I’ve been wanting to attend the NYC ML Meetup for some time and hope to make it next week on the 25th. Rob Schapire is talking about “Playing Repeated Games”, which in my experience is far more relevant to machine learning than the title might indicate.
The Workshop on Cores, Clusters, and Clouds
Alekh, John, Ofer, and I are organizing a workshop at NIPS this year on learning in parallel and distributed environments. The general interest level in parallel learning seems to be growing rapidly, so I expect quite a bit of attendance. Please join us if you are parallel-interested.
And, if you are working in the area of parallel learning, please consider submitting an abstract due Oct. 17 for presentation at the workshop.
MetaOptimize
Joseph Turian creates MetaOptimize for discussion of NLP and ML on big datasets. This includes a blog, but perhaps more importantly a question and answer section. I’m hopeful it will take off.
Netflix Challenge 2 Canceled
The second Netflix prize is canceled due to privacy problems. I continue to believe my original assessment of this paper, that the privacy break was somewhat overstated. I still haven’t seen any serious privacy failures on the scale of the AOL search log release.
I expect privacy concerns to continue to be a big issue when dealing with data releases by companies or governments. The theory of maintaining privacy while using data is improving, but it is not yet in a state where the limits of what’s possible are clear let alone how to achieve these limits in a manner friendly to a prediction competition.
Yahoo! ML events
Yahoo! is sponsoring two machine learning events that might interest people.
- The Key Scientific Challenges program (due March 5) for Machine Learning and Statistics offers $5K (plus bonuses) for graduate students working on a core problem of interest to Y! If you are already working on one of these problems, there is no reason not to submit, and if you aren’t you might want to think about it for next year, as I am confident they all press the boundary of the possible in Machine Learning. There are 7 days left.
- The Learning to Rank challenge (due May 31) offers an $8K first prize for the best ranking algorithm on a real (and really used) dataset for search ranking, with presentations at an ICML workshop. Unlike the Netflix competition, there are prizes for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place, perhaps avoiding the heartbreak the ensemble encountered. If you think you know how to rank, you should give it a try, and we might all learn something. There are 3 months left.