I just got back from the first DALI meeting, held in La Palma. I was a co-organiser with Zoubin Ghahramani, Thomas Hoffman and Bernhard Schoelkopf. The original vision was mainly driven by Bernhard, and the meeting is an attempt to recapture the spirit of some of the early NIPS conferences and the Snowbird meeting: a smaller meeting with some focus...

Karl Popper is perhaps one of the most important thinkers from the 20th century. Not purely for his philosophy of science, but for giving a definitive answer to a common conundrum: “Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?”. He says that they were simply preceded by an ‘earlier type of egg’. I take this to mean that the answer is neither: they actually...

Sorry for the relative silence on the NIPS experiment. Corinna and I have both done some analysis on the data. Over the Christmas break I focussed an analysis on the ‘raw numbers’ which people have been discussing. In particular I wanted to qualify the certainties that people are placing on these numbers. There are a couple of different ways of doing...

Back in 2006 when the wider machine learning community was becoming aware of Gaussian processes (mainly through the publication of the Rasmussen and WIlliams book). Joaquin Quinonero Candela, Anton Schwaighofer and I organised the Gaussian Processes in Practice workshop at Bletchley Park. We planned a short proceedings for the workshop, but when I contacted...

My mum and son ensuring preparing the ground for non-robust seeds Was at the allotment the other day, and my son Frederick asked how the seeds we plant could ever survive when it took so much work and preparation to plant and support them. I said it was because they’ve been selected (by breeding) to produce high yield, and that tends to make them less...

The Guardian’s media network published a short article I wrote for them today. They commissioned an article of about 600 words, that appeared on the Guardian’s site, but the original version I wrote was around 1400. I agreed a week’s exclusivity with the Guardian, but now that’s up, the longer version is below (it’s about twice as long). On a recent...