The July 08 (Vol. 30, #7) IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence has an incredible paper by Raykar, Duraiswami, and Krishnapuram. A Fast Algorithm for Learning a Ranking Function from Large-Scale Data Sets appears to be a game-changer for an incredibly important problem in machine learning. Basically, they …
more ...According to InformationWeek, Umakant Sharma, seeded 2nd in a tournament in New Delhi, was caught with a Bluetooth headset stitched into a cap that he wore "pulled down over his ears" during competition. According to the All India Chess Federation, accomplices fed him moves from a chess program. He's been …
more ...The Netflix optimization challenge exemplifies a situation for which there should be a solution, but which I've not seen a good answer. Namely: for-profit but initially ad-hoc cooperation. For instance, let's just say that I made the case that a Pandora-like "Movie Genome Project" was the key to winning …
more ...Scott Swigart points to this article that gives a non-technical overview of the use of genetic algorithms to determine the optimal tuning characteristics of one's Linux Kernel. This ought to work: many years ago I wrote a genetic algorithm that tuned the optimization parameters of one's C++ compiler and it …
more ...Netflix is offering \$1M to the first person who can achieve 10% better movie recommendations than their current system. Sweet.
I have all sorts of ideas on this. Thank heavens I have copious spare time.
more ...Infants exposed to a Mandarin-speaking adult for less than 5 hours (25-minute sessions over 4 weeks) were "able to distinguish phonetic elements of that language." Very impressive. But infants exposed to a similar amount of speech delivered over DVD could not. Fascinating. General-audience article here (via The Old New Thing …
more ...Drools.NET is a port of the Drools library to .NET. I have a bg, big architectural decision coming up for a client and I am debating about whether to tackle the issue with an inference engine or a scripting language. So I've been looking at Drools pretty closely. It's …
more ...Brilliant! The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression (http://www.hutter1.net/prize.htm) takes as its challenge the task of compressing 100MB of Wikipedia text into the pre-competition best of \~17MB. The idea is that a chunk of Wikipedia text that big has characteristics relevant to compression that go beyond …
more ...NaturallySpeaking 9, coming out in August, claims to dramatically reduce the time it takes to model your voice, achieving the best-possible recognition soon after opening the box.
For some people, that best-possible recognition is said to be 99%. Maybe. I've probably gone throught the "voice training" process a dozen or …
more ...The Catalogue of Variable Frequency and Single-Resistance-Controlled Oscillators Employing A Single Differential Difference Complementary Current Conveyor which I imagine is self-explanatory to electrical engineers. Silver went to Multiobjective Genetic Algorithms for Multiscaling Excited-State Direct Dynamics in Photochemistry. Bronze prizes went to two things that I could actually understand: A multi-population …
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