Update Oct 18, 2017: AlphaGo Zero was announced. This post refers to the previous version. 95% of it still applies. I had a chance to talk to several people about the recent AlphaGo matches with Ke Jie and others. In particular, most of the coverage was a mix of popular…

The accepted papers at ICML have been published. ICML is a top Machine Learning conference, and one of the most relevant to Deep Learning, although NIPS has a longer DL tradition and ICLR, being more focused, has a much higher DL density. Most mentioned institutions I thought it would be fun to compute…

Have you looked at Google Trends? It’s pretty cool — you enter some keywords and see how Google Searches of that term vary through time. I thought — hey, I happen to have this arxiv-sanity database of 28,303 (arxiv) Machine Learning papers over the last 5 years, so why not…

I thought it would be fun to cross-reference the ICLR 2017 (a popular Deep Learning conference) decisions (which fall into 4 categories: oral, poster, workshop, reject) with the number of times each paper was added to someone’s library on arxiv-sanity. ICLR 2017 decision making involves a number of area chairs…

The first time I tried out Virtual Reality was a while ago — somewhere in the late 1990's. I was quite young so my memory is a bit hazy, but I remember a research-lab-like room full of hardware, wires, and in the middle a large chair with a big helmet…

When we offered CS231n (Deep Learning class) at Stanford, we intentionally designed the programming assignments to include explicit calculations involved in backpropagation on the lowest level. The students had to implement the forward and the backward pass of each layer in raw numpy. Inevitably, some students complained on the class…

The last few weeks we heard from several excellent guests, including Selina Tobaccowala from Survey Monkey, Patrick Collison from Stripe, Nirav Tolia from Nextdoor, Shishir Mehrotra from Google, and Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos. The topic of discussion was scaling beyond the tribe phase to the Village/City phases of a company. …