## Posts

### Numerical Errors, Perturbation Analysis and Machine Learning

Everyone hates numerical errors. We love to think that computers are machines with infinite precision. When I was a student, I really hated error analysis. It sounded like a subject that is set out to study an annoying side-effect of our imperfect computers, a boring detail that is miles away from anything that anyone would ever consider a nice part of mathematics. I will not try to convince you today that the opposite is true. However, even in error analysis there are some nice ideas and lessons to be learned. This post asks the question whether, if you are doing machine learning, you should care about numerical errors.

This issue should be well understood. However, I don't think that it is as well appreciated as it should be, or that it received the attention it should. In fact, I doubt that the issue is discussed in any of the recent machine learning textbooks beyond the usual caveat "beware the numerical errors" (scary!).

In this blog, I will illustrate the question …
Recent posts

### Student Response Systems -- A Year Later

I have promised to come back with my experience after the Fall semester of 2013. Though the end of that semester passed a long ago, here are some thoughts:

Overall my experience of socrative was very positive. During the first week I polled the class to see how large a percentage of the class has some kind of wifi enabled device that they could use. 90 out of the 95 students had some kind of device that they were willing to bring to the class, so I decided to give socrative a try.

Socrative helped me tremendously to stay on the top of what everyone in the class knows. The way I used socrative was as follows: After every block of new material (usually 5-10 slides), I inserted a few questions to verify whether the students "got" the new material. This was all the "extra work" that I had to put in designing the class material due to socrative. And I would have done something similar without socrative anyways, so in fact I did not feel much of a difference here. Once the…

There are plenty Student Response Systems (SRSs) out there. Which one to choose? This brief document summarizes what I have found on the web before the Fall of 2012. Radio communication-based systemsThe systems differ in a few characteristics. The first is what type of devices the students can use. Classical, iClicker like systems require the student buy a device which communicates with a receiver that the teacher should possess. Since our school uses iClickers, let me focus on them. The overall cost of first generation iClickers is $10/device, assuming the student sells back the device to the bookstore (which they can). This is not a major cost but who likes to pay when you don’t have to? The first limitation of iClicker-like systems is that they are bound to the smart classrooms and the computers there. Thus, if you are like me and use your own computer for projection, you will need to switch between screens to show the results of a poll. This makes the use of iClicker q… ### Approximating inverse covariance matrices Phew, the last time I have posted an entry to my blog was a loong time ago.. Not that there was nothing interesting to blog about, just I always delayed things. (Btw, google changed the template which eliminated the rendering of the latex formulae, not happy.. Luckily, I could change back the template..) Now, as the actual contents: I have just read the PAMI paper "Accuracy of Pseudo-Inverse Covariance Learning-A Random Matrix Theory Analysis" by D Hoyle (IEEE T. PAMI, 2011 vol. 33 (7) pp. 1470--1481). The paper is about pseudo-inverse covariance matrices and their analysis based on random matrix theory analysis and I can say I enjoyed this paper quite a lot. In short, the author's point is this: Let \$d,n>0\$be integers. Let$\hat{C}$be the sample covariance matrix of some iid data$X_1,\ldots,X_n\in \mathbb{R}^d$based on$n$datapoints and let$C$be the population covariance matrix (i.e.,$\hat{C}=\mathbb{E}[X_1 X_1^\top]$). Assume that$d,n\rightarrow \infty$… ### Brains, Minds and Machines Former UofA student, Alborz, shared a link to a video recording of a recent MIT150 symposium on Brains, Minds and Machines on facebook. I watched the video yesterday (guess what, I need to mark 40 something finals, hehe:)). I wrote a comment back to Alborz on facebook and then I thought, why not make this a blog post? So, here it goes, edited, expanded. Warning: Spoilers ahead and the summary will be biased. Anyhow.. The title of the panel was: "The Golden Age — A Look at the Original Roots of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience " and the panelist were Emilio Bizzi, Sydney Brenner, Noam Chomsky, Marvin Minsky, Barbara H. Partee and Patrick H. Winston. The panel was moderated by Steven Pinker who started with a 20-30 minute introduction. Once done with this each of the panelist delivered a little speech and at the end there were like two questions asked by Pinker. My heroes in the panel were Minsky and Winston. They rocked! Minsky almost fell asleep duri… ### Useful latex/svn tools (merge, clean, svn, diff) This blog is about some tools that I have developed (and yet another one that I have downloaded) which help me to streamline my latex work cycle. I make the tools available, hoping that other people will find them useful. However, they are admittedly limited (more about this) and as usual for free stuff they come with zero guarantee. Use them at your own risk. The first little tool is for creating a cleaned up file before submitting it to a publisher who asks for source files. I call it ltxclean.pl, it is developed in Perl. It can be downloaded from here. The functionality is (1) to remove latex comments (2) to remove \todo{} commands (3) to merge files included from a main file into the main file (4) to merge the bbl file into the same main file If you make the tool executable (chmod a+x ltxclean.pl), you can use it like this:$ ltxclean.pl main.tex > cleaned.tex

How does this work?

The tool reads in the source tex file, processes it line by line and produces some output to the standard ou…

### I can run Matlab on my Mac again!

After much struggling today I managed to make Matlab run again my Mac.
The major problem was that Matlab complained about that I have the wrong version of X11 installed on my system and it won't start. As I have finished teaching today for the semester, I thought that I am going to celebrate this by resolving this issue which I was struggling with for a year or so by now. On the internet you will see a lot of advice on what to do, and as they say, the truth is indeed out there, however, it is not so easy to find. In a nutshell what seems to happen is this:

Why Matlab does not start when other applications do start (say, Gimp, Gnuplot using X11, etc.).
Matlab seems to make the assumption that the X11 libraries are located at /usr/X11/lib and it sticks to this assumption no matter how your system is configured. I use XQuartz and macports' X11 and they put stuff elsewhere. I had some legacy code sitting in /usr/X11/, which I did not use. It was a remainder of some version of X11 th…