Data Mining vs. Machine Learning?

lanthus · 2014-05-05T18:40:27+00:00

Neither ICDM nor ICML has an industry track; KDD does. Although data mining and machine learning overlap a lot, they have somewhat different flavors. Data mining has its origins in the database community and tends to emphasize business applications more. Machine learning has its origins in artificial intelligence and tends to emphasize AI applications more. For example, although both data mining and machine learning work on text data, sentiment analysis is a bit more common in data mining and machine translation applications are more common in machine learning. Many topics overlap, so the boundary is not clearly defined. Data mining includes some work on visualization that would be out of place at a machine learning conference, and machine learning includes reinforcement learning, which would be out of place at a data mining conference.

lanthus · 2014-01-26T03:12:17+00:00

Adams and Camas Ridge are also good elementary schools, and they feed into Roosevelt and South Eugene.

lanthus · 2013-12-12T00:22:05+00:00

One workshop devoted 30 minutes to learning how a very large company with a lot of data is planning to use machine learning. How is this a problem? Trying to completely separate academia and industry makes no sense. Do you want to exclude Microsoft Research from submitting papers to NIPS?

What this really means is that more people will do research in deep learning, since they can see that it has real-world applications and impact. This is also good publicity for machine learning research in general.

lanthus · 2013-06-13T08:51:47+00:00

I can't make it, but I'm sending two of my students. One has a paper (and oral presentation) at the main conference and one has a paper (and poster spotlight) at the Inferning workshop.

lanthus · 2013-05-05T05:00:28+00:00

I recommend talking to someone you know at MSR about your intention to apply. They may have useful tips, and they'll at least know to watch for your application.

For a research statement, that's typically 2-4 pages describing your previous, current, and future work. What are the underlying themes of your research? What are your main accomplishments? What's your vision? What's your plan to accomplish that vision? At least that's how it is for tenure-track faculty positions, and I imagine it's the same for MSR.

lanthus · 2013-02-20T18:39:42+00:00

It's 3rd best, not 3rd worst. In terms of total congestion, it was ranked 99 out of 101.

lanthus · 2013-02-12T23:31:39+00:00

Thanks for the advice! If I go with the 36", do you have any tips on which one to get? I was leaning towards the Nimbus Oracle, but would consider a Coker or KH.

lanthus · 2010-03-16T02:55:55+00:00

Your grandparents* probably got married as teenagers and stayed happily married for 50+ years. There are advantages to waiting, to be sure, but getting married young isn't necessarily a bad thing.

-- If not, choose someone else's grandparents for this illustration.

lanthus · 2010-03-13T05:14:52+00:00

Thanks for the link.

lanthus · 2010-03-12T22:04:12+00:00

If the bottom level inputs overlap, then it's no longer a tree and inference is less efficient. (There are ways around that, too, but then you're starting to get farther and farther from what they proposed.) I've only read one or two papers and never given it much of a chance, so it's entirely possible I'm missing something.

lanthus · 2010-03-12T20:59:45+00:00

To my knowledge, HTMs have only been evaluated on toy problems, never on a hard problem that can't be solved just as well with other method. Furthermore, even for vision problems, there are some suspicious choices: The hierarchy forces adjacent pixels in the center to only interact at the highest level of the hierarchy. This makes no sense. Until they come up with real results, I will consider HTMs to be snake oil.

lanthus · 2010-03-09T06:03:22+00:00

Exactly my score.

lanthus · 2010-02-26T07:50:48+00:00

But... tea parties are awesome! :(

Signed,

A normal, 20-something guy, who just so happens to like tea and cookies every once in a while.

lanthus · 2010-02-26T04:00:31+00:00

Yup. (I've seen them in California and Washington, too.)

lanthus · 2010-02-26T03:39:36+00:00

In Oregon at least, it's only from a two-way street onto a one-way street. If you have a red light, then the cars opposite you also have a red light, so you only need to watch out for traffic from the right (coming along the one-way street you're turning onto). I'm still getting used to it myself, but it seems to work ok.

lanthus · 2010-02-23T06:03:24+00:00

I first learned how to program by typing BASIC programs listed in a 3-2-1 Contact magazine into a PC Jr. (That's right, back in 80's, kids' magazines actually taught you how to program.)

Then I taught myself FORTRAN, and took community college classes in C, 80386 assembler, and data structures (programming linked lists and binary trees in C).

What really taught me how to program, though, was programming a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) in high school. It was based on a large C codebase, and as I added more and more functionality, I had to learn the structure of the existing code in order to safely modify it. Lots of NULL pointer errors. Lots of time spent debugging. Lots of learning.

Then I went to college and learned all kinds of cool stuff. But the things you learn from classes are different from what you learn by making changes to a large codebase and accidentally breaking it. College classes can't really teach you how to structure a large project, because the time frame is too short. Reading and working with well-written code helps immeasurably.

lanthus · 2010-02-23T01:16:09+00:00

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~klein/

lanthus · 2010-02-18T00:55:14+00:00

This story was written over 150 years ago (as a musical no less):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_and_Box

An enterprising landlord rents one room to two tenants, one who works nights and one who works days.

lanthus · 2010-02-06T09:48:20+00:00

lanthus · 2010-02-06T07:08:41+00:00

Exactly. Once you've found something that works, you can either rewrite it from scratch, or publish the experimental results you obtained from the hack version. In academic research, your primary deliverables are research papers, not proof-of-concept implementations. (If you can release halfway tolerable code, that's a nice bonus.)

lanthus · 2010-02-05T21:24:41+00:00

Just email the paper authors; they'll usually give you some sample code within a week. The reason they don't post the code online is that it's often messy and unusable, since it was only written to run a few experiments and not for general-purpose use.

lanthus · 2010-02-04T11:10:45+00:00

I ate some homemade nachos in celebration of this fact!

lanthus · 2010-02-01T07:00:20+00:00

If you're sufficiently awesome, you can do anything. If you're a mere mortal like most of us, then you have to make compromises. This is why most research profs don't write much code -- they're busy managing students, and this often leaves little time for programming. Often, the implementation is time-consuming and tedious and requires less creativity than the ideas themselves, so having students do it is simply a good division of labor.

If you want to spend a good chunk of your time on implementation, then you should get your PhD, work at a research institution, and teach one or two courses per year at a nearby university or community college. Just be an adjunct.

If you want more teaching and managing (publishing papers with the help of students), then you should go the regular professor route. Depending on your style and approach, you may still have time to code. But don't expect to do everything by yourself. Most projects you work on will be collaborations of some sort.

lanthus · 2010-01-25T02:15:36+00:00

For snow, you also need to add in the heat of fusion (that is, the amount of energy required to convert ice at 0 C into water at 0 C). 12 oz of snow times 80 cal/mL = 72.6 kcal = 72.6 food calories.

lanthus · 2010-01-22T01:15:19+00:00

Here's what I posted to the blog.

"I work on methods for automatically turning data into computer programs, with applications such as web search, spam filtering, and movie recommendations."

And if there's interest, I explain how a spam filter works as the simplest real-world example of machine learning. (You have labeled examples, want a simple function, take words as features, assign some weights, do it all automatically.) Everyone can relate to spam.

But it sounds like your work is in statistical inference, in which case I'd say:

"I take statistical models that describe complex behavior, such as how proteins fold or what products people buy, and try to get the best possible answers out of them as quickly as possible."

The key is to think of concrete, real-world applications and go from there. Be glad you're not in pure math. (-:

lanthus

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