Blog

Paradise Blogged

Here is the unfolding saga of how I returned to southern California after a twenty-year exile on the East Coast. I am a professor of computer science at UCSD with research interests in machine learning, voice processing, and artificial intelligence.

(Back to my home page.)

December 19, 2006

LOS ANGELES

A city with something for everyone. But where do you go for hard-core math? On a Sunday night? There's only one place: Math Club. Last Sunday, the topic was nonlinear dimensionality reduction, and I was the headliner. There are no record or film deals yet, but I expect the phone to ring any minute.

HOLIDAY CHEER

How to grade exams: a professor's guide.
What comes next: Kansas outlaws evolution.

PIANO SIGHTINGS

The end of the quarter in Music 137A focused on ii-V-I progressions. Here is my last homework assignment. I wonder what it would sound like to play on this piano.

December 11, 2006

VANCOUVER

Congratulations to my student Fei Sha, who not only won an outstanding paper award at NIPS*06, but also successfully defended his thesis. We celebrated with a sumptuous feast of omakase dinners at Tojo's.

A few of the many papers that I enjoyed at this year's conference:

Approximate inference using planar graph decomposition (Globerson & Jaakkola)
Analysis of representations for domain adaptation (Blitzer, Ben-David, Crammer, & Pereira)
MLLE: Modified locally linear embedding using multiple weights (Wang & Zhang)
An EM algorithm for localizing multiple sound sources in reverberant environments (Mandel, Ellis, & Jebara)

My views on nonlinear dimensionality reduction were also changed forever by this talk.

November 23, 2006

WIND AND SEA

Not your usual fall colors: here is Wind 'n Sea beach in La Jolla, where we went for a short walk on Thanksgiving day. The rocks make it an interesting beach to walk and a terrible beach to run.

THE PRE-MEAL THANKSGIVING SAFETY DEMONSTRATION

Welcome to this Thanksgiving meal, with non-stop service from passive aggression to outright yelling. This afternoon's meal will last approximately two hours and 14 minutes. At this time, please direct your attention to the head of the table for the pre-meal safety demonstration.
Emergency exits are located at the door into the kitchen and through the living room into the front hall. Please take a moment to locate the exit nearest you.

Wait, it gets better. Read the rest here.

BUT YOU NEVER CALL

Seinfeld, on people who send you an e-mail instead of calling: "That's their way of saying I only want to hear my half of the conversation." More bits from his latest routine here. (Scroll down past the lead story.)

November 5, 2006

PAR FOR THE COURSE

The latest addition to the undergraduate curriculum at Xiamen University in China: "golf classes start in two months and will be required for economics and computer software majors". This is one area in which UCSD can certainly compete.

PRESS RELEASE

The monthly newletter for Essential Science Indicators is running a brief profile on me and my work with Sam Roweis on locally linear embedding.

EATING WELL

In the mood for Peruvian food? Head over to El Q'Ero in Encinitas (formerly known as Amici), and make sure to save room for the specialty dessert. For tasty Thai food not far from campus, I recommend Spice and Rice.

A LITERARY PHENOMENON

Why do people love Haruki Murakami? I have only read two of his novels, but this review makes me want to read more.

October 24, 2006

WORK IN PROGRESS

What I seem to be thinking about these days: nearest neighbor search, feature selection, matrix factorization, multiple instance learning, and auditory object recognition.

GIANT STEPS

I only recently came across this amazing visualization of John Coltrane's Giant Steps. It's hard to appreciate the speed at which chords are changing in this song (not to mention the skill required to play over them), but you can get some idea by watching this.

BABY STEPS

Meanwhile, I continue to learn more colorful scales in jazz class. To practice the augmented and diminished scales, I composed these motifs over a simple I-IV progression.

