Nov
23
Ensemble Machine Learning Tutorial
November 23, 2007 | 1 Comment
Here’s the slides from a 2-part lecture I’m giving on ensemble learning at Indiana University. It includes a discussion of the Netflix Prize competition, and the use of ensemble techniques in that competition.
[PDF][PPT]
Nov
5
A Review of MemoryArchive.org
November 5, 2007 | 1 Comment
I recently came across a small site running on Mediawiki called MemoryArchive.org. The concept is that each article is a memory written, unlike Wikipedia, by a single author. Subjective content allowed.
There seems to be a legit place for a site with this concept to complement Wikipedia. Wikipedia is derivative knowledge, it is intended […]
Oct
2
Visualizing Science & Tech Activity in Wikipedia
October 2, 2007 | Leave a Comment
If you didn’t see our original Wikipedia Activity Visualization, check it out here (there’s a detailed explanation, as well). Also, there is a Google maps style zoomable version here.
This new version uses the same layout and images (well, slightly improved) as the original, but this time we tried to highlight activity in regions of […]
Sep
2
Scheme Tutorial
September 2, 2007 | 2 Comments
I was asked to give a short (1 hr) tutorial on the Scheme language this week for students in the graduate and undergraduate AI courses at Indiana. Thought I would post the slides in case anyone wants to adapt it for their own purposes…
PDF versionPPT (Office 2007) version
Aug
17
ICCBR 2007 Highlights
August 17, 2007 | 1 Comment
ICCBR07 (International Conference on Case Based Reasoning) is held on alternating years with the ECCBR conference. The venue was Belfast, a city with nice blue collar charm to it. Seemed sort of a European version of my hometown of Green Bay. Stayed in a Queens University dorm room, where I was constantly reminded I am too old to be staying in the dorms. Should […]
Jul
27
This is a talk series being given at Google by David Mease based on a Master’s level stats course he is teaching this summer at Stanford. Its easy listening if you already have some data mining or stats background.
The introduction (part 1) is particularly well done, as is the portion on association rule mining […]
Jul
21
On Transfer Learning
July 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Definition (from DARPA): The ability of a system to recognize and apply knowledge and skills learned in previous tasks to novel tasks
Current approaches involve either the building of a shared model of a domain or multiple domains, in the form of a case base, hierarchy, or relational schema, that couple the classifiers together, or the creation […]
May
20
Visualizing the ‘Power Struggle’ in Wikipedia
May 20, 2007 | 17 Comments
A new visualization Bruce Herr and I recently completed is being featured in this week’s New Scientist Magazine (the article is free online, minus the viz). They did a good job jazzing up the language used to describe the viz–’power struggle’, ‘bubbling mass’, ‘blitzed articles’–but they also dumbed down the technical accomplishments. I guess […]
Apr
3
Another Visualization of the Netflix Prize Dataset
April 3, 2007 | 7 Comments
Here’s a recent visualization I did of the dataset used in the Netflix Prize Competition. The dataset is 17,700 movies and 31 gigs of user ratings. This viz shows similar movies close to one another, with the similarities determined by a formula based on ratings.
I found most interesting a cluster of movies (in blue) […]
Apr
3
An Interactive Visualization of the Netflix Prize Dataset
April 3, 2007 | 2 Comments
The visualization activated below (click the button) shows all 17,700 movies that are part of the Netflix Prize Competition. The movies are laid out such that simlar movies are close to one another. Similarity between two movies is computed based on whether users who like one like the other, or (and, really) those who […]
Mar
18
GapMinder Talk
March 18, 2007 | 3 Comments
Just read an article about Google buying a small company called GapMinder which does data visualization. I checked out the talk on the GapMinder homepage, and would recommend watching the first 10 minutes of it. The visualization tool that is used throughout the talk is something special…easy to see Google’s interest.
Feb
28
Installing WordPress on GoDaddy
February 28, 2007 | 34 Comments
Setting up WordPress on a GoDaddy hosting account is really not difficult (this blog is an example that it can be done!). Below are my notes on the process. If you glance at these steps, and don’t want to mess around with this, consider using one of the following hosting services which come with […]
Feb
28
A Tutorial on Flash Remoting Using Perl
February 28, 2007 | 2 Comments
Flash remoting is a big improvement over forms/cgi for communication between flash and server. There’s a great little project called amfphp for using php with flash remoting. There’s a whole lot less great (but appreciated!) version called amf::perl for perl and python. There is little documentation, so I thought I’d post an example.
Here’s […]
Feb
24
Tips for Making Perl Programs Run Faster
February 24, 2007 | 3 Comments
In my daily work I tend to manipulate fairly large datasets, such as Wikipedia, U.S. Patents, Netflix Ratings, and Imdb. Here’s a few tricks I’ve come across so that you don’t lose time waiting for your programs to finish.
Use Storable
Feb
22
Flash vs. Processing
February 22, 2007 | 8 Comments
Over the past year and a half I’ve been hooked on the language Processing. I’ve even contributed a early version library for visualizing social network data.
Feb
22
Ranking Online Backup Services
February 22, 2007 | 3 Comments
This post is a bit off topic for this blog. However, I recently decided I really needed an off-site backup service (er, I lost some files). And, as usual, I spent way too much time looking around the web for such a service. Anyways, I thought I’d share my homework. To give you an idea of my […]
Feb
17
Top 10 Google Tech Talks
February 17, 2007 | 3 Comments
All Google Tech Talks are here (Google EngEDU is the actual name of the talk series). Thought I’d compile a top ten list…
Python and Python 3000. Two talks about the Python language given by its inventor Guido van Rossum. The first is about the language’s origins and the second is about its future.
[…]
Feb
15
CoCitation vs. Bibliometric Coupling
February 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I recently posted an efficient algorithm for computing the similarity of two Wikipedia pages (or any two nodes in a network) using cocitation similarity. Another type of similarity which may be worth considering is bibliometric coupling, in which two pages are similar if the pages they link to are similar. What is interesting is that […]
Feb
12
Wikipedia Page Similarities
February 12, 2007 | 1 Comment
I’m working on a visualization, a ‘map’ if you will, of Wikipedia pages. The map will layout pages close to one another if they are similar. So, in order to create such a map I need to compute the similarity of any two Wikipedia pages.
For my first attempt at this, I decided to […]
Feb
10
Visualization Google Tech Talks
February 10, 2007 | Leave a Comment
15 Views of a Node Link Graph: An Information Visualization Portfolio by Tamara Munzner
Scholarly Data, Network Science, and (Google) Maps by Katy Borner
Feb
10
35 Great Visualizations
February 10, 2007 | 1 Comment
Geographical & Historical
WorldProcessor. Globes overlaid with information. Beautiful…must see!
Wikisky Google maps for the stars.
Flight Patterns Visualizations of FAA data.
TextArc: History of Science Beautiful.
2007 Calender. Brad Paley design.
31 days in Iraq. Visualization of deaths in Iraq. Depressing.
Tracing the Visitor’s Eye Flickr tags on a geospatial basemap.
Schreiner International Cables Map. […]