NIPS - Day 5

I woke up on the first day of workshops to a beautiful sunrise in Sierra Nevada. I'm not sure what it is about mountain weather that causes the sky to turn so pink, but I'm definitely not complaining.

The NIPS organisers seem to have set it in stone that the each workshop will have a 5 hour break in the middle of the day for sleeping/skiing. As much as the 7.30am workshop starts hurt, I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to ski. I'm not sure that the schedule helped to sync the body clock with Spanish eating times, but I think a lot of people are jet lagged enough for that not to matter.

I attended the workshop on Decision Making with Multiple Imperfect Decision Makers. The two talks I enjoyed the most were:

• David Leslie - Random Belief Learning
• Stephen Roberts - Bayesian Combination of Multiple, Imperfect Classifiers

I also spoke to Edwin during the coffee breaks about how crowdsourcing is used to aggregate multiple data sources with of different quality, reliability etc. This prompted the thought that maybe something similar could be used in NIALM to collect large sets of appliance signatures. In my opinion, this would make a far more powerful data set for building generalisable appliance models than it would be for evaluating the performance of NIALM approaches.