Google at UAI 2012 by Kevin Murphy.
From the post:
The conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier venues for research related to probabilistic models and reasoning under uncertainty. This year’s conference (the 28th) set several new records: the largest number of submissions (304 papers, last year 285), the largest number of participants (216, last year 191), the largest number of tutorials (4, last year 3), and the largest number of workshops (4, last year 1). We interpret this as a sign that the conference is growing, perhaps as part of the larger trend of increasing interest in machine learning and data analysis.
There were many interesting presentations. A couple of my favorites included:
- “Video In Sentences Out,” by Andrei Barbu et al. This demonstrated an impressive system that is able to create grammatically correct sentences describing the objects and actions occurring in a variety of different videos.
- “Exploiting Compositionality to Explore a Large Space of Model Structures,” by Roger Grosse et al. This paper (which won the Best Student Paper Award) proposed a way to view many different latent variable models for matrix decomposition – including PCA, ICA, NMF, Co-Clustering, etc. – as special cases of a general grammar. The paper then showed ways to automatically select the right kind of model for a dataset by performing greedy search over grammar productions, combined with Bayesian inference for model fitting.
You can find other individual papers at: Schedule UAI 2012.
Or you can grab the entire proceedings. (972 page PDF file)
Either way, you will find numerous items for exploration and conversation.