ICML registration is also available, at about an x3 higher cost. My understanding is that this is partly due to the costs of a larger conference being harder to contain, partly due to ICML lasting twice as long with tutorials and workshops, and partly because the conference organizers were a bit over-conservative in various ways.

1. Videos will be posted with about a 1 day delay on techtalks. This is a side-by-side capture of video+slides from Weyond.
2. We are experimenting with Piazza as a discussion forum. Anyone is welcome to subscribe to Piazza and ask questions there, where I will be monitoring things. update2: Sign up here.

The first lecture is up now, including the revised version of the slides which fixes a few typos and rounds out references.

This is not a beginning class—you really need to have taken a basic machine learning class previously to follow along. Students will be able to run and experiment with large scale learning algorithms since Yahoo! has donated servers which are being configured into a small scale Hadoop cluster. We are planning to cover the frontier of research in scalable learning algorithms, so good class projects could easily lead to papers.

For me, this is a chance to teach on many topics of past research. In general, it seems like researchers should engage in at least occasional teaching of research, both as a proof of teachability and to see their own research through that lens. More generally, I expect there is quite a bit of interest: figuring out how to use data to make predictions well is a topic of growing interest to many fields. In 2007, this was true, and demand is much stronger now. Yann and I also come from quite different viewpoints, so I’m looking forward to learning from him as well.

We plan to videotape lectures and put them (as well as slides) online, but this is not a MOOC in the sense of online grading and class certificates. I’d prefer that it was, but there are two obstacles: NYU is still figuring out what to do as a University here, and this is not a class that has ever been taught before. Turning previous tutorials and class fragments into coherent subject matter for the 50 students we can support at NYU will be pretty challenging as is. My preference, however, is to enable external participation where it’s easily possible.

Suggestions or thoughts on the class are welcome

1. Winning a Kaggle competition.
2. Wide adoption of deep learning for speech recognition.
3. Significant industry support.
4. Gains in image recognition.

This is a rare event in research: a significant capability breakout. Congratulations are definitely in order for those who managed to achieve it. At this point, deep learning algorithms seem like a choice undeniably worth investigating for real applications with significant data.

The new Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing
will begin organizing semester-long programs starting in 2013.

One of our first programs, set for Fall 2013, will be on the “Theoretical Foundations
of Big Data Analysis”. The organizers of this program are Michael Jordan (chair),
Stephen Boyd, Peter Buehlmann, Ravi Kannan, Michael Mahoney, and Muthu Muthukrishnan.

See http://simons.berkeley.edu/program_bigdata2013.html for more information on
the program.

The Simons Institute has created a number of “Research Fellowships” for young
researchers (within at most six years of the award of their PhD) who wish to
participate in Institute programs, including the Big Data program. Individuals
who already hold postdoctoral positions or who are junior faculty are welcome
to apply, as are finishing PhDs.

Please note that the application deadline is January 15, 2013. Further details
are available at http://simons.berkeley.edu/fellows.html .

Mike Jordan

I also attended Strata + Hadoop World for the first time. This is primarily a trade conference rather than an academic conference, but I found it pretty interesting as a first time attendee. This is ground zero for the Big data buzzword, and I see now why. It’s about data, and the word “big” is so ambiguous that everyone can lay claim to it. There were essentially zero academic talks. Instead, the focus was on war stories, product announcements, and education. The general level of education is much lower—explaining Machine Learning to the SQL educated is the primary operating point. Nevertheless that’s happening, and the fact that machine learning is considered a necessary technology for industry is a giant step for the field. Over time, I expect the industrial side of Machine Learning to grow, and perhaps surpass the academic side, in the same sense as has already occurred for chip design. Amongst the talks I could catch, I particularly liked the Github, Zillow, and Pandas talks. Ted Dunning also gave a particularly masterful talk, although I have doubts about the core Bayesian Bandit approach(*). The streaming k-means algorithm they implemented does look quite handy.

(*) The doubt is the following: prior elicitation is generally hard, and Bayesian techniques are not robust to misspecification. This matters in standard supervised settings, but it may matter more in exploration settings where misspecification can imply data starvation.

The main program will feature invited talks from Peter Bartlett, William Freeman, and Vladimir Vapnik, along with numerous spotlight talks and a poster session. Following the main program, hackNY and Microsoft Research are sponsoring a networking hour with talks from machine learning practitioners at NYC startups (specifically bit.ly, Buzzfeed, Chartbeat, and Sense Networks, Visual Revenue). This should be of great interest to everyone considering working in machine learning.

1. Learning Reductions: I’ve wanted to get learning reductions working and we’ve finally done it. Not everything is implemented yet, but VW now supports direct:
   1. Multiclass Classification –oaa or –ect.
   2. Cost Sensitive Multiclass Classification –csoaa or –wap.
   3. Contextual Bandit Classification –cb.
   4. Sequential Structured Prediction –searn or –dagger

   In addition, it is now easy to build your own custom learning reductions for various plausible uses: feature diddling, custom structured prediction problems, or alternate learning reductions. This effort is far from done, but it is now in a generally useful state. Note that all learning reductions inherit the ability to do cluster parallel learning.

2. Library interface: VW now has a basic library interface. The library provides most of the functionality of VW, with the limitation that it is monolithic and nonreentrant. These will be improved over time.
3. Windows port: The priority of a windows port jumped way up once we moved to Microsoft. The only feature which we know doesn’t work at present is automatic backgrounding when in daemon mode.
4. New update rule: Stephane visited us this summer, and we fixed the default online update rule so that it is unit invariant.

There are also many other small updates including some contributed utilities that aid the process of applying and using VW.

Plans for the near future involve improving the quality of various items above, and of course better documentation: several of the reductions are not yet well documented.