WORDPLAY

backblog overflow of incidents you intend to write about on your weblog
proffspring the children of professors, who tend to become professors themselves

October 7, 2006

FLIX PICKS

Until Netflix creates the perfect movie recommender system, or entices one of us to build it for them, you'll just have to take my word on these picks. First choice: The Departed, the latest crime drama from Martin Scorsese. Close second: The Illusionist, featuring the supernaturally talented Edward Norton.

INTERVAL TRAINING

Some cool scales I've learned in the first two weeks of Music 137A: Lydian augmented, supra Locrian, and half-whole diminished. Here is a sample motif on the half-whole scale that I composed for homework. (Apologies for the terrible sound quality.)

October 2, 2006

SNEAK PREVIEWS

My students and I will have two papers at NIPS-06, one on large margin training of continuous-density hidden Marvov models, the other on graph regularization for maximum variance unfolding. The algorithms in these papers have applications to automatic speech recognition and sensor localization.

September 20, 2006

RETHINKING SCIENCE

The U.S. is not producing enough scientists and engineers. How to correct this shortage? The answer depends on whether you believe that scientists are born or made. This thought-provoking column argues for the former:

[W]e live in a supply-constrained world, where the pool of real scientists and engineers is relatively small and most people, no matter how bright, aren't destined for careers in science and engineering.

Proceeding from this observation, the author proposes a paradigm shift for early science education in this country. Worth reading.

September 17, 2006

A SURFER IS BORN

Moonlight Beach, Encinitas. Today I rode my first wave. Of course, I had many spectacular wipe-outs before managing to stand up -- which made it all the more exhilarating when it finally happened. As in most aspects of life, a good teacher makes all the difference.

September 15, 2006

CALL MONITORING

Let this be a warning to all students. Turn off your cell phone before the start of lecture, or the professor may do it for you. As in, permanently.

PUBLISH OR PERISH?

What do the journals of Machine Learning and Topology have in common? Five years ago, fed up with high prices and lack of access, the editorial board of Machine Learning resigned en masse to protest its treatment by commercial publishers. Apparently, the editors of Topology reached the same conclusion last month.

September 8, 2006

THE PROMISING SYLLABUS

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests a better way to entice students on the first day of class. From the lead-in:

I've always considered the most boring 20 minutes of the semester the time I spend reading the syllabus on the first day of class. Students come in, potentially excited about getting started, only to end up listening to me read aloud.
I imagine them paraphrasing in their heads one of my favorite Woody Allen lines: Thanks, but I've been doing my own reading since about the first grade.

FIRST DO NO HARM

Harvard wants to improve the quality of its teaching. Really, this shouldn't be too hard, given the considerable room for improvement. Others, however, are skeptical:

Lee S. Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, said if Harvard's new effort succeeds, it would be "revolutionary", but he was also skeptical that the university can really change. Universities like Harvard, he said, evaluate scholarship as the Michelin restaurant guide would: "Is this the best person in the world?" But they use a much different standard to assess teaching: "Is this person so awful as a teacher that it would actually be harmful to students?"

That's setting the bar rather low, isn't it? In truth, most of my professors at Harvard were very good, and some were absolutely masterful. On the other hand, there were a few who should never have been allowed into a classroom. I found no obvious correlation between academic rank and teaching ability.

TIME IS ON MY SIDE

A friend of mine in graduate school used to joke that the top three reasons to become an academic were June, July, and August. In fact, that joke doesn't get it right at all. This end-of-the-summer op-ed describes the real attraction:

On paper, the academic life looks great. As many as 15 weeks off in the summer, four in the winter, one in the spring, and then, usually, only three days a week on campus the rest of the time. Anybody who tells you this wasn't part of the lure of a job in higher education is lying. But one finds out right away in graduate school that in fact the typical professor logs an average of 60 hours a week, and the more successful professors work even more - including not just 14-hour days during the school year, but 10-hour days in the summer as well.
Why, then, does there continue to be a glut of fresh Ph.D.'s? It isn't the pay scale, which, with a few lucky exceptions, offers the lowest years-of-education-to-income ratio possible. It isn't really the work itself, either. Yes, teaching and research are rewarding, but we face as much drudgery as in any professional job. Once you've read 10,000 freshman essays, you've read them all.
But we academics do have something few others possess in this post-industrial world: control over our own time. All the surveys point to this as the most common factor in job satisfaction. The jobs in which decisions are made and the pace set by machines provide the least satisfaction, while those, like mine, that foster at least the illusion of control provide the most.

