Shravan and Alex‘s LDA code is released. On a single machine, I’m not sure how it currently compares to the online LDA in VW, but the ability to effectively scale across very many machines is surely interesting.
CI Fellows, again
Lev and Hal point out the CI Fellows program is on again for this year. Lev visited me for a year under this program, and I quite enjoyed it. Due May 31.
ICML workshops due
COLT open questions
Alina and Jake point out the COLT Call for Open Questions due May 11. In general, this is cool, and worth doing if you can come up with a crisp question. In my case, I particularly enjoyed crafting an open question with precisely a form such that a critic targeting my papers would be forced to confront their fallacy or make a case for the reward. But less esoterically, this is a way to get the attention of some very smart people focused on a problem that really matters, which is the real value.
Vowpal Wabbit, v5.1
I just created version 5.1 of vowpal wabbit. This almost entirely a bugfix release, so it’s an easy upgrade from v5.0.
In addition:
- There is now a mailing list, which I and several other developers are subscribed to.
- The main website has shifted to the wiki on github. This means that anyone with a github account can now edit it.
- I’m planning to give a tutorial tomorrow on it at eHarmony/the LA machine learning meetup at 10am. Drop by if you’re interested.
The status of VW amongst other open source projects has changed. When VW first came out, it was relatively unique amongst existing projects in terms of features. At this point, many other projects have started to appreciate the value of the design choices here. This includes:
- Mahout, which now has an SGD implementation.
- Shogun, where Soeren is keen on incorporating features.
- LibLinear, where they won the KDD best paper award for out-of-core learning.
This is expected—any open source approach which works well should be widely adopted. None of these other projects yet have the full combination of features, so VW still offers something unique. There are also more tricks that I haven’t yet had time to implement, and I look forward to discovering even more.
I’m indebted to many people at this point who have helped with this project. I particularly point out Daniel and Nikos, who have spent quite a bit of time over the last few months working on things.