NPCT

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 [...]

David said I should learn about Geometric Algebra. So I wrangled Steve into an explanation over beers at the Fort St. George. It looks very interesting and I wonder if there aren’t uses for it in machine learning. Here are some tutorials:

Imaginary Numbers are Not Real
Geometric algebra:
a computational framework
for geometrical applications, Part [...]

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 [...]

One of our very good friends, Holly Dunsworth, is going to be on National Public Radio (NPR) for “This I Believe” this coming weekend as a part of “Weekend Edition.” You can read her essay here. An excerpt:

I believe in evolution. It’s easy. It’s my life. I’m a paleoanthropologist. I study fossils of [...]

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

If you are writing code that is dominated by evaluation of the exponential function, you cannot do without these two papers:

Nicol N. Schraudolph. A Fast, Compact Approximation of the Exponential Function. Neural Computation, 11(4):853–862, 1999.

G. C. Cawley. On a fast compact approximation of the exponental function. Neural Computation, 12(9):2009-20012, 2000.

The implementations described yield 3x [...]

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.

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 [...]

A while back, I wrote a little library to do plotting with Gnuplot and Lisp. In the time since then, I have gotten away from using much Lisp in my work. The library (if you can call it that) is called “cl-gnuplot” and you can get it here. To my surprise, some [...]

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.

I came across this Tensors for Chemists and Psychologists tutorial today and it seems like a nice introduction.

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.

Check out this great Doonesbury cartoon on Slate.

My PhD supervisor has just finished his new book entitled Power. I don’t know much about it, to be honest, but here is an intro:

Seven internationally renowned writers address the theme of Power from the perspective of their own disciplines. Energy expert Mary Archer begins with an exploration of the power sources of our [...]

A professor at the University of Kansas who has derided Intelligent Design received a roadside beating by people who have obviously embraced Jesus’ teachings of peace and forgiveness.

She said Mirecki reported he was attacked around 6:40 a.m. in rural Douglas County south of Lawrence. Mirecki told the Lawrence Journal-World that he was driving to breakfast [...]