handwriting recognition sounds like a good image analysis task for practice since it is 1-bit (black and white), should be low resource usage. I wonder what is challenging, it is not a simple clustering discrimination problem ? Anybody familiar with the science of this (what does a distribution of samples look like).<br>
<br><br>by the way I have obtained a face recognition software, looks like a prototype but complete w/ a good size test data set, I haven't tried it yet but maybe someone wants to do that together ?<br>(don't ask me how it works because I haven't yet looked at it).<br>
<br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 12:25 PM, Mike Schachter <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mike@mindmech.com">mike@mindmech.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Anthony Goldbloom | Kaggle</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:anthony.goldbloom@kaggle.com" target="_blank">anthony.goldbloom@kaggle.com</a>></span><br>
Date: Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 12:04 PM<br>Subject: Forgery Detection, Overfitting and Recent Results<br>To: <a href="mailto:mike@mindmech.com" target="_blank">mike@mindmech.com</a><br><br><br>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: center; margin-top: 0pt; background-color: rgb(245, 245, 245);">
<div border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="600" style="border: 0pt none; margin: 20px auto; text-align: left; width: 600px; background-color: white; padding: 0pt 20px 20px;">
<div style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;">
<img src="" alt="Kaggle Update" title="Kaggle Update" style="max-width: 600px; padding-top: 20px;">
</div>
<div style="font-size: 14px; color: rgb(119, 119, 119); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.4em; padding: 0px 0px 20px;">
<div style="background-color: rgb(243, 243, 243); padding: 20px; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.3em;">
<div>
<b>Tuesday, 1st March 2011</b>
</div>
<div style="padding-top: 10px;"></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 2em;">
<div><h1 style="font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; border-top: 5px solid rgb(32, 190, 255); color: rgb(32, 190, 255); line-height: 28px; clear: both; margin: 20px 0pt 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 19px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">New Competitions</span></h1>
<div style="overflow: hidden;">
<div style="overflow: hidden;">
<div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
For those looking for some practice before the $3 million Heritage Health Prize, we've just launched two new competitions. <br>
</div>
<div>
The first requires participants to <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=51983b1ef8&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">develop an algorithm that can identify handwriting</a>. Such algorithms are important in the forensics world, where they are used to detect forgery. The competition is associated with the <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=b334ae28ef&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition</a>, to be held in Beijing in September. </div>
<div>
<br>
The second is hosted by Phil Brierley, winner of the tourism 2 competition and author of the <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=7316cca577&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">Tiberius</a> predictive modeling software. Phil has noticed that it's often the case that the person who is leading on the public leaderboard, doesn't win because they have overfit their model. Phil has setup a <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=1a7db52a41&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">competition with a simulated dataset</a>, particularly designed to give participants practice at not overfitting.<br>
</div>
<div>
<h2 style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-style: normal; clear: both; margin: 15px 0pt 5px;">
Recent Results</h2>
</div>
<div>
<br>
Since our last newsletter, the RTA competition and the Melbourne University competition have closed. <br>
</div>
<div>
The <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=29cef9c92b&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">RTA competition</a>, requiring participants to predict travel time on Sydney's M4 freeway, was our biggest competition so far, attracting 364 teams. The winners were <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=b282ffce51&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">José Pablo González</a>, a PhD student at Carnegie Melon University and <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=67f2f73d17&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">Guido Matias Cortes</a>, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia. Congratulations also to Sergey Yurgenson and Alisson Azzolini who finished second and third. There's a nice writeup of the competition on <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=95392d1900&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">ZDNet</a>.<br>
</div>
<div>
The <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=27a4fbc35f&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">Melbourne University competition</a>, which had participants predict which grant applications would be successful, was won by Kaggle's own Jeremy Howard (he entered before he joined Kaggle). However, he was ineligible, so <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=c12f39d848&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">Quan Sun</a>, a PhD student at Waikato University in New Zealand collected the prize. Third placed went to Yuanchen He, a senior engineer at McAfee. Each has posted their methodogy on the Kaggle blog (<a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=7266074157&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">Jeremy</a>, <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=f2c792557c&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">Quan </a>and <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=9356a7b8d7&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">Yuanchen</a>). </div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 10px 20px 15px; line-height: 22px; font-size: 17px; color: white; text-align: center;">Visit <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=68bd8eeb0a&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">Kaggle</a> today, or discover more about Kaggle and read interesting articles at <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=35f6665e21&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">No Free Hunch</a>, our regularly-updated blog.</div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); border-top: 0px none rgb(255, 255, 255); padding: 20px; font-size: 10px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 100%; font-family: Verdana; width: 600px; margin: 0pt auto;">
<div style="overflow: hidden;">
<a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=e37fe72458&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: underline; font-weight: normal;" target="_blank"><img src="" alt="Kaggle" style="float: left;" height="99" width="161"></a> <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=0c955828b9&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: underline; font-weight: normal;" target="_blank"> <img src="" alt="LinkedIn" style="float: right; margin-left: 10px;" height="99" width="68"></a> <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=3d73eb5f76&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: underline; font-weight: normal;" target="_blank"><img src="" alt="Facebook" style="float: right; margin-left: 10px;" height="99" width="68"></a> <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=31a568ddfb&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: underline; font-weight: normal;" target="_blank"><img src="" alt="Twitter" style="float: right; margin-left: 10px;" height="99" width="68"></a></div>
<div style="clear: both; padding-top: 10px; border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin-top: 10px;">
<p style="padding: 0pt 0pt 1em; margin: 0pt;">
<a href="http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=234ef32a6e&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: underline; font-weight: normal;" target="_blank">View in browser</a> • <a href="http://kaggle.us1.list-manage2.com/unsubscribe?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=f42f9df1e1&e=bf02f945c6&c=234ef32a6e" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: underline; font-weight: normal;" target="_blank">Unsubscribe</a> • <a href="http://us1.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=e4c8fb8b43860678deab268e5&id=234ef32a6e&e=bf02f945c6" style="color: rgb(32, 190, 255); text-decoration: underline; font-weight: normal;" target="_blank">Forward to a friend</a></p>
<p style="padding: 0pt 0pt 1em; margin: 0pt;">
You are receiving this email because you are a Kaggle user or you are on Kaggle's mailing list</p>
<p style="padding: 0pt 0pt 1em; margin: 0pt;">
Copyright 2011 Kaggle All rights reserved.</p>
<p style="padding: 0pt 0pt 1em; margin: 0pt;">
</p>
</div>
</div>
<span style="padding: 0px;"></span>
<img src="" height="1" width="1"></div>
</div><br>
<br>_______________________________________________<br>
ml mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:ml@lists.noisebridge.net">ml@lists.noisebridge.net</a><br>
<a href="https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/ml" target="_blank">https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/ml</a><br>
<br></blockquote></div><br>