NIPS 2017 Notes [pdf]

(cs.brown.edu)

240 points | by stablemap 2324 days ago

10 comments

  • pdxdabel 2324 days ago
    Hi all! David (the author) here -- first, thanks for the kind words and thanks to @stablemap for sharing! I'm glad folks have found them useful.

    I'm planning on putting these together to future conferences I attend, too (I'm currently a 3rd year Ph.D student so I should be attending a few in the coming years).

    • mi_lk 2324 days ago
      Hi David, very impressive of your notes, especially in this knowledge-intense machine learning conference, the way you organize diverse topics and have short summaries about them seems like a very useful skill to have. Do you have any methods/tips that you can share about your note-taking skills?
      • pdxdabel 2324 days ago
        Investing in a particular set of tools has been really critical for me -- once I found that I liked the flexibility and power of latex, I put effort into simplifying the process of using it.

        So, for instance, I made some macros for commands that I use frequently, and a put together a latex template that includes the packages and basic structure of documents I write. Otherwise, just practice! I forced myself to write notes during class in latex when I took information theory earlier in grad school and that helped a lot.

        Hope this helps. If I think of anything else I'll be sure to come back and post!

    • lustig 2323 days ago
      Hi David! Thanks for a great summary! I will keep an eye on your blog for notes from upcoming conferences.
  • eli_gottlieb 2323 days ago
    It's interesting that when asked about why we use hierarchical methods in RL, ML, and cogsci, people haven't talked about the circuit complexity and information-theoretic reasons for using hierarchies. IIRC, a "deeper" circuit can represent a given function with exponentially fewer units/gates than a "shallower" circuit, and hierarchical methods also narrow down only the predictive information in the (supervised) dataset, according to information-bottleneck methods.
  • hackandtrip 2324 days ago
    Wonderful content, appreciate those notes over usual videos that come out, really more usable. Is there a place where wonderful people usually share notes on conference like those?
  • emmelaich 2324 days ago
    NIPS stands for "Neural Information Processing Systems"

    (took me a while but I found it!)

  • Dangeranger 2324 days ago
    It makes me laugh thinking that these notes were probably written in LaTex and then exported.

    The formatting for this overview is pretty great though. PDF with a TOC makes a very nice means of navigation.

  • daferna 2324 days ago
    Somebody get this guy a PhD!
  • fredmonroe 2324 days ago
    thanks for doing these, really appreciated
  • formalsystem 2324 days ago
    Wow can't appreciate this enough. You put this together really quickly!
  • tuxguy 2324 days ago
    these are awesome !!! thanks a bunch David, @stablemap !
  • DyslexicAtheist 2323 days ago
    The event has also been compared to a dumpster fire[0] due to "sexualized events & speeches", is this guy exaggerating or is it safe to go there for women? Pretty off-putting tbh

    [0] https://twitter.com/haldaume3/status/939910697911066624

    • yamaneko 2323 days ago
      Smitha Milli gave a bit more of context about what happened. Link to her thread:

      - https://twitter.com/SmithaMilli/status/940012716797739008

      • briga 2323 days ago
        This seems like a pretty harmless joke to me. I have difficulty imagining why anyone would be offended by this, unless there's more to the story
        • peoplewindow 2323 days ago
          Well, according to the notes there was an entire talk about bias where the example of a Turkish sentence that didn't contain gendered pronouns "X is a nurse, X is a doctor" gets translated to "She is a nurse, he is a doctor" by Google Translate. And apparently that's a problem that needs fixing rather than a reasonable translation, although we all know that Google Translate is trained on the work of human translators, where it presumably learned this (demographically correct) bias from. So I guess they need fixing too.

          Seems like NIPS might have a systematic issue with hyper-sensitivity to perceived slights. But it's the intersection of academia and SV companies so is it really a surprise?

      • DyslexicAtheist 2323 days ago
        thanks, rather unspectacular then.
    • lemondrops 2323 days ago
      Also, this? https://twitter.com/SamiraEKahou/status/940085885101412352

      I don't get why anyone but the wife herself should be offended by this.