting a colocation with ACL or SIGI
6 0.70039749 466 hunch net-2012-06-05-ICML acceptance statistics
7 0.69678891 134 hunch net-2005-12-01-The Webscience Future
8 0.69593179 225 hunch net-2007-01-02-Retrospective
9 0.69550157 478 hunch net-2013-01-07-NYU Large Scale Machine Learning Class
10 0.69535053 458 hunch net-2012-03-06-COLT-ICML Open Questions and ICML Instructions
11 0.6944558 22 hunch net-2005-02-18-What it means to do research.
12 0.6921795 452 hunch net-2012-01-04-Why ICML? and the summer conferences
13 0.69161302 207 hunch net-2006-09-12-Incentive Compatible Reviewing
14 0.69092894 416 hunch net-2010-10-29-To Vidoelecture or not
15 0.68937629 105 hunch net-2005-08-23-(Dis)similarities between academia and open source programmers
16 0.68916982 464 hunch net-2012-05-03-Microsoft Research, New York City
17 0.68900037 382 hunch net-2009-12-09-Future Publication Models @ NIPS
18 0.6884836 333 hunch net-2008-12-27-Adversarial Academia
19 0.68756586 297 hunch net-2008-04-22-Taking the next step
20 0.68595284 25 hunch net-2005-02-20-At One Month