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NYU Large Scale Machine Learning Class

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 🙂

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Deep Learning 2012

2012 was a tumultuous year for me, but it was undeniably a great year for deep learning efforts. Signs of this include:

  1. Winning a Kaggle competition.
  2. Wide adoption of deep learning for speech recognition.
  3. Significant industry support.
  4. Gains in image recognition.

This is a rare event in research: a significant capability breakout. Congratulations are definitely in order for those who managed to achieve it. At this point, deep learning algorithms seem like a choice undeniably worth investigating for real applications with significant data.

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7th Annual Machine Learning Symposium

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.

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Vowpal Wabbit, version 7.0

A new version of VW is out. The primary changes are:

  1. Learning Reductions: I’ve wanted to get learning reductions working and we’ve finally done it. Not everything is implemented yet, but VW now supports direct:
    1. Multiclass Classification –oaa or –ect.
    2. Cost Sensitive Multiclass Classification –csoaa or –wap.
    3. Contextual Bandit Classification –cb.
    4. Sequential Structured Prediction –searn or –dagger

    In addition, it is now easy to build your own custom learning reductions for various plausible uses: feature diddling, custom structured prediction problems, or alternate learning reductions. This effort is far from done, but it is now in a generally useful state. Note that all learning reductions inherit the ability to do cluster parallel learning.

  2. Library interface: VW now has a basic library interface. The library provides most of the functionality of VW, with the limitation that it is monolithic and nonreentrant. These will be improved over time.
  3. Windows port: The priority of a windows port jumped way up once we moved to Microsoft. The only feature which we know doesn’t work at present is automatic backgrounding when in daemon mode.
  4. New update rule: Stephane visited us this summer, and we fixed the default online update rule so that it is unit invariant.

There are also many other small updates including some contributed utilities that aid the process of applying and using VW.

Plans for the near future involve improving the quality of various items above, and of course better documentation: several of the reductions are not yet well documented.

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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.