• AI Safety

    Updated: 2009-11-29 21:21:26
    Dan Reeves introduced me to Michael Vassar who ran the Singularity Summit and educated me a bit on the subject of AI safety which the Singularity Institute has small grants for. I still believe that interstellar space travel is necessary for long term civilization survival, and the AI is necessary for interstellar space travel. [...]

  • ICML 2010 Workshops (and Tutorials)

    Updated: 2009-11-23 22:35:49
    I’m the workshops chair for ICML this year. As such, I would like to personally encourage people to consider running a workshop. My general view of workshops is that they are excellent as opportunities to discuss and develop research directions—some of my best work has come from collaborations at workshops and several workshops have substantially [...]

  • Podcast with Michael Vassar

    Updated: 2009-11-23 20:26:10
    Just prior to Singularity Summit 2009, Singularity Institute President Michael Vassar did a podcast with “The Skeptics Guide to the Universe”, produced by the New England Skeptical Society in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Skip to 26:00 to get past the news items. Here’s a funny tidbit of Michael talking about [...]

  • Singularity 101 at Good.is

    Updated: 2009-11-16 22:27:37
    SIAI was invited to contribute a series of articles to Good.is, the website of GOOD magazine, which focuses on philanthropy and activism. The first article, “What is the Singularity?” is now live, and new articles will appear every Monday through January 26th. Myself and SIAI volunteer Roko Mijic will be alternating posts. For an [...]

  • The Other Online Learning

    Updated: 2009-11-15 21:07:44
    If you search for “online learning” with any major search engine, it’s interesting to note that zero of the results are for online machine learning. This may not be a mistake if you are committed to a global ordering. In other words, the number of people specifically interested in the least interesting top-10 [...]

  • Hungry Optimizers with Low-Complexity Values

    Updated: 2009-11-10 20:25:15
    Check out my blog post, “Hungry Optimizers with Low-Complexity Values” at Accelerating Future.

  • NYAS ML Symposium this year.

    Updated: 2009-11-09 15:24:46
    The NYAS ML symposium grew again this year to 170 participants, despite the need to outsmart or otherwise tunnel through a crowd. Perhaps the most distinct talk was by Bob Bell on various aspects of the Netflix prize competition. I also enjoyed several student posters including Matt Hoffman’s cool examples of blind source [...]

  • Yisong Yue on Self-improving Systems

    Updated: 2009-11-07 01:48:05
    I’d like to point out Yisong Yue’s post on Self-improving systems, which is a nicely readable description of the necessity and potential of interactive learning to deal with the information overload problem that is endemic to the modern internet.

  • Was Our Oldest Ancestor a Proton-Powered Rock?

    Updated: 2009-11-05 08:36:59
    For an interesting example of the power of lateral thinking solving scientific problems, check out the article “Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock?” at New Scientist.

  • Singularity Summit 2009 Videos Now Available

    Updated: 2009-11-02 18:32:49
    The videos for Singularity Summit 2009 are now available at Vimeo. The few that are missing are either still awaiting confirmation of permission or the speaker asked for video not to be posted of their talk.

  • NIPS workshops

    Updated: 2009-10-26 14:40:57
    Many of the NIPS workshops have a deadline about now, and the NIPS early registration deadline is Nov. 6. Several interest me: Adaptive Sensing, Active Learning, and Experimental Design due 10/27. Discrete Optimization in Machine Learning: Submodularity, Sparsity & Polyhedra, due Nov. 6. Large-Scale Machine Learning: Parallelism and Massive Datasets, due 10/23 (i.e. past) Analysis and Design of [...]

  • ALT 2009

    Updated: 2009-10-10 21:58:51
    I attended ALT (”Algorithmic Learning Theory”) for the first time this year. My impression is ALT = 0.5 COLT, by attendance and also by some more intangible “what do I get from it?” measure. There are many differences which can’t quite be described this way though. The program for ALT seems to [...]

  • Singularity Summit 2009 - the Best Summit Yet!

    Updated: 2009-10-05 01:28:01
    Thanks to all 813 people who attended the Singularity Summit! The event was a huge success. If you want to buy a T-shirt to commemorate the event, you can do so here.

  • Static vs. Dynamic multiclass prediction

    Updated: 2009-10-03 14:01:48
    I have had interesting discussions about distinction between static vs. dynamic classes with Kishore and Hal. The distinction arises in multiclass prediction settings. A static set of classes is given by a set of labels {1,…,k} and the goal is generally to choose the most likely label given features. The static approach [...]

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