[Noisebridge-discuss] Machine Learning seminars?

Meredith L. Patterson mlp at thesmartpolitenerd.com
Sat Dec 13 00:54:39 UTC 2008


Josh Myer wrote:
> What is your name?

Meredith L. Patterson.

> What is your background in ML? (none/some/lots/I'm Judea Pearl)                   

It was the focus of my PhD but I never finished my thesis. I'm the
coauthor of the Kernel Machine Library
(http://www.terborg.net/research/kml/), an extensible, templatized C++
library for doing regression, classification and ranking with SVMs, RVMs
and other kernel learning methods. For Summer of Code 2005, I integrated
that library into the backend of PostgreSQL and extended the SQL parser
to support queries based on a training set of items already in a database.

> What would you want to learn?                                                     

I don't really have any contacts in the academic ML world, so I'm not as
up to date on new developments in the field as I should be. I'd like to
fix that problem.

I also don't know as much about principal component analysis as I'd like to.

> What would you want to create?                                                    

I've been wanting to do a stock picking tool for a while.

> What would you want to teach?                                     

Uh, whatever people want to learn, I guess. I'm conversant with most
learning methods and am an acceptably competent instructor.

> Do you have data?  Can you describe it in a paragraph?

I have lots of data. Acoustic features of music, lots and lots of
genomic data, access to a whole bunch of historical stock market data.

> How/when do you want to work with other people?

A paper reading group might be cool.

> (And the new question is: do you have any swank, short demos?  Those
> would be an awesome way to wrap up the first meeting.)

I could give a quick demo of OBELisQ (the Postgres fork I mentioned), or
perhaps the playlist generation tool I built using it.

--mlp



More information about the Noisebridge-discuss mailing list