Archives

This is the complete archive of posts from Inductio Ex Machina in reverse chronological order.

5 Aug 15

Predictive APIs and Apps Conference View Comments

A brief overview of the 2nd International Conference on Predictive APIs and Apps (PAPIs) which starts tomorrow in Sydney.

7 Jul 15

COLT 2015 in Review View Comments

Despite the jet-lag and the extreme heat, I had a very enjoyable time at COLT this year. This is a summary of some of the highlights for me as well as a list of work I saw that I'd like to investigate further.

11 Mar 15

Upcoming Conference in Sydney on Predictive APIs and Apps View Comments

Spreading the word about the research track at the PAPIs conference that I am helping chair this year.

5 Jan 15

Reflecting and Restarting View Comments

After an unintended break of more than a year, I've decided to start up this blog again.

30 Aug 13

What does the “OSS” in MLOSS mean? View Comments

A summary of a recent discussion between the JMLR Machine Learning Open Source Software (MLOSS) Action Editors about what “open” means.

4 Jun 13

Meet the Bregman Divergences View Comments

An introduction to and survey of some interesting results about Bregman divergences.

14 May 13

Bayesian Updating as Regularised Optimisation View Comments

A brief description and discussion of Zhu et al.'s RegBayes framework for generalising Bayesian updating.

16 Apr 13

Machine Learning Research Jobs at NICTA View Comments

Spreading the word about a number of machine learning research jobs at NICTA.

26 Mar 13

Switching from Jekyll to Hakyll View Comments

A brief operational note on how and why I shifted my site and this blog from Jekyll to Hakyll.

17 Dec 12

Gun Deaths vs. Gun Ownership View Comments

Looking at some data on gun-related deaths and gun ownership worldwide in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting.

24 Oct 12

"Who is ML Hipster?" View Comments

The facts behind this mysterious Twitter account can finally be revealed!

20 Jun 12

ICML Discuss Redux View Comments

The ICML discussion site rides again, this time integrated into the conference site itself.

4 Apr 12

Fisher Information and the Hessian of Log Likelihood View Comments

A brief note spelling out a key relationship in information geometry.

15 Sep 11

Prediction with Expert Advice as Online Convex Optimisation View Comments

A short note describing the Prediction With Expert Advice game and why it is a special case of Online Convex Optimisation.

2 Sep 11

NIPS 2011 Workshop on Relations Between Machine Learning Problems View Comments

I am co-organising a workshop at this year's NIPS to look at how we might better understand machine learning problems by examining their relationships to each other.

12 Aug 11

Artificial AI v2.0 View Comments

The second version of my alternative AI project has been released, code name Edith Valerie Reid.

20 Jun 11

ML Discuss for ICML 2011 View Comments

A brief note about the ML Discuss site for ICML 2011.

21 Apr 11

Proper Losses and the Inevitability of Rediscovery View Comments

I recently discovered that a result concerning probability estimation in one of my recent papers was already observed by Lindley 28 years prior.

24 Jan 11

Bayesian Serenity Prayer View Comments

A parody of the Serenity Prayer for those working with Bayesian inference.

1 Nov 10

A Universality Cultist Responds View Comments

An attempt to set the record straight about the role of generalisation bounds in polite society.

21 Sep 10

What is Fano's Inequality? View Comments

A look at an information theoretic inequality that is useful for establishing lower bounds for minimax risks.

7 Sep 10

Postdoc Position Available View Comments

I am advertising for a fixed-term postdoc to join my Structures and Protocols for Inference project.

16 Aug 10

The Compression Lemma View Comments

A brief discussion and proof of this very elegant and powerful result of Banerjee's.

3 Jul 10

MetaOptimize Q+A View Comments

Some promotion for the new StackOverflow-like question and answer site for machine learning, NLP and computer vision.

22 Jun 10

ICML 2010 Discussion Site View Comments

Some advertising for the revamped ICML discussion site I built.

