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COLT/ICML Open Questions and ICML Instructions

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:

  1. The effort of writing down a precise formulation of what you want often helps you understand the nature of the problem.
  2. Your problem will be officially published and citable.
  3. 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.

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Key Scientific Challenges and the Franklin Symposium

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.

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Berkeley Streaming Data Workshop

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.

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Vowpal Wabbit version 6.1 & the NIPS tutorial

I just made version 6.1 of Vowpal Wabbit. Relative to 6.0, there are few new features, but many refinements.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

  1. Miro will cover the L-BFGS implementation, which he created from scratch. We have found this works quite well amongst batch learning algorithms.
  2. 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 🙂

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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.