1. The 25th Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference once again brought together a diverse population of neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, statistical learning theorists, and applied machine learning researchers in Granada, Spain, December 12-17. This cross-disciplinary program, chaired by U.C. Berkeley's Peter Bartlett and Google Research Director Fernando Pereira, featured three papers by Googlers (see detailed list below).

    One of my favorite papers at this year's conference was Generalization Bounds and Consistency for Latent Structural Probit and Ramp Loss by University of Chicago’s David McAllester and Joseph Keshet, which analyzed the statistical consistency of losses for structured prediction problems (like speech recognition, machine translation, and visual scene parsing). This was one of those nice theoretical papers which proved good properties about effective algorithms that until now were only understood as heuristics.

    After the conference, we headed to Spain's Sierra Nevada for the NIPS workshops. The workshops at NIPS provide researchers a chance to focus on more specific communities, and Googlers helped to organize five workshops this year on various topics, from learning semantics to big learning. Several Googlers had accepted papers and talks at other workshops as well, such as Samy Bengio and Gal Chechik, who spoke at the workshop on Beyond Mahalanobis: Supervised Large-Scale Learning of Similarity.

    I spent most of the second day at my own workshop on Domain Adaptation, which I co-organized with Googlers Corinna Cortes and Afshin Rostami. Our workshop brought together theoretical and practical domain adaptation, and the invited speakers included Shai Ben-David and Mehryar Mohri from the theory side and Dan Roth from the applications side. Since my workshop was next door to Googlers Doug Eck and Ryan Rifkin's workshop on Machine Learning and Music, I got to hear some interesting musical demonstrations from that workshop, as well. In addition to the Googler-run workshops, I really enjoyed the workshop on Language and Vision, which featured invited talks by Google postdoctoral fellow Percy Liang on the pragmatics of visual scene description and Josh Tenenbaum on physical models as a cognitive plausible mechanism for bridging language and vision.

    As the workshop weekend drew to a close, some NIPS attendees scrambled to get home for the holidays in light of an airline strike. We hope the skies look clear for next year when NIPS lands in Google’s neck of the woods, Lake Tahoe!

    John Blitzer, Research Scientist



    Google at NIPS 2011

    Googlers co-authored the following papers:

    Additionally, Googlers helped to organize the following five workshops this year on various topics, from learning semantics to big learning:
    Finally, several Googlers had papers and talks at other workshops, such as:


    Note: Googlers in blue.

    NIPS 2011 conference goers take a break from a busy program to say hi to Googlers and grab wintery treats.

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