Day 2 started with Trever Hastie’s talk on regularization paths and coordinate descent. It was great to see Dr. Hastie passionately speaking about the coordinate descent, logistic regression and fitting. The keynote’s topic was “Regularization Paths and Coordinate Descent” and following is a brief abstract from the talk.
"In a statistical world faced with an explosion of data, regularization has become an important ingredient. In many problems, we have many more variables than observations, and the lasso penalty and its hybrids have become increasingly useful. This talk presents some effective algorithms based on coordinate descent for fitting large scale regularization paths for a variety of problems. Joint work with Rob Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman"
After the keynote talk, there were combined and research sessions. I attended one with social Networks which comprised of the following presentations.
25-minute presentations
- The Structure of Information Pathways in a Social Communication Network. G. Kossinets, J. Kleinberg, D. Watts.
- Influence and Correlation in Social Networks. A. Anagnostopoulos, R. Kumar, M. Mahdian.
- Weighted Graphs and Disconnected Components. M. McGlohon, L. Akoglu, C. Faloutsos.
15-minute presentations
- Microscopic Evolution of Social Networks. J. Leskovec, L. Backstrom, R. Kumar, A. Tomkins.
- Mobile Call Graphs: Beyond Power-Law and Lognormal Distributions. M. Seshadri, S. Machiraju, A. Sridharan, J. Bolot, C. Faloutsos, J. Leskovec.
- Feedback Effects between Similarity and Social Influence in Online Communities. D. Crandall, D. Cosley, D. Huttenlocher, J. Kleinberg, S. Suri.
During lunch which was sponsored by Microsoft adCenter labs, they talked about challenges in advertising and applying it to get the best out of revenue share and context base hits. They also announced adCenter labs challenge which I have yet to find any information about online.
Later in the afternoon, Microsoft Research’s Thore Graepel talked about Large Scale Data Analysis and Modeling in Online Services and Advertising. It was a very interesting and pragmatic presentation about the real world problems in online search and advertising. Even though the first part of presentation was online ranking and matchmaking heavy, the later discussion on advertising made up for it.
Then there were 25-minute presentations
- ArnetMiner: Extraction and Mining of Academic Social Networks. J. Tang, J. Zhang, L. Yao, J. Li, L. Zhang, Z. Su.
- Identifying Authoritative Actors in Question-Answering Forums - The Case of Yahoo! Answers. M. Bouguessa, B. Dumoulin, S. Wang. (the paper was on Belinko’s website but not there anymore, interesting?)
And on a separate track,
15-minute presentations
- Automated Cyclone Discovery and Tracking using Knowledge Sharing in Multiple Heterogeneous Satellite Data. S.-S. Ho, A. Talukder.
- Spotting Out Emerging Artists Using Geo-Aware Analysis of P2P Query Strings. N. Koenigstein, Y. Shavitt, T. Tankel.
- Land Cover Change Detection: A Case Study. S. Boriah, V. Kumar, M. Steinbach, C. Potter, S. Klooster.
Later after the automated cyclone discovery session, I got a chance to meet Dr. Talukder of Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA to talk about a mutual acquaintance, Dr. Homayoun Seraji
This concluded day 2 of the conference.