Following up on the above, an Instapundit reader contributes this gem: "The best part of being a professor is that you get to work whatever 70 hours a week that you want."

VERBAL VILLAINY

As reported by Slashdot, Microsoft has filed a patent application for conjugating verbs. Apparently, this is not a parody. Two thoughts come to mind. First, kill all the lawyers. Second, this looks like a job for Letterman.

EPISODE III

The empire strikes back, or at least tries, in the latest adventures of Darth Vader's younger brother, Chad, who manages the night shift at a grocery store. (If you haven't already, be sure to catch episodes I and II.)

September 4, 2006

COASTLINE

Over Labor Day weekend, we spent part of Sunday afternoon walking in Torrey Pines State Reserve (just a few miles north of campus). The views up and down the coast were simply magnificent.

WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN

Bear lives in the courtyard adjacent to the CSE building at UCSD. I have a wonderful view of Bear from the window of my fourth floor office. One day I looked outside and saw a student sitting on Bear's head. A few minutes later, police and maintenance workers arrived with ladders to help the student down. I snapped this photo from my office window. Due to the glare from the sun, Bear appears to be jacked directly into cyberspace. Weird.

THE E-ENVELOPE, PLEASE

Final decisions were emailed this weekend for NIPS-06, one of the leading conferences in machine learning and pattern recognition. As usual, competition was tough: of over 800 submitted abstracts, less than 25% were accepted for publication. Among the accepted papers are two from our group, one on large margin methods for automatic speech recognition, the other on semidefinite programs for sensor localization.

August 27, 2006

RECHARGING THE BATTERIES

What a perfect weekend. On Saturday, we saw All Wear Bowlers, an absolutely hilarious and often surreal two-man show running through August at the La Jolla Playhouse. On Sunday, we spent the morning and afternoon at La Jolla Cove, much of that time swimming at the Underwater Park Ecological Reserve. The water was teeming with fish. Just down the coast a bit, the seals were also out in force.

SWEEPING OUT MY HEAD

Just an excuse to quote from the novel I am currently reading:

Meanwhile, I planted an elbow on the armrest of my chair, rested my head on my hand, and shut my eyes. Nothing came to mind. With my eyes closed, I could hear hundreds of elves sweeping out my head with their tiny brooms. They kept sweeping and sweeping. It never occurred to any of them to use a dustpan.

The novel is A Wild Sleep Chase by Haruki Murakami.

August 22, 2006

EVOLUTION

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "evolutionary biology is missing from a list of majors that the U.S. Department of Education has deemed eligible for a new federal grant program designed to reward students majoring in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages."

Sheesh, what comes next?

Some follow-up from Political Animal: "Ed Department folks were unavailable for comment, but a spokescritter suggested this was just a 'clerical consolidation of some kind.' Roger that."

On an oddly related note, an op-ed in today's Wall St Journal notes the significant fertility gap between liberals and conservatives and predicts tough times ahead for left-leaning politics.

Perhaps one lesson to draw from all this is that people who believe in the theory of evolution should start having more babies.

August 21, 2006

CLOSE TO HOME

Tomorrow, UCSD will host a massive mock exercise for first responders to practice their skills in responding to urban terrorism. The exercise will take place right next to the CSE building; we have been warned to stay away. I hope the date is just a coincidence.

August 17, 2006

CONNECTIONS

Today I attended the "Small Models" session of the Connections-II workshop at Caltech. Much to my delight, many folks at the workshop had also worked on minimum rank matrix completion problems. On top of that, the dinner conversations at the Athenaeum were every bit as interesting as the talks.

