I’ve spent much of the last few days reading various ICML papers and I find there’s a few pieces of feedback that I give consistently across several papers. I’ve collated some of …| Academically Interesting
Machine learning is very good at optimizing predictions to match an observed signal — for instance, given a dataset of input images and labels of the images (e.g. dog, cat, etc.), machine lea…| Academically Interesting
In my post on where I plan to donate in 2016, I said that I would set aside $2000 for funding promising projects that I come across in the next year: The idea behind the project fund is … [to…| Academically Interesting
I’ve switched the host of my blog to Ghost, so my blog is now located at This is different from the previous re-hosting on my personal website, which is no longer maintained. Feedly users can…| Academically Interesting
[Update: This post is out of date. My blog has now moved again, to I’ve decided to move this blog to my personal website. It’s now located here: including all the old posts and comments…| Academically Interesting
Suppose that we want to construct subsets $latex S_1, \ldots, S_m \subseteq \{1,\ldots,n\}$ with the following properties: $latex |S_i| \geq k$ for all $latex i$ $latex |S_i \cap S_j| \leq 1$ for a…| Academically Interesting
In my previous post, “Latent Variables and Model Mis-specification”, I argued that while machine learning is good at optimizing accuracy on observed signals, it has less to say about correctly infe…| Academically Interesting
Here is interesting linear algebra fact: let $latex A$ be an $latex n \times n$ matrix and $latex u$ be a vector such that $latex u^{\top}A = \lambda u^{\top}$. Then for any matrix $latex B$, $late…| Academically Interesting
Consider the following statements: The shape with the largest volume enclosed by a given surface area is the $latex n$-dimensional sphere. A marginal or sum of log-concave distributions is log-conc…| Academically Interesting
The following explains where I plan to donate in 2016, with some of my thinking behind it. This year, I had $10,000 to allocate (the sum of my giving from 2015 and 2016, which I lumped together for…| Academically Interesting