21 May 10

Prediction Services View Comments

Thoughts on a number of recent prediction services including the Google Prediction API.

9 May 10

Attending AISTATS View Comments

I will be attending AISTATS 2010 and presenting a poster on a characterisation of the convexity of composite binary losses.

13 Apr 10

Upcoming ALT and DS Conferences View Comments

I'm a local organiser for two upcoming international conferences. This is a shameless bit of promotion.

14 Mar 10

A Java Sightseer's Guide to Clojure View Comments

Some links and brief notes about a recent talk I gave to the Canberra Java User's Group.

14 Jul 09

Online Learning in Clojure View Comments

In an attempt to better familiarise myself with online learning and Clojure I implemented the former in the latter.

7 Jul 09

ICML and COLT Highlights View Comments

I attended both ICML and COLT this year. This is an overview of what I thought were the most interesting talks.

11 Jun 09

ICML Discussion View Comments

I have set up a discussion site for ICML again this year.

23 May 09

Generalised Pinsker Inequalities and Surrogate Regret Bounds View Comments

Robert Williamson and I have had two papers accepted at ICML and COLT 2009. They are both about bounds -- one for surrogate losses the other for f-divergences.

4 May 09

Irving “Jack” Good (1916–2009) View Comments

Noting the passing of one of the big names in Bayesian statistics with a discussion some of his work I am personally familiar with.

21 Apr 09

Priors and the Argument By Design View Comments

Ken Binmore gives a short Bayesian explanation of why the usual Argument By Design for the existence of God only reinforces existing beliefs.

11 Apr 09

Minilight in Clojure: Triangles View Comments

This is the second part of my attempt to port the Minilight ray-tracer to Clojure. This time it is triangles. Some bugs are found and fixed in the vector package.

5 Apr 09

Minilight in Clojure: Vectors View Comments

In an attempt to learn Clojure I am translating the minilight ray-tracer. In this first part I build and test a simple 3D vector package.

4 Apr 09

My MLSS 2009 Lecture View Comments

The lectures I gave at MLSS 2009 in Canberra are now up at videolectures.net.

29 Mar 09

Setting Up Clojure for Mac OS X Leopard View Comments

I have recently been experimenting with Clojure and here I document how I have set up my work environment.

24 Mar 09

Women in Machine Learning View Comments

Ada Lovelace day aims to “draw attention to women excelling in technology”. Here I highlight a few women in machine learning whose work I admire.

13 Mar 09

ML: AI or IA? View Comments

Some Friday afternoon philosophising on the place of machine learning within the larger disciplines of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Amplification.

11 Mar 09

A Koan On Bias View Comments

In machine learning, bias is what allows for generalisation beyond observations. Without it, learning is not possible, regardless of how much data is available and what certain Wired reporters believe.

5 Mar 09

Probability Estimation: Bayes Risk View Comments

An overview of some properties of conditional, or point-wise, Bayes risks for proper losses.

3 Mar 09

The Horatio Principle View Comments

This strangely named principle from Binmore's book, “Rational Decisions”, has an unusual take on the axiom of choice and its implications for probability.

1 Mar 09

Probability Estimation: An Introduction View Comments

Probability estimation is an important class of problem in machine learning. In this, the first of a series of posts, I discuss a natural class of losses for these problems.

24 Feb 09

The WoBloMo Challenge View Comments

March is the World Blogging Month. I plan to take up the challenge and write a blog post here every other day in March.

25 Jan 09

Warning! High Dimensions Ahead View Comments

A very counter-intuitive result that highlights the danger of reasoning about higher dimensional space by analogy with lower dimensional ones.

20 Jan 09

Moved Domain View Comments

A notice that I've moved this blog to a new domain. Please update your feed readers.

16 Jan 09

ML and Stats People on Twitter View Comments

Wherein I compile a list of interesting people who use Twitter to discuss machine learning and statistics.

6 Jan 09

Information, Divergence and Risk for Binary Experiments View Comments

A summary of a recent paper Bob and I posted to arXiv.

