NIPS - Day 2

Today was the first full day of NIPS, consisting of many spotlight and oral sessions. This has been my first experience of spotlight sessions, and I've been really impressed at how many new techniques I'm introduced to and how many thoughts about my own work it triggers. I have to say I much prefer it to the topic sessions I experienced at IJCAI.

I also learnt today that there's three identical (I think) Machine Learning Summer Schools (MLSS) held in different parts of the world. I attended the European Agent Systems Summer School (EASSS) 2011, and although it was really helpful in understanding other research in my group, it wasn't too relevant to my PhD. I think I'll look into MLSS to see whether it will be beneficial for me to attend it in 2012.

After attending the poster session I've also learnt the following:

• A0 is the best poster size (at least at NIPS). A1 posters are too small by comparison, while bigger posters require kneeling to read the bottom.
• People (or at least just myself) are most likely to view your poster if both of the following are true:
• a) something in your title interests them and
• b) your abstract confirms this. This might seem obvious, but it's interesting when you consider this along with acceptance likelihood and post publishing usefulness when writing your title and abstract.

Apart from this general conference waffle, I also came across the following interesting posters:

• Message parsing for approximate MAP inference with latent variables
• Comparative analysis of Viterbi training and maximum likelihood estimation for HMMs