The Grue language doesn’t have words for “blue” or “green”. Instead Grue speakers have the following concepts: grue: green during the day and blue at night bleen: blue during the day and green at night (This example is adapted from the original grue thought experiment.) To us, these concepts seem needlessly complicated. However, to a […]

The work with Shirley Pepke on using CorEx to find patterns in gene expression data is finally published in BMC Medical Genomics. Shirley wrote a blog post about it as well. She will present this work at the Harvard Precision Medicine conference and we’ll both present at Berkeley’s Data Edge conference. The code we used for the paper […]

Edit: Also check out the story by the Washington Post and on cancer.gov. Shirley is a collaborator of mine who works on using gene expression data to get a better understanding of ovarian cancer. She has a remarkable personal story that is featured in a podcast about our work together. I laughed, I cried, I can’t recommend […]

Here’s one way to solve a problem. (1) Visualize what a good solution would look like. (2) Quantify what makes that solution “good”. (3) Search over all potentials solutions for one that optimizes the goodness. I like working on this whole pipeline, but I have come to the realization that I have been spending too much […]

Here are the slides from my talk yesterday at ICML. The information sieve is introduced in this paper. But in this followup paper, we make it really practical and demonstrate the connections to “common information”. The code is on github for the discrete and continuous versions.

This one is just for fun. There’s no deeper meaning, just a failed experiment that resulted in some cool looking pictures.

  You have just eaten the most delicious soup of your life. You beg the cook for a recipe, but soup makers are notoriously secretive and soup recipes are traditionally only passed on to the eldest heir. Surreptitiously and with extreme caution, you pour some soup into a hidden soup compartment in your pocket. When […]

Shannon’s birthday has passed, but I thought I would jump on the bandwagon late, as usual. Shannon himself recognized that information theory was so compelling that it encouraged over-use. He wrote an article saying as much way back in the 50’s. It will be all too easy for our somewhat artificial prosperity to collapse overnight […]

As a child, I was visited by an alien. I remember the sensation of not being able to move or speak and seeing this other-worldly face. Some time later, when I saw a documentary about people who had been visited by aliens, I felt a chill of recognition. Their experiences matched my own. People all […]

Once upon a time, a boy from a farm in Iowa got an exciting opportunity to move to the west coast. While many new experiences awaited him there, he found himself imprisoned in a cage made of cars. After many years, he had never managed to escape the prison of cars to do simple things […]