ML Symposium and ICML details

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. We now have a permanent server and the beginnings of the permanent website setup. Much more work needs to be done here.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

5 Replies to “ML Symposium and ICML details”

  1. I just flicked through a couple of the ICML videos at the Weyond site. The sound wasn’t great and had distracting tinny sounds in it.

    I imagine the videos will be more widely watched at videolectures. Although, if exposure is the goal, maybe the videos should be (cross-)posted to YouTube. A link could be given saying (download slides *here* or watch with synchronized slides *here*). The existence of http://www.synchtube.com/ suggests it might even be possible to synchronize slides with embedded YouTube videos.

    1. Synchtube is conceptually interesting. Are there examples of video synched with slides there? I didn’t see it.

      1. No I haven’t seen anyone synch slides with YouTube. I was just wondering whether it was technically possible (there could be issues with Javascript trust boundaries?), so I did a quick search and found that site. If they can alter the timing of youtube videos /somehow/, I figured it would be possible to synch slides. It’s quite possible I’m missing something.

  2. Hi Iain, Thanks for pointing out about the tinny sound in ICML videos. We are re-encoding the video to remove that. Most of the plenary talks are already re-encoded, and that distracting sound has been removed. Other videos will be also up by this week. Rajnish.

  3. The interface for watching ICML videos is kind of buggy. You can’t fast forward on the slide bar without messing up the video. If they work on that interface and the sound issues, it’s still a good choice. Cross-posting to youtube after recording seems like a great idea too.

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