Category: Uncategorized

• Machine learning in online dating

  Love and happiness It can make you do right, It can make you do wrong It can make you come home early It can make you stay out all night long I went to a LA machine learning meetup last week featuring Jon Morra from eHarmony, where he highlighted some of the uses of machine learning in their online dating platform.…

  January 16, 2015

• The best words in Scrabble

  

  Well, I’m back in the old country for the holidays, and boy do I feel like the smartest pickle in the jar for moving to California when it’s below zero here in Montreal (either scale). There is one thing I miss about the old country: French Scrabble. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time memorizing…

  January 2, 2015

• Scalable models workshop recap

  Originally posted on Scalable models for high-dimensional neural data: [ This blog post is collaboratively written by Evan and Memming ] The Scalable Models workshop was a remarkable success! It attracted a huge crowd from the wee morning hours till the 7:30 pm close of the day. We attracted so much attention that we had…

  March 26, 2014

• Adagrad – eliminating learning rates in stochastic gradient descent

  Earlier, I discussed how I had no luck using second-order optimization methods on a convolutional neural net fitting problem, and some of the reasons why stochastic gradient descent works well on this class of problems. Stochastic gradient descent is not a plug-and-play optimization algorithm; it requires messing around with the step size hyperparameter, forcing you…

  January 23, 2014

• Temporal impulse response functions of LFPs

  I’m about to submit a paper on LFP receptive fields in V4 and in the interest of flow had to scrap a couple of figures. We measured temporal impulse response functions of LFPs using a standard sparse flashed bar paradigm. We used two Utah arrays to measure the signals (96 electrodes arranged in a 10×10…

  November 20, 2012

• Best email ever

  I got an email yesterday from a reader of this blog that I can’t help but share. This guy has figured out the secret to life, the universe, and everything. Spoiler alert: Genetically engineered demons are out to eat our adrenal glands. Hello! My name is [J—]. I live here in [city] and do landscaping,…

  September 11, 2012