KA-CHING!

Congratulations to my students John Blitzer and Kilian Weinberger (from UPenn), who won first prize in this year's UCSD Student Data Mining Competition on document classification. Google, are you reading this?

August 10, 2006

COLLEGE RANKINGS

The Washington Monthly has published its contrarian rankings of national universities. From the introduction to the rankings:

Unlike other college guides, such as U.S. News and World Report, this guide asks not what colleges can do for you, but what colleges are doing for the country.

Here's where it gets interesting. More details:

What are reasonable indicators of how much a school is benefiting the country? We came up with three: how well it performs as an engine of social mobility (ideally helping the poor to get rich rather than the very rich to get very, very rich), how well it does in fostering scientific and humanistic research, and how well it promotes an ethic of service to country.

Based on these criteria, UCSD was ranked sixth among national universities; the top five were MIT, UC Berkeley, Penn State, UCLA, and Texas A&M. Liberal arts colleges were ranked separately.

August 7, 2006

RECOMMENDATIONS

I found the first novel, Love and Garbage, in a used book store and could not resist the title. It turned out to be excellent, though not the whimsical read I expected. Later, browsing at the campus book store for lighter fare, I stumbled across The Final Solution: A Story of Detection. The premise: in WWII England, an octogenarian Sherlock Holmes is coaxed out of retirement by the disappearance of a German-speaking parrot. So far it's hard to put down.

SO YOU WANT TO BE AN EXPERT

Scientific American has an interesting report on what we can learn from experts at chess. Two take-home messages:

Think quality, not quantity.
"[W]hat matters is not experience per se but 'effortful study', which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time."
Attitude trumps ability.
"[M]otivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise ... Teachers in sports, music and other fields tend to believe that talent matters and that they know it when they see it. In fact, they appear to be confusing ability with precocity."

August 3, 2006

TECHNOLOGICAL GADGETRY

What you want, what you need:

the Kaleidescape video jukebox -- it hooks directly to your TV and can store up to 825 of your favorite DVDs. The only question: can it get past the DVD Copy Control Association?
video games that use eye-trackers as control devices. Recent ~~playtesting~~ research has shown that real-time feedback from eye movements creates more immersive virtual environments.
biometric vending machines, the first prototype of which is being developed at UCSD. In addition to tasty treats, the machine in our CS building has a barcode scanner, a fingerprint reader, and a camera for face recognition. (Note to self: add a microphone for speaker recognition.)

August 1, 2006

PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

Move over Disneyland. According to a recent study, the happiest place on earth is Denmark, followed by Switzerland in second, Austria in third, and Iceland in fourth. Do you need a change of scenery? Be sure to plan your next move with the interactive World Map of Happiness.

USE THE FORCE

A new Star Wars film is in the works. More good news: it's not being directed by George Lucas. The film, titled Secrets of the Rebellion, will fill in the gaps between Episodes III and IV. The only catch: the film has a budget of $60,000. Will it be any good? I am cautiously optimistic. Consider these other amateur efforts:

Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager (Episode I) (Episode II)
Grocery Store Wars: Join the Organic Rebellion
Ryan vs Dorkman: Star Wars Light Saber fan video
Ryan vs Brandon: the amazing sequel
Sith Sense: Twenty Questions with Lord Vader

July 31, 2006

SPEECH WRECKOGNITION

Check out the latest live demo of speech recognition from Microsoft, captured forever on Google Video. What a disaster. No wonder the errors seem baffling to laymen: the recognizer is confusing words, such as "aunt" versus "mom", that do not sound alike in the least.

What exactly caused the problem? Hard to tell. Perhaps even more tantalizing: who is the anonymous reader quoted on slashdot? Here's a potential clue. The reader likens the recognizer output to a notorious piece of dialogue from a clumsily translated Japanese video game.

