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NYAS ML 2012 and ICML 2013

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.

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Patterns for research in machine learning

There are a handful of basic code patterns that I wish I was more aware of when I started research in machine learning. Each on its own may seem pointless, but collectively they go a long way towards making the typical research workflow more efficient. Here they are:

  1. Separate code from data.
  2. Separate input data, working data and output data.
  3. Save everything to disk frequently.
  4. Separate options from parameters.
  5. Do not use global variables.
  6. Record the options used to generate each run of the algorithm.
  7. Make it easy to sweep options.
  8. Make it easy to execute only portions of the code.
  9. Use checkpointing.
  10. Write demos and tests.

Click here for discussion and examples for each item. Also see Charles Sutton’s and HackerNews’ thoughts on the same topic.

My guess is that these patterns will not only be useful for machine learning, but also any other computational work that involves either a) processing large amounts of data, or b) algorithms that take a significant amount of time to execute. Share this list with your students and colleagues. Trust me, they’ll appreciate it.