blog-mining hunch_net knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
the latest blogs:
1 hunch net-2014-03-11-The New York ML Symposium, take 2
Introduction: The 20 13 14 is New York Machine Learning Symposium is finally happening on March 28th at the New York Academy of Science . Every invited speaker interests me personally. They are: Rayid Ghani (Chief Scientist at Obama 2012) Brian Kingsbury (Speech Recognition @ IBM) Jorge Nocedal (who did LBFGS) We’ve been somewhat disorganized in advertising this. As a consequence, anyone who has not submitted an abstract but would like to do so may send one directly to me (jl@hunch.net title NYASMLS) by Friday March 14. I will forward them to the rest of the committee for consideration.
2 hunch net-2014-02-16-Metacademy: a package manager for knowledge
Introduction: In recent years, there’s been an explosion of free educational resources that make high-level knowledge and skills accessible to an ever-wider group of people. In your own field, you probably have a good idea of where to look for the answer to any particular question. But outside your areas of expertise, sifting through textbooks, Wikipedia articles, research papers, and online lectures can be bewildering (unless you’re fortunate enough to have a knowledgeable colleague to consult). What are the key concepts in the field, how do they relate to each other, which ones should you learn, and where should you learn them? Courses are a major vehicle for packaging educational materials for a broad audience. The trouble is that they’re typically meant to be consumed linearly, regardless of your specific background or goals. Also, unless thousands of other people have had the same background and learning goals, there may not even be a course that fits your needs. Recently, we ( Roger Grosse
3 hunch net-2013-12-01-NIPS tutorials and Vowpal Wabbit 7.4
Introduction: At NIPS I’m giving a tutorial on Learning to Interact . In essence this is about dealing with causality in a contextual bandit framework. Relative to previous tutorials , I’ll be covering several new results that changed my understanding of the nature of the problem. Note that Judea Pearl and Elias Bareinboim have a tutorial on causality . This might appear similar, but is quite different in practice. Pearl and Bareinboim’s tutorial will be about the general concepts while mine will be about total mastery of the simplest nontrivial case, including code. Luckily, they have the right order. I recommend going to both I also just released version 7.4 of Vowpal Wabbit . When I was a frustrated learning theorist, I did not understand why people were not using learning reductions to solve problems. I’ve been slowly discovering why with VW, and addressing the issues. One of the issues is that machine learning itself was not automatic enough, while another is that creatin
4 hunch net-2013-11-21-Ben Taskar is gone
Introduction: I was not as personally close to Ben as Sam , but the level of tragedy is similar and I can’t help but be greatly saddened by the loss. Various news stories have coverage, but the synopsis is that he had a heart attack on Sunday and is survived by his wife Anat and daughter Aviv. There is discussion of creating a memorial fund for them, which I hope comes to fruition, and plan to contribute to. I will remember Ben as someone who thought carefully and comprehensively about new ways to do things, then fought hard and successfully for what he believed in. It is an ideal we strive for, that Ben accomplished. Edit: donations go here , and more information is here .
5 hunch net-2013-11-09-Graduates and Postdocs
Introduction: Several strong graduates are on the job market this year. Alekh Agarwal made the most scalable public learning algorithm as an intern two years ago. He has a deep and broad understanding of optimization and learning as well as the ability and will to make things happen programming-wise. I’ve been privileged to have Alekh visiting me in NY where he will be sorely missed. John Duchi created Adagrad which is a commonly helpful improvement over online gradient descent that is seeing wide adoption, including in Vowpal Wabbit . He has a similarly deep and broad understanding of optimization and learning with significant industry experience at Google . Alekh and John have often coauthored together. Stephane Ross visited me a year ago over the summer, implementing many new algorithms and working out the first scale free online update rule which is now the default in Vowpal Wabbit. Stephane is not on the market—Google robbed the cradle successfully I’m sure that
6 hunch net-2013-09-20-No NY ML Symposium in 2013, and some good news
Introduction: There will be no New York ML Symposium this year. The core issue is that NYAS is disorganized by people leaving, pushing back the date, with the current candidate a spring symposium on March 28. Gunnar and I were outvoted here—we were gung ho on organizing a fall symposium, but the rest of the committee wants to wait. In some good news, most of the ICML 2012 videos have been restored from a deep backup.
7 hunch net-2013-08-31-Extreme Classification workshop at NIPS
Introduction: Manik and I are organizing the extreme classification workshop at NIPS this year. We have a number of good speakers lined up, but I would further encourage anyone working in the area to submit an abstract by October 9. I believe this is an idea whose time has now come. The NIPS website doesn’t have other workshops listed yet, but I expect several others to be of significant interest.
8 hunch net-2013-07-24-ICML 2012 videos lost
Introduction: A big ouch—all the videos for ICML 2012 were lost in a shuffle. Rajnish sends the below, but if anyone can help that would be greatly appreciated. —————————————————————————— Sincere apologies to ICML community for loosing 2012 archived videos What happened: In order to publish 2013 videos, we decided to move 2012 videos to another server. We have a weekly backup service from the provider but after removing the videos from the current server, when we tried to retrieve the 2012 videos from backup service, the backup did not work because of provider-specific requirements that we had ignored while removing the data from previous server. What are we doing about this: At this point, we are still looking into raw footage to find if we can retrieve some of the videos, but following are the steps we are taking to make sure this does not happen again in future: (1) We are going to create a channel on Vimeo (and potentially on YouTube) and we will publish there the p-in-p- or slide-vers
9 hunch net-2013-07-10-Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence
Introduction: David McAllester starts a blog .
10 hunch net-2013-06-29-The Benefits of Double-Blind Review
Introduction: This post is a (near) transcript of a talk that I gave at the ICML 2013 Workshop on Peer Review and Publishing Models . Although there’s a PDF available on my website , I’ve chosen to post a slightly modified version here as well in order to better facilitate discussion. Disclaimers and Context I want to start with a couple of disclaimers and some context. First, I want to point out that although I’ve read a lot about double-blind review, this isn’t my research area and the research discussed in this post is not my own. As a result, I probably can’t answer super detailed questions about these studies. I also want to note that I’m not opposed to open peer review — I was a free and open source software developer for over ten years and I care a great deal about openness and transparency. Rather, my motivation in writing this post is simply to create awareness of and to initiate discussion about the benefits of double-blind review. Lastly, and most importantly, I think it’s e