Lecture at IDE Autumn School 2018

I had the great pleasure to give two lectures at the IDE Autumn School 2018 „Digitale Edition – Vertiefung und Nutzung“. The autumn school joins scholars from all areas of the Digital Humanities and aims at broadening their toolsets (see the remarkable syllabus of this year's school).

My task was to talk about network analysis, including graph-theoretic centrality measures and graph visualization in Python. I chose Shakespeare's Hamlet as a toy example, making use of the CSV-files from Roger W. Haworth. The slightly edited CSV-file and the Jupyter Notebooks (handout and solution) are available for download. And so are, of course, the slides (just click on the image below).

A Visit from Marek Smieja

This week I had a nice visit from Marek Smieja, Assitant Professor at the Group of Machine Learning Research at Jagiellonian University in Krakov.

Marek presenting some of his most recent results - you can find the paper on arXiv (and in the upcoming proceedings of this year's edition of NIPS!)

I first met Marek in 2012 on the terrace of Lausanne Palace Hotel - and if that doesn't make a good start for a story then I don't know what does. Drinks in our hands, we were discussing the exciting talks we have heard during the first few days of the IEEE Information Theory Workshop held at EPF Lausanne. Back then Marek and I were working both on information dimension, but we already had the idea that we will soon move towards machine learning.

Fast forward to 2015, when Marek invited me to visit Poland to attend the first edition of Theoretical Foundations of Machine Learning. A year or so later, Marek and I started working on a method for semi-supervised clustering, mixing ideas from model-based clustering and the information bottleneck principle. We have stayed in contact ever since, but this week was the first time we met again since raising glasses on this terrace in 2012. (Marek could not attend the conference in 2015.) Needless to say, I was really happy when he announced that he will be able to visit me at the Know-Center.

Marek in front of the Uhrturm, one of Graz' main attractions.

During two intensive days in Know-Centers "Small Meeting Room" we brought each other up to date regarding our current research projects, found a topic on which we may collaborate in the near future, and defined a student project with the aim to combine Markov aggregation and semi-supervised clustering. I'm looking forward to continuing this year-long academic relationship with Marek!

PS: If you have some hot results on the theory of machine learning ready, you may want to submit it to TFML 2019. Deadline is November 30th.

Talk at "International Zurich Seminar on Information and Communication"

Just coming back from Zurich, where I attended the Int. Zurich Seminar. Being there for the fourth time in a row, it felt like a class reunion :). I was speaking about a joint work with Tobi Koch on the information dimension of multivariate Gaussian processes (see below for the slides). The work is on arXiv here and here, and Tobi and I discussed a roadmap for more results to come - stay tuned!

By the way, the IZS publishes its submissions on an ETH server that is free to access for everyone and that does not require to transfer copyrights from the authors to the publisher. This is not only open access at its best, but also gives you a chance to look at the amazing papers presented in Zurich.

Talk at "Advanced Topics in Discrete Mathematics"

I was recently giving a talk in the "Advanced Topics in Discrete Mathematics" series organized by the doctoral program on discrete mathematics. In case you missed it, be glad that you did: I went overtime quite a bit. You can obtain the slide by clicking on the image below.