Sebastien Bubeck points out COLT registration with a May 13 early registration deadline. The local organizers have done an admirable job of containing costs with a $300 registration fee.
ICML registration is also available, at about an x3 higher cost. My understanding is that this is partly due to the costs of a larger conference being harder to contain, partly due to ICML lasting twice as long with tutorials and workshops, and partly because the conference organizers were a bit over-conservative in various ways.
Adam Kalai points out the New England Machine Learning Day May 1 at MSR New England. There is a poster session with abstracts due April 19. I understand last year’s NEML went well and it’s great to meet your neighbors at regional workshops like this.
Sebastien Bubeck has a new ML blog focused on optimization and partial feedback which may interest people.
Yann LeCun and I are coteaching a class on Large Scale Machine Learning starting late January at NYU. This class will cover many tricks to get machine learning working well on datasets with many features, examples, and classes, along with several elements of deep learning and support systems enabling the previous.
This is not a beginning class—you really need to have taken a basic machine learning class previously to follow along. Students will be able to run and experiment with large scale learning algorithms since Yahoo! has donated servers which are being configured into a small scale Hadoop cluster. We are planning to cover the frontier of research in scalable learning algorithms, so good class projects could easily lead to papers.
For me, this is a chance to teach on many topics of past research. In general, it seems like researchers should engage in at least occasional teaching of research, both as a proof of teachability and to see their own research through that lens. More generally, I expect there is quite a bit of interest: figuring out how to use data to make predictions well is a topic of growing interest to many fields. In 2007, this was true, and demand is much stronger now. Yann and I also come from quite different viewpoints, so I’m looking forward to learning from him as well.
We plan to videotape lectures and put them (as well as slides) online, but this is not a MOOC in the sense of online grading and class certificates. I’d prefer that it was, but there are two obstacles: NYU is still figuring out what to do as a University here, and this is not a class that has ever been taught before. Turning previous tutorials and class fragments into coherent subject matter for the 50 students we can support at NYU will be pretty challenging as is. My preference, however, is to enable external participation where it’s easily possible.
Suggestions or thoughts on the class are welcome 
Michael Jordan sends the below:
The new Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing
will begin organizing semester-long programs starting in 2013.
One of our first programs, set for Fall 2013, will be on the “Theoretical Foundations
of Big Data Analysis”. The organizers of this program are Michael Jordan (chair),
Stephen Boyd, Peter Buehlmann, Ravi Kannan, Michael Mahoney, and Muthu Muthukrishnan.
See http://simons.berkeley.edu/program_bigdata2013.html for more information on
the program.
The Simons Institute has created a number of “Research Fellowships” for young
researchers (within at most six years of the award of their PhD) who wish to
participate in Institute programs, including the Big Data program. Individuals
who already hold postdoctoral positions or who are junior faculty are welcome
to apply, as are finishing PhDs.
Please note that the application deadline is January 15, 2013. Further details
are available at http://simons.berkeley.edu/fellows.html .
Mike Jordan
A reminder that the New York Academy of Sciences will be hosting the 7th Annual Machine Learning Symposium tomorrow from 9:30am.
The main program will feature invited talks from Peter Bartlett, William Freeman, and Vladimir Vapnik, along with numerous spotlight talks and a poster session. Following the main program, hackNY and Microsoft Research are sponsoring a networking hour with talks from machine learning practitioners at NYC startups (specifically bit.ly, Buzzfeed, Chartbeat, and Sense Networks, Visual Revenue). This should be of great interest to everyone considering working in machine learning.
The New York Machine Learning Symposium is October 19 with a 2 page abstract deadline due September 13 via email with subject “Machine Learning Poster Submission” sent to physicalscience@nyas.org. Everyone is welcome to submit. Last year’s attendance was 246 and I expect more this year.
The primary experiment for ICML 2013 is multiple paper submission deadlines with rolling review cycles. The key dates are October 1, December 15, and February 15. This is an attempt to shift ICML further towards a journal style review process and reduce peak load. The “not for proceedings” experiment from this year’s ICML is not continuing.
Edit: Fixed second ICML deadline.
The workshop on the Meaningful Use of Complex Medical Data is happening again, August 9-12 in LA, near UAI on Catalina Island August 15-17. I enjoyed my visit last year, and expect this year to be interesting also.
The first Bay Area Machine Learning Symposium is August 30 at Google. Abstracts are due July 30.
Yaser points out some nicely videotaped machine learning lectures at Caltech. Yaser taught me machine learning, and I always found the lectures clear and interesting, so I expect many people can benefit from watching. Relative to Andrew Ng’s ML class there are somewhat different areas of emphasis but the topic is the same, so picking and choosing the union may be helpful.
Larry Wasserman has started the Normal Deviate blog which I added to the blogroll on the right.
Manfred Warmuth points out the UCSC machine learning summer school running July 9-20 which may be of particular interest to those in silicon valley.
The accepted papers are up in full detail. We are still struggling with the precise program itself, but that’s coming along. Also note the May 13 deadline for early registration and room booking.
May 16 in Cambridge, is the New England Machine Learning Day, a first regional workshop/symposium on machine learning. To present a poster, submit an abstract by May 5.
May 19 in New York, STOC is coming to town and rather surprisingly having workshops which should be quite a bit of fun. I’ll be speaking at Algorithms for Distributed and Streaming Data.
has died. He lived a full life. I know him personally as a founder of the Center for Computational Learning Systems and the New York Machine Learning Symposium, both of which have sheltered and promoted the advancement of machine learning. I expect much of the New York area machine learning community will miss him, as well as many others around the world.
