NPCT

There has been a really interesting (and inbox-filling) debate about the correct course for brain research on the comp-neuro (that’s “Computational Neuroscience”) mailing list. There is a summary of the discussions here.

You can now see a video of a talk I gave at the 2008 ICML/UAI/COLT Workshop on Nonparametric Bayes over at VideoLectures.net, along with a bunch of other talks from the Helsinki conferences, including one given by Oliver Stegle about a paper we wrote together.

You won’t find many people with Bayesian chops like Radford Neal at the University of Toronto. Fortunately for the rest of us, he’s started a blog.

AISTATS*09 Call for Papers
Twelfth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and
Statistics
April 16-19, 2009, Clearwater, Florida USA
This is the twelfth conference on Artificial Intelligence and
Statistics, an interdisciplinary gathering of researchers at the
intersection of computer science, statistics, and related areas. Since
its inception in 1985, the primary goal of this conference has been to
broaden research in both of these [...]

I am writing a paper on nonparametric Bayesian density modeling and I would like to compare my technique to the standard approach of the infinite mixture of Gaussians (iMoG). You can read Carl Rasmussen’s paper to get a feel for what it’s all about. My plan is to look at hold-out log probabilities [...]

Oliver Stegle and I just got our paper Gaussian Process Product Models for Nonparametric Nonstationarity (pdf) accepted at the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning in Helsinki. Here is the abstract:

Stationarity is often an unrealistic prior assumption for Gaussian process regression. One solution is to predefine an explicit nonstationary covariance function, but such covariance [...]

I believe the original article is in Science, here.
The article is only available if you or your institution has an AAAS membership. This behavior seems a bit odd for a group calling it self an “Association for the Advancement of Science.”

There’s been some discussion lately on the UAI mailing list about repositories for gene expression data. Here are some of the places people have pointed to:

Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO)
Array Express
Stanford Microarray Database
Tim Hughes’ Lab

I use Latex Beamer to do all my talk slides. Problematically, however, it can be tempting to pack the slides full of equations. Obviously if you’re presenting mathematical results this is unavoidable. This page on using arrows in equations with Beamer is fantastic. I’m definitely using them in my next presentation.

It’s stuff like this that makes computer science research fun.

I have had a technical report on my website for a while called Bayesian Online Changepoint Detection. It implements a model for exact inference of “relevant” data for making predictions in a time series, with simple i.i.d. exponential-family distributions. It is not a very original contribution, but it does seem to be sufficiently [...]

Sam Roweis has an immensely useful pair of cheatsheets on Matrix Identities and Gaussian Identities. I find them so useful that I tape them on the wall next to my desk. For that purpose, I wanted all four pages on one side. I used psbind the shrink the margins. I didn’t actually [...]

There is a nice machine learning blog here.

PhD Comics is always spot on, but the current storyline is particularly relevant: the central character’s relationship is just about to become trans-Atlantic. As I get ready to leave for the US to visit Brenda for several weeks, the topic of this one has come up a few times. Too funny…

It appears that Marvin Minsky has gone through and edited his own Wikipedia page. What’s odd is that rather than editing the page to make it more accurate, he added commentary about the statements, elaborating and correcting. Really interesting, to be sure, but a bit weird.

At different points, I’ve come across interesting advice related to research and academia. I’ve created a page to keep track of the links. They’re worth checking out.

I’ve been using CiteULike more and more to track my references, but up until now I’ve still been maintaining a separate bibtex file that I edit by hand. I’ve decided that having pretty spacing in my file is not worth the extra effort compared to:

wget http://www.citeulike.org/bibtex/user/rpadams -O rpadams.bib

Anyway, CiteULike is highly recommended.

I just ordered myself a new lab notebook. That would be an actual paper notebook, not a notebook computer. I’m a little obsessive about this sort of thing and I had finally gotten fed up with the one that I got from the supply cabinet here at the Cavendish. I ordered it [...]

This week’s Offtopic Lunch will be Keith Vertanen: “Photon Collection Paradigms: Exposure Control in Photography”

In this talk, I will discuss how light is metered and recorded in photography. Fundamental limits of the medium will be described as well as techniques for dealing with these limitations. I will introduce Ansel Adams’ zone system and describe its [...]

Some folks in Helsinki has put up a nice tutorial on Independent Components Analysis. It is available in postscript, PDF or as HTML.