Category: Announcements

and I can’t help but remember him.

I first met Sam as an undergraduate at Caltech where he was TA for Hopfield‘s class, and again when I visited Gatsby, when he invited me to visit Toronto, and at too many conferences to recount. His personality was a combination of enthusiastic and thoughtful, with a great ability to phrase a problem so it’s solution must be understood. With respect to my own work, Sam was the one who advised me to make my first tutorial, leading to others, and to other things, all of which I’m grateful to him for. In fact, my every interaction with Sam was positive, and that was his way.

His death is being called a suicide which is so incompatible with my understanding of Sam that it strains my credibility. But we know that his many responsibilities were great, and it is well understood that basically all sane researchers have legions of inner doubts. Having been depressed now and then myself, it’s helpful to understand at least intellectually that the true darkness of the now is overestimated, and that you have more friends than you think. Sam was one of mine, and I’ll miss him.

My last interaction with Sam, last week, was discussing a new research direction that interested him, optimizing the cost of acquiring feature information in the learning algorithm. This problem is endemic to real-world applications, and has been studied to some extent elsewhere, but I expect that in our unwritten future history, we’ll discover that further study of this problem is more helpful than almost anyone realizes. The reply that I owed him feels heavy, and an incompleteness is hanging. For his wife and children it is surely so incomparably greater that I lack words.

(Added) Others: Fernando, Kevin McCurley, Danny Tarlow, David Hogg, Yisong Yue, Lance Fortnow on Sam, a Memorial site, and a Memorial Fund

Edit: removed a news article link by request

I’d like to point out Inherent Uncertainty, which I’ve added to the ML blog post scanner on the right. My understanding from Jake is that the intention is to have a multiauthor blog which is more specialized towards learning theory/game theory than this one. Nevertheless, several of the posts seem to be of wider interest.

Several events are happening in the NY area.

1. Barriers in Computational Learning Theory Workshop, Aug 28. That’s tomorrow near Princeton. I’m looking forward to speaking at this one on “Getting around Barriers in Learning Theory”, but several other talks are of interest, particularly to the CS theory inclined.
2. Claudia Perlich is running the INFORMS Data Mining Contest with a deadline of Sept. 25. This is a contest using real health record data (they partnered with HealthCare Intelligence) to predict transfers and mortality. In the current US health care reform debate, the case studies of high costs we hear strongly suggest machine learning & statistics can save many billions.
3. The Singularity Summit October 3&4. This is for the AIists out there. Several of the talks look interesting, although unfortunately I’ll miss it for ALT.
4. Predictive Analytics World, Oct 20-21. This is stretching the definition of “New York Area” a bit, but the train to DC is reasonable. This is a conference of case studies of applications of ML to real-world problems.
5. Machine Learning Symposium, Friday Nov. 6. I’m on the committee again this year. The abstract deadline is Sept. 30, and we already have several speakers lined up.