Ganesh Swami

The official TED blog makes a list of 100 websites that you should know and use. I know what I’ll be doing when I have time to spare.

The Web is constantly turning out new and extraordinary services many of us are unfamiliar with. During TED University at this spring’s TED2007 in Monterey, Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, offered an ultra-fast-moving ride through sites in many different areas, from art, design and illustration, to daily news, blogs and curiosity. Now, by popular demand, here’s his list of 100 websites you should know and use.

Here’s the deal:

• Google lists the post on my favorite wordpress plugins as the second hit for my name.

• Spammers target this highly visible post for all the spam (about 90% on just this post.) Fortunately, akismet blocks almost all of them.

• I have a plugin installed that organizes the dates in my sitemap by the most recent updates. The amount of spam causes the last modified date on the post to be updated regularly.

• Google uses this information to repeatedly crawl the aforementioned post, thinking it’s a highly active page.

• Positive feedback ensues.

As I had previously written, I’m doing a fair bit of machine learning these days for automated disease classification. I found a whitepaper by Tom Mitchell that gives a broad overview of the field.

How can we build computer systems that automatically improve with experience, and what are the fundamental laws that govern all learning processes?

Application Successes: Speech recognition, Computer vision, Bio-surveillance, Robot control and Accelerating empirical sciences.

Current research questions:

• Using unlabeled data for supervised learning
• Transfer knowledge from learning one task to another
• Relationship between different learning algorithms
• Strategy for learners that collect their own data
• Data privacy in data mining

The top conferences and journals in Machine Learning as stated in the paper:

• International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
• Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS).
• Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT).
• Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). Freely available.
• Machine Learning.