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Ben Taskar is gone

I was not as personally close to Ben as Sam, but the level of tragedy is similar and I can’t help but be greatly saddened by the loss.

Various news stories have coverage, but the synopsis is that he had a heart attack on Sunday and is survived by his wife Anat and daughter Aviv. There is discussion of creating a memorial fund for them, which I hope comes to fruition, and plan to contribute to.

I will remember Ben as someone who thought carefully and comprehensively about new ways to do things, then fought hard and successfully for what he believed in. It is an ideal we strive for, that Ben accomplished.

Edit: donations go here, and more information is here.

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Graduates and Postdocs

Several strong graduates are on the job market this year.

  • Alekh Agarwal made the most scalable public learning algorithm as an intern two years ago. He has a deep and broad understanding of optimization and learning as well as the ability and will to make things happen programming-wise. I’ve been privileged to have Alekh visiting me in NY where he will be sorely missed.
  • John Duchi created Adagrad which is a commonly helpful improvement over online gradient descent that is seeing wide adoption, including in Vowpal Wabbit. He has a similarly deep and broad understanding of optimization and learning with significant industry experience at Google. Alekh and John have often coauthored together.
  • Stephane Ross visited me a year ago over the summer, implementing many new algorithms and working out the first scale free online update rule which is now the default in Vowpal Wabbit. Stephane is not on the market—Google robbed the cradle successfully 🙂 I’m sure that he will do great things.
  • Anna Choromanska visited me this summer, where we worked on extreme multiclass classification. She is very good at focusing on a problem and grinding it into submission both in theory and in practice—I can see why she wins awards for her work. Anna’s future in research is quite promising.

I also wanted to mention some postdoc openings in machine learning.

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No NY ML Symposium in 2013, and some good news

There will be no New York ML Symposium this year. The core issue is that NYAS is disorganized by people leaving, pushing back the date, with the current candidate a spring symposium on March 28. Gunnar and I were outvoted here—we were gung ho on organizing a fall symposium, but the rest of the committee wants to wait.

In some good news, most of the ICML 2012 videos have been restored from a deep backup.

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ICML 2012 videos lost

A big ouch—all the videos for ICML 2012 were lost in a shuffle. Rajnish sends the below, but if anyone can help that would be greatly appreciated.

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Sincere apologies to ICML community for loosing 2012 archived videos

What happened: In order to publish 2013 videos, we decided to move 2012 videos to another server. We have a weekly backup service from the provider but after removing the videos from the current server, when we tried to retrieve the 2012 videos from backup service, the backup did not work because of provider-specific requirements that we had ignored while removing the data from previous server.

What are we doing about this: At this point, we are still looking into raw footage to find if we can retrieve some of the videos, but following are the steps we are taking to make sure this does not happen again in future:
(1) We are going to create a channel on Vimeo (and potentially on YouTube) and we will publish there the p-in-p- or slide-versions of the videos. This will be available by the beginning of Oct 2013.
(2) We are going to provide download links from TechTalks so that the slide-version (of p-in-p- version if availbale) of the videos can be directly downloaded by viewers.This feature will be available by Aug 4th 2013.
(3) Of course we are now creating regular backups that do not depend on our service provider.

How can you help: If you have downloaded from TechTalks the ICML 2012 videos using external tools, we will really appreciate if you can provide us the videos, please email at support@techtalks.tv .

Thank you,
Rajnish.