El asiedo [book review]

Just finished this long book by Arturo Pérez-Reverte that I bought [in its French translation] after reading the fascinating Dos de Mayo about the rebellion of the people of Madrid against the Napoleonian occupants. This book, The Siege, is just fantastic, more literary than Dos de Mayo and a mix of different genres, from the military to the historical, to the criminal, to the chess, to the speculative, to the romantic novel..! There are a few major characters, a police investigator, a trading company head, a corsair, a French canon engineer, a guerilla, with a well-defined unique location, the city of Cádiz under [land] siege by the French troops, but with access to the sea thanks to the British Navy. The serial killer part is certainly not the best item in the plot [as often with serial killer stories!], as it slowly drifts to the supernatural, borrowing from Laplace and Condorcet to lead to perfect predictions of where and when French bombs will fall. The historical part also appears to be rather biased against the British forces, if this opinion page is to be believed, towards a nationalist narrative making the Spanish guerilla resistance bigger and stronger than it actually was. But I still read the story with fascination and it kept me awake past my usual bedtime for several nights as I could not let the story go!

Florid’AISTATS

The next AISTATS conference is taking place in Florida, Fort Lauderdale, on April 20-22. (The website keeps the same address one conference after another, which means all my links to the AISTATS 2016 conference in Cadiz are no longer valid. And that the above sunset from Florida is named… cadiz.jpg!) The deadline for paper submission is October 13 and there are two novel features:

1. Fast-track for Electronic Journal of Statistics: Authors of a small number of accepted papers will be invited to submit an extended version for fast-track publication in a special issue of the Electronic Journal of Statistics (EJS) after the AISTATS decisions are out. Details on how to prepare such extended journal paper submission will be announced after the AISTATS decisions.
2. Review-sharing with NIPS: Papers previously submitted to NIPS 2016 are required to declare their previous NIPS paper ID, and optionally supply a one-page letter of revision (similar to a revision letter to journal editors; anonymized) in supplemental materials. AISTATS reviewers will have access to the previous anonymous NIPS reviews. Other than this, all submissions will be treated equally.

I find both initiatives worth applauding and replicating in other machine-learning conferences. Particularly in regard with the recent debate we had at Annals of Statistics.

AISTATS 2016 [#2]

The second and third days of AISTATS 2016 passed like a blur, with not even the opportunity to write my impressions in real time! Maybe long tapa breaks are mostly to blame for this… In any case, we had two further exciting plenary talks about privacy-preserving data analysis by Kamalika Chaudhuri and crowdsourcing and machine learning by Adam Tauman Kalai. The talk by Kamalika was covering recent results by Kamalika and coauthors about optimal privacy preservation in classification and a generalisation to correlated data, with the neat notion of a Markov Quilt.  Other talks that same day also dwelt on this privacy issue, but I could not be . The talk by Adam was full of fun illustrations on humans training learning systems (with the unsolved difficulty of those humans deliberately mis-training the system, as exhibited recently by the short-lived Microsoft Tay experiment).

Both poster sessions were equally exciting, with the addition of MLSS student posters on the final day. Among many, I particularly enjoyed Iain Murray’s pseudo-marginal slice sampling, David Duvenaud’s fairly intriguing use of early stopping for non-parametric inference,  Garrett Bernstein’s work on aggregated Markov chains, Ye Wang’s scalable geometric density estimation [with a special bonus for his typo on the University of Turing, instead of Torino], Gemma Moran’s and Chengtao Li’s posters on determinantal processes, and Matej Balog’s Mondrian forests with a Laplace kernel [envisioning potential applications for ABC]. Again, just to mention a few…

The participants [incl. myself] also took one evening off to visit a sherry winery in Jerez, with a well-practiced spiel on the story of the company, with some building designed by Gutave Eiffel, and with a wine-tasting session. As I personally find this type of brandy too strong in alcohol, I am not a big fan of sherry but it was nonetheless an amusing trip! With no visible after-effects the next morning, since the audience was as large as usual for Adam’s talk [although I did not cross a machine-learning soul on my 6am run…]

In short, I enjoyed very much AISTATS 2016 and remain deeply impressed by the efficiency of the selection process and the amount of involvement of the actors of this selection, as mentioned earlier on the ‘Og. Kudos!

AISTATS 2016 [#1]

Travelling through Seville, I arrived in Càdiz on Sunday night, along with a massive depression [weather-speaking!]. Walking through the city from the station was nonetheless pleasant as this is an town full of small streets and nice houses. If with less churches than Seville! Richard Samworth gave the first plenary talk of AISTATS 2016  with a presentation on random projections for classification. His classifier is based on an average of a large number of linear random projections of the original data where the projections are chosen as minimising the prediction error over a subset of the components. The performances of this approach seem to be consistently higher than for random forests, which makes it definitely worth investigating further. (A related R package is available.)

The following talks that day covered Bayesian optimisation and probabilistic numerics, with Javier Gonzales introducing glasses for Bayesian optimisation in order to solve its myopia (!)—by which he meant predicting the output of the optimisation over n future steps. And a first mention of the Pima Indians by Daniel Hernandez-Lobato in his talk about EP with stochastic gradient steps towards optimisation. (As well as much larger datasets.) And Mark Girolami bringing quasi-Monte Carlo into control variates. A kernel based ABC by Mijung Park, which uses kernels and maximum mean discrepancy to avoid defining summary statistics, and a version of parallel MCMC by Guillaume Basse. Plus another session on deep learning.

As usual with AISTATS conferences, the central activity of the day was the noon poster session, including speakers discussing their paper, and I had several interesting chats about MCMC related topics, with e.g. one alternative notion of ensemble MCMC [centred on estimating the normalising constant].

We awarded the notable student paper awards before the welcoming cocktail: The winners are Bo Dai, Nedelina Teneva, and Ye Wang.  And this first day ended up with a companionable evening in a most genuine tapa bar, tasting local blood sausage and local blue cheese. (If you do not mind the corrida theme!)

AISTATS 2016 [programme]

The full programme for AISTATS 2016 in Cádiz is now on-line, including the posters (except for the additional posters by MLSS participants). Richard Samworth is scheduled to talk on Monday morning, May 9, Kamalika Chaudhuri on Tuesday morning, May 10, and Adam Tauman Kalai  on Wednesday morning, May 11. As at the previous AISTATS meeting, poster sessions are central to the day, while evenings are free (which shows this is not a Bayesian meeting!!!). See you in Cádiz, hopefully! (Registration is still open, just in case.)