So, what have we here? Let's just say that this meme was well known among researchers in machine learning and speech recognition at AT&T Labs, many of whom now work for Google. Further conspiracy theories should be submitted to JMLG.

July 29, 2006

ROOM WITH A VIEW

I spent the first part of the weekend in San Francisco, surely one of the most beautiful cities in the US. How did I manage the slight chill at night, having forgotten to pack a jacket when I left SoCal? By wearing the fleece pullover that I received, serendipitously, on the previous day as a souvenir from Google. I love it when that happens.

July 28, 2006

THE MOST INCLUSIVE, IN EVERY WAY IMAGINABLE

The Club Med experience at the Google faculty summit continues, where "delicious cuisine and top-shelf beverages are served all day." This morning's highlight was the technology round table in machine learning. How can academic research better prepare PhD students for the large-scale projects at Google, where data sets contain billions of examples and batch jobs are distributed over thousands of computers? Good question.

IN THE NEWS

Geoff Hinton and Ruslan Salakhutdinov have published a new article in Science on nonlinear dimensionality reduction using neural networks. I should have more to say after I fully digest the paper.

Do black holes really exist? It may not change the way you live, but evidence accumulates for an alternative theory of gravitational collapse.

Sadly, here is another sign that students in the United States have lost their edge in computer science.

July 27, 2006

GOOGLE

Is anyone live-blogging the Google faculty summit? This is my first (but hopefully not last) visit to the GooglePlex in Mountain View. Very impressive.

In the morning, Andrew Moore (formerly of CMU, now at Google Pittsburgh) spoke on clever representations for efficient querying of large contigency tables. From his talk, I also learned that asteroids kill five hundred people each year, in expectation. Who knew?

Many thanks to the UCSD students who took a break from their summer internships to track me down and host my lunch at Google.

Alarming facts from the afternoon panel on diversity and the future of computing:

Today's computer science majors have lower math SAT scores, on average, than today's English majors.
Interest in computer science is declining among high school students, and the situation is even worse than the statistics suggest.
All over the country, even in places such as Silicon Valley, high schools are eliminating computer science courses from their curricula.

In the session on university relations and Google research awards, Luis von Ahn described his ESP Game for manual labeling of images on the web. Brilliant!

July 26, 2006

NOCAL

Just arrived at the Sunnyvale hotel for the Google Faculty Summit. Within minutes of checking in, I ran into three other editors of JMLR. Perhaps it's time to start thinking about co-locating some other machine learning conferences around here. The events of the summit may also be worth considering for a special issue of JMLG.

Whenever and wherever I travel, I always forget to pack one or more items. As of three hours into this trip, the list already includes a cell phone charger, a swim suit, and a windbreaker.

July 22, 2006

LIFE'S A BEACH

Now that the house is more or less unpacked, we decided to relax and spend a day at the beach. It was crowded but pleasant. La Jolla Shores is basically a family beach, with gentle waves, nearby parking, and green areas for picnicking. Conversely, there are no tattoo parlors or body-piercing shops.

ODDS AND ENDS

The house is starting to look like a home. For example, here is the courtyard: before and after. Progress!

The joke starts like this: Dan Quayle, Charles Barkley, and John Mellencamp walk into a bar. (Based on a true story...)

George Orwell's rules of writing are making the rounds again in the blogosphere. Here they are:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive (voice) where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

It makes you wonder: could we program (or train) a computer to recognize bad writing? The NY Times publishes an article on brainy robots, but once again, the Onion has the real scoop.

July 21, 2006

LOCAL DEADLINES

You only have ten more days to submit your results to the UCSD Student Data Mining Competition. The submission deadline is July 31, 2006. Winners receive $500.

Lisa Wainer, Hanna Wallach, and Jenn Wortman are organizing a workshop for women in machine learning, to be held in San Diego in October 2006. Female students in all areas of machine learning are encouraged to submit a brief abstract describing either new or previously published research. The submission deadline is August 15, 2006.