Nina points out the Submodularity Workshop March 19-20 next week at Georgia Tech. Many people want to make Submodularity the new Convexity in machine learning, and it certainly seems worth exploring.
Sara Olson also points out a tenured faculty position at IMT Lucca with a deadline of May 15th. Lucca happens to be the ancestral home of 1/4 of my heritage
Sasha is the open problems chair for both COLT and ICML. Open problems will be presented in a joint session in the evening of the COLT/ICML overlap day. COLT has a history of open sessions, but this is new for ICML. If you have a difficult theoretically definable problem in machine learning, consider submitting it for review, due March 16. You’ll benefit three ways:
- The effort of writing down a precise formulation of what you want often helps you understand the nature of the problem.
- Your problem will be officially published and citable.
- You might have it solved by some very intelligent bored people.
The general idea could easily be applied to any problem which can be crisply stated with an easily verifiable solution, and we may consider expanding this in later years, but for this year all problems need to be of a theoretical variety.
Joelle and I (and Mahdi, and Laurent) finished an initial assignment of Program Committee and Area Chairs to papers. We’ll be updating instructions for the PC and ACs as we field questions. Feel free to comment here on things of plausible general interest, but email us directly with specific concerns.
For graduate students, the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges program including in machine learning is on again, due March 9. The application is easy and the $5K award is high quality “no strings attached” funding. Consider submitting.
Those in Washington DC, Philadelphia, and New York, may consider attending the Franklin Institute Symposium April 25 which has several speakers and an award for V. Attendance is free with an RSVP.
The From Data to Knowledge workshop May 7-11 at Berkeley should be of interest to the many people encountering streaming data in different disciplines. It’s run by a group of astronomers who encounter streaming data all the time. I met Josh Bloom recently and he is broadly interested in a workshop covering all aspects of Machine Learning on streaming data. The hope here is that techniques developed in one area turn out useful in another which seems quite plausible. Particularly if you are in the bay area, consider checking it out.
I just made version 6.1 of Vowpal Wabbit. Relative to 6.0, there are few new features, but many refinements.
- The cluster parallel learning code better supports multiple simultaneous runs, and other forms of parallelism have been mostly removed. This incidentally significantly simplifies the learning core.
- The online learning algorithms are more general, with support for l1 (via a truncated gradient variant) and l2 regularization, and a generalized form of variable metric learning.
- There is a solid persistent server mode which can train online, as well as serve answers to many simultaneous queries, either in text or binary.
This should be a very good release if you are just getting started, as we’ve made it compile more automatically out of the box, have several new examples and updated documentation.
As per tradition, we’re planning to do a tutorial at NIPS during the break at the parallel learning workshop at 2pm Spanish time Friday. I’ll cover the basics, leaving the fun stuff for others.
- Miro will cover the L-BFGS implementation, which he created from scratch. We have found this works quite well amongst batch learning algorithms.
- Alekh will cover how to do cluster parallel learning. If you have access to a large cluster, VW is orders of magnitude faster than any other public learning system accomplishing linear prediction. And if you are as impatient as I am, it is a real pleasure when the computers can keep up with you.
This will be recorded, so it will hopefully be available for viewing online before too long.
I hope to see you soon
Everyone should have received notice for NY ML Symposium abstracts. Check carefully, as one was lost by our system.
The event itself is October 21, next week. Leon Bottou, Stephen Boyd, and Yoav Freund are giving the invited talks this year, and there are many spotlights on local work spread throughout the day. Chris Wiggins has setup 6(!) ML-interested startups to follow the symposium, which should be of substantial interest to the employment interested.
I also wanted to give an update on ICML 2012. Unlike last year, our deadline is coordinated with AIStat (which is due this Friday). The paper deadline for ICML has been pushed back to February 24 which should allow significant time for finishing up papers after the winter break. Other details may interest people as well:
- We settled on using CMT after checking out the possibilities. I wasn’t looking for this, because I’ve often found CMT clunky in terms of easy access to the right information. Nevertheless, the breadth of features and willingness to support new/better approaches to reviewing was unrivaled. We are also coordinating with Laurent, Rich, and CMT to enable their paper/reviewer recommendation system. The outcome should be a standardized interface in CMT for any recommendation system, which others can then code to if interested.
- Area chairs have been picked. The list isn’t sacred, so if we discover significant holes in expertise we’ll deal with it. We expect to start inviting PC members in a little while. Right now, we’re looking into invited talks. If you have any really good suggestions, they could be considered.
- CCC is interested in sponsoring travel costs for any climate/environment related ML papers, which seems great to us. In general, this seems like an area of growing interest.
- We now have a permanent server and the beginnings of the permanent website setup. Much more work needs to be done here.
- We haven’t settled yet on how videos will work. Last year, ICML experimented with Weyond with results here. Previously, ICML had used videolectures, which is significantly more expensive. If you have an opinion about cost/quality tradeoffs or other options, speak up.
- Plans for COLT have shifted slightly—COLT will start a day early, overlap with tutorials, then overlap with a coordinated first day of ICML conference papers.
Various people want to use hunch.net to announce things. I’ve generally resisted this because I feared hunch becoming a pure announcement zone while I am much more interested contentful posts and discussion personally. Nevertheless there is clearly some value and announcements are easy, so I’m planning to summarize announcements on Mondays.
- D. Sculley points out an interesting Semisupervised feature learning competition, with a deadline of October 17.
- Lihong Li points out the webscope user interaction dataset which is the first high quality exploration dataset I’m aware of that is publicly available.
- Seth Rogers points out CrossValidated which looks similar in conception to metaoptimize, but directly using the stackoverflow interface and with a bit more of a statistics twist.
