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 […]

In academic work, page restrictions in publications often mean that there is not enough space to explore interesting but tangential relationships between ideas or to give more than bare-bones proofs of mathematical ideas. I am hoping to remedy this, at least initially, with a webcast series of three talks at ISI. I’ll post the links […]

I just put up a new paper with the (hopefully) intriguing title “The Information Sieve“. The motivation is that when we humans look at the world, we tend to identify a new pattern or learn a new trick, and then we move on to the next thing. There are two amazing things about this: 1. We […]

I admit that this is a bit of a melodramatic title. I was actually a little surprised that, before I used it, the phrase “deep learning for insights” did not exist in google. I gave a talk at eHarmony with this title, for the LA machine learning group. The video is posted here. The original announcement also has […]

I’ve been working on a series of posts about an exciting line of work I’m pursuing. The groundwork is in this paper. The basic idea is that any thing we learn from inputs should be considered a representation. What would happen if we searched over the space of all representations for one that is most informative about […]

A “real” blog update will be some time coming. In the meantime, there are some pretty pictures from preliminary results if you click around here. The picture below is a cool result where our method took results from survey questions (like “Are you the life of the party?”) and automatically discovered that there should be […]

Demystifying Information-Theoretic Clustering Quick summary: Finding clusters in data is a fundamental problem in machine learning. You’d like to be able to do so without making any assumptions about your data. Information theory provides a good way to do this, but the first few attempts to do so have been fundamentally flawed. We fix the […]

My AISTATS talk has been posted online.

If you’ve been reading science news, you’ve seen over the years that obesity, happiness, loneliness, and divorce are all contagious. Just a few weeks ago, I read that grades are also contagious. Certainly, it’s not surprising to find out that friends’ behaviors are correlated on all these fronts, but is that enough to say for sure […]

Thanks to the magic of Mathematica 9, you can now make pretty pictures of your social networks with a single command. I was impressed by how well it automatically captured the true structure of my network, which I labeled and included below. I’m not sure what you can conclude about me as a person, except […]