July 19, 2006

EAST IS EAST

I am returning to La Jolla after a whirlwind visit to the East Coast: one day each at Penn, AAAI-06, and MIT.

First, congratulations to my student Fei Sha, who successfully defended his thesis proposal and is now headed out to Berkeley to complete the thesis in more temperate climes. Also, congratulations to John Blitzer, who passed his WPE-2 exam on dimensionality reduction in statistical NLP; we all eagerly await his thesis proposal on this subject.

We were joined in these celebrations by Sam Roweis, who served as an external examiner on Fei and John's committees, and who, on the previous day, managed to distract me from the horrors of sewage clogs by sharing his latest ideas in machine learning. On that swelteringly hot day, we decided to make the students sweat as much during their exams as we did during our run in Fairmount Park. Yet they still passed with flying colors!

In Cambridge, I caught up with a childhood friend who now directs her own theatre troupe. I knew her when she was just learning to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Here we have more evidence that Suzuki piano lessons provide the foundation for all successful paths of life.

At the AAAI-06 session on dimensionality reduction, Amir Globerson and I did our best to explain semidefinite programming to an unsuspecting audience.

I spent today at MIT and got lost several times in the newly built Stata Center. Those who have yet to visit, be warned: navigating the Infinite Corridor is child's play by comparison.

Two restaurant recommendations to pass along: Alma De Cuba in Philly, and Central Kitchen in Cambridge. I already want to go back for seconds.

July 15, 2006

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

The cable guy is coming today to hook up high speed Internet.

One of the cars doesn't start.

The laundry room floods whenever I flush the downstairs toilet.

July 13, 2006

WHAT NEXT

I took a break from unpacking to prepare a talk for AAAI-06 and to read some papers on statistical language processing. Then I took another break to run along the beach, where for the first time, I observed the curious spectacle of beach ping pong.
You have to respect the kind of creative thinker who lugs a ping pong table to the beach. It frees your mind to all sorts of possibilities: beach foosball, beach billiards, even beach piano. (More on that here.)

July 12, 2006

SLOWLY BUT SURELY

Someday I will finish unpacking. Not today, but someday. Meanwhile, the boxes pile up in the courtyard. The boxes that aren't collapsed are filled with crumpled packing paper, or in some cases, they contain other boxes that are filled with crumpled packing paper. Perhaps as I continue, the recursion will grow even deeper. It's like a giant cardboard Matryoshka doll.

July 9, 2006

SOCIAL SCIENCE

What accounts more strongly for corruption: the absence of legal enforcement, or the influence of cultural norms? A clever study disentangles these two factors by analyzing how parking tickets are distributed among foreign diplomats at the United Nations.

July 8, 2006

COUNTING BLESSINGS

The FBI disrupted a terrorist plot to flood lower Manhattan.
North Korea's test missile fizzled out, long before reaching Hawaii.
Our furniture arrived from NJ.

July 7, 2006

SURVEY SAYS

How do you suppose it would feel, on your sixtieth birthday no less, to find out that a consensus of experts regarded your life's work as something of a sham?
Ouch.
Well, at least, you could look forward to being cheered up by all your wonderful birthday presents, right?
More ouch.

FINAL CLUES

More passages from this month's mystery novel:

I am not greatly attracted to books whose authors merely portray the hopelessness of our existence, despairing of man, of our conditions, despairing over poverty and riches, over the finiteness of life and the transience of feelings. A writer who doesn't know anything else had better keep silent.
My wife wanted to know whether street-sweeping wasn't depressing me too much. It certainly would depress me if I had to do it for the rest of my life.

July 6, 2006

THE STRAND

Today I went for my first run along "The Strand", a two-mile stretch of continuous beach that starts just south of La Jolla. I still have several more beaches to explore before deciding on a favorite. Of course, now that I have received a campus parking permit at UCSD, it may be more difficult to rationalize these weekday afternoon excursions. So many beaches, so little time.