Jetlag did a number on me (going to sleep at West Coast Time, then waking up in time for 8am EST talks…). Feh. Talks were worth it, though.

Met a bunch of really interesting people. It was great to talk to other folks that are doing classification at Google (including taxonomic classification like I’m doing!). Learned a lot (note to self: read up more on gibbs sampling, latent dirichlet allocation, and the RCV1 corpus). Also got to hang out with Chih-Jen Lin a bit, had great discussions about academia, publications (quality versus quantity of publications in China/Taiwan), and how to reform the academic publication system to give better signals as to what is readworthy. Right now, reviewers and conference organizers are the gatekeepers, and that doesn’t scale well. When you think of how many smart people read academic publications, the only way that they can give feedback is to publish something themselves. That’s such a high cost to communicate, it leads to stagnation and monoculturality in the community (echo chamber!). I wish I could easily see, for the profs I respect, a “Papers I read last year that I found really influential” list. Aggregate these and you get great, quantitative metrics of a paper’s worth. Also, “best in conference” awards for papers are so short-sighted; we really don’t know what’s good for a couple years. It would be great to have a “best 2 years ago” retrospective award for conferences and journals. компютриCiteULike starts to address these issues, but it isn’t in wide use and it’s not perfect.

The city itself

• So nice to be somewhere that prioritizes pedestrians over cars. By contrast, Santa Monica issues tickets if you start to walk in a crosswalk when the “walk” sign turns into a blnking red hand. Sigh.
• I’m reminded of Taipei every time I visit NY. There’s a semi-tangible energy in the air of both, lots of people crammed into a small area, everything walkable, and alive, all hours of the day and night. I would love to live here, at least before I have kids. Probably not going to happen, but it would be fun.
• One night, instead of going out, spent a chill 3 hours out on Google’s 8th story balcony overlooking the cityline, admiring the view and talking to co-workers. Amazing.
• Ate some good food there, but I have three regrets: (1) didn’t order any morning street bagels, (2) didn’t get any late-night pizza, (3) likewise for late-night street-gyros. Sigh, will have to come back again.
• Also, damnit, this is twice I’ve been to the city and haven’t yet heard any good jazz!