Kevin's Weblog

Session III, I picked "Algorithmic Tools Applied to Learning and Inference Problems". This started out quite interesting, but turned into a bit of a slog as he tried to cover 4 example cases, each of which could have been a 1 hour talk, in 30 minutes each.

Of these, only the first looked like it might have some relevance for us, which was "A Data Structure for Nearest Neighbors on Manifolds", which provided a technique for doing approximate near-neighbor searching on a fixed set of point, with O(log n) query time (and O(n log n) space and O(n log n) time to build). I wonder if there are any rigorous guarantees provided by our systems which perform related tasks.

"Markov Decision Processes with Nonrecurring Rewards" talked about a traveling salesman-like problem with time-sensitive rewards associated with each node.

The other two talked about error-correcting codes and learning Markov models. My brain was pretty much full for these and I didn't get too much out of them.

Anyway, now I'm going to do explore the hotel a little more, and also see if I can find Cem.