3 Days in Vancouver
The Neural Information Processing Systems conference has just finished. There were a lot of interesting talks and posters (we spare you the entire list of talks and posters, they can be found here). The most hands-on research could be seen in the demonstration track; a number of interesting demos included:
Also, there was a short presentation on the NetFlix prize. This is a prize sponsored by NetFlix Inc. given to the team that develops the strongest movie recommendation system. A very interesting contest!
We were very happy to have an opportunity to talk about TrueSkill during a 20 minute presentation on Tuesday. The talk went well and there were a number of questions (a lot of questions were actually ask about our current work of applying TrueSkill to 200 years of professional Chess outcome data). However, talking at such a big venue is quite a nerve wrecking experience (there are about 700 of the best researchers in AI and machine learning in the audience) and you can see a very tense Ralf right before the talk.
Ralf Herbrich and Thore Graepel