18 Nov 08

Machine Learning Summer School 2009 View Comments

A plug for the 2009 Machine Learning Summer School in Canberra, Australia. I will be giving a presentation there.

17 Nov 08

Behold! Jensen's Inequality View Comments

Unsatisfied with the very algebraic and formal proofs of Jensen's inequality, I present a diagram that gives a graphical intuition for the result.

7 Nov 08

Artificial AI View Comments

Present the results for my latest and greatest attempt at creating an intelligent machine.

19 Oct 08

"Snuck, flied and wedded" View Comments

A quick summary of a paper in Nature last year that analyses the rate at which words shift from irregular to regular.

27 Sep 08

Super Crunchers View Comments

A review of the book _Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart_ by Ian Ayers.

22 Sep 08

A Year of Research Blogging View Comments

Looking back on a year of research blogging about machine learning.

29 Aug 08

Prediction and the Axiom of Choice View Comments

Some thoughts on Hardin and Taylor's paper "A Peculiar Connection Between the Axiom of Choice and Predicting the Future".

27 Jul 08

COLT 2008 Highlights View Comments

A quick summary of some of the best talks and papers at COLT 2008 in Helsinki, Finland.

21 Jul 08

Evaluation Methods for Machine Learning View Comments

Some thoughts on the workshop on evaluation methods that I attended as part of ICML 2008 in Helsinki.

2 Jul 08

ICML Discussion Site View Comments

A brief note describing the site I set up for ICML 2008.

17 Jun 08

Visualising 19th Century Reading in Australia View Comments

A description of a visualisation of some 19th century Australian borrowing records from the Australian Common Readers Project.

12 Jun 08

Constructive and Classical Mathematics View Comments

A simple example involving irrational numbers makes me think that constructive mathematics has something going for it.

26 May 08

Research-Changing Books View Comments

In response to a post by Peter Turney, I list the books I feel shaped my research career.

21 Apr 08

Visualising ROC and Cost Curve Duality View Comments

Discussion of the point-line duality between Drummond and Holte's cost curves and ROC curves. An applet is provided to help visualise this relationship.

9 Apr 08

The Earth Is Round (p < 0.05) View Comments

Some sage advice by Jacob Cohen on hypothesis testing and p-values.

13 Mar 08

Feed Bag: A Simple RSS Archiver View Comments

A brief overview of an RSS archiving tool I whipped up in ruby.

3 Mar 08

JMLR Discussion On Boosting View Comments

A summary of a sequence of papers in JMLR that discusses an interpretation of boosting.

22 Feb 08

A Meta-index of Data Sets View Comments

A collection of sites around the web that catalogue a wide variety of data sets that may be useful to machine learning researchers.

19 Feb 08

Clarity and Mathematics View Comments

A follow-up to John Langford's discussion on how mathematics can be misused in an attempt to improve the chance of publication.

7 Feb 08

Staying Organised with CiteULike and BibDesk View Comments

An overview of how I use the free Mac application BibDesk along with the online social bibliographic service CiteULike.

4 Feb 08

A Cute Convexity Result View Comments

A quick post on the use of determinants to define convex functions.

19 Dec 07

A Crash Course in Convex Analysis View Comments

An overview of convex analysis and the Legendre-Fenchel transform by Hugo Touchette proves very useful.

20 Nov 07

Principles of Learning Problem Design View Comments

A plug for the workshop talk I'll be giving at NIPS 2007.

19 Oct 07

The Mathematical Grue View Comments

Doing mathematics sometimes feels like playing a piece of interactive fiction.

3 Oct 07

Antihubrisines View Comments

Some great advice from the statistician John Tukey.

3 Oct 07

Anti-Learning View Comments

A summary of an interesting talk by Justin Bedo which shows that learning can sometimes go very wrong - and how to exploit it.

22 Sep 07

Introducing Inductio Ex Machina View Comments

A short post describing what I intend for my new research blog.