I’ve been happy to see an increase in funding for open source software across research areas and across funding bodies. However, I observed that a majority of funding from, say, the NSF, goes to projects that do not exist yet, and where the funding is supposed to create a new project, or to extend projects that are developed and used within a single...

Tldr; You probably shouldn’t be citing the "No Free Lunch" Theorem by Wolpert. If you’ve cited it somewhere, you might have used it to support the wrong conclusion. What it actually (vaguely) says is “You can’t learn from data without making assumptions”. The paper on the “No Free Lunch Theorem”, actually called "The Lack of A Priori Distinctions Between...

As the title suggests, this is a non-machine-learning, non-vision, non-python post *gasp*. Some people in my network posted about spritz a startup that recently went out of stealth-mode. They do a pretty cool app for speed reading. See this huffington post article for a quick demo and explanation. They say they are still in development, so the app is...

Yesterday a week-long scikit-learn coding sprint in Paris ended. And let me just say: a week is pretty long for a sprint. I think most of us were pretty exhausted in the end. But we put together a release candidate for 0.14 that Gael Varoquaux tagged last night. You can install it via:  pip install -U https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/archive/0.14a1.zip...

The ICML is now already over for two weeks, but I still wanted to write about my reading list, as there have been some quite interesting papers (the proceedings are here). Also, I haven't blogged in ages, for which I really have no excuse ;) There are three topics that I am particularly interested in, which got a lot of attention at this years ICML:...

Some time ago I wrote about a structured learning project I have been working on for some time, called pystruct. After not working on it for some time, I think it has come quite a long way the last couple of weeks as I picked up work on structured SVMs again. So here is a quick update on what you can do with it. To the best of my knowledge this is...