NIPS - Day 1

After a long day of travelling yesterday, I arrived in Granada for NIPS2011. NIPS stands for Neural Information Processing Systems, and is widely regarded as the top machine learning conference. I'm here to present my paper, although that's not until the sustainability workshop on Saturday.

Today I attended 3 tutorials:

• Linear Programming Relaxations for Graphical Models
• Modern Bayesian Nonparametrics
• Graphical Models for the Internet

I really enjoyed each one, as the quality of presentation resulted in some really interesting and accessible tutorials.

I also went for lunch with a bunch of PhD students from the machine learning labs at Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, which was great to meet them and get a feel for what problems they're studying. We ate some interesting Paella, but I don't think it was quite good enough to warrant a return trip tomorrow.

After the welcome talk, there was a tapas reception and the first poster session. I spoke to many, many people who were using HMMs or similar graphical models in their work, which might even lead to some extensions to the paper I'm currently writing...