lidsblog

Your Folly, My Jolly

First of all, props to John Downer for the title of this post. 

Energy is starting to become a key area of focus at MIT.  Within LIDS, there were several energy-related seminars this academic year.  Two weeks ago, the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu gave a talk and said that a major increase in basic research is necessary in the United States in order to provide the new energy technologies needed to avert catastrophic climate change. 

Unfortunately, I was not able to attend because it coincided with a talk by Al Hero on a topic very close to my research: linear dimensionality reduction.  Prof. Hero discussed dimensionality reduction when models of statistical structure underlying the data are applicable, for example a graphical model that generates data.  He also focused on distributed implementations.  In some of my work, I have looked at linear dimensionality reduction for margin-based classification, including with distributed implementation.  I will be presenting that work this summer at the Fusion conference. 

The fusion in this case is information fusion, not the type of fusion that "has the potential to meet future worldwide energy needs in a safe, sustainable manner without carbon dioxide emissions."

I am doing an internship this summer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in the Systems and Decision Sciences section.  The National Ignition Facility, a device to create a fusion reaction, is being dedicated on Friday at the lab.  Some people think its a folly, but for me its a jolly.  I'll get to hear Secretary Chu after all. 

Spring 2009

I recently returned from SPARS09, a small workshop dedicated to sparse approximation and compressed sensing. It was held in St Malo, France. I presented a paper on model selection and nonnegative matrix factorization.

My research this year has primarily been focused on rates of convergence for learning tree structured graphical models. This work, co-authored with A. Anandkumar, L. Tong and my advisor Alan Willsky, has been accepted to ISIT 2009 and the longer version has been posted on arXiv.

I'll be interning at Microsoft Research again this summer. It should be interesting because I can do machine learning on real data.

I took a class on measure theory and functional analysis this semester. I think both subjects are absolutely fascinating. The next thing I would like to learn is Geometry on Manifolds.

Vincent