Open Thoughts

July 2008 archive

Final Call for Comments: MLOSS NIPS*08 Workshop

July 11, 2008

This is a final call for comments regarding our NIPS'08 MLOSS Workshop proposal, which we will be sending to the NIPS workshop organizers next thursday (July 17).

As mentioned before we managed to secure a number of high profile invited speakers, like the author of octave - John W. Eaton and the author of matplotlib John D. Hunter.

Apart from this we decided to have a discussion in the morning and in the afternoon, to discuss

What is a good mloss project?

  • Review criteria for JMLR mloss
  • Interoperable software
  • Test suites

Reproducible research

  • data exchange standards
  • shall datasets be open too? How to provide access to data sets.
  • Reproducible research, the next level after UCI datasets

Finally we invite others of mloss software to present their projects. This time submission will be done in a radically new way, i.e. to submit:

  • Tag your mloss.org project with the tag nips2008
  • Ensure that you have a good description (limited to 500 words)
  • Any bells and whistles can be put on your own project page, and of course provide this link on mloss.org

We very much invite feedback and are looking for active co-organizers too!

New JMLR-MLOSS publication and progress updates for July 2008

July 7, 2008

Almost two months have passed since the last progress report. Well the biggest news is the recent pulling of R machine learning packages. This lead to 35 additional projects on mloss.org and we are now at 120 projects and 224 registered users at mloss.org.

We also made a lot of progress regarding the upcoming NIPS'08 MLOSS Workshop proposal and managed to secure a number of high profile invited speakers, like the author of octave - John W. Eaton and the author of matplotlib John D. Hunter, as well as the program committee. In case you have suggestions - let us know! We will otherwise submit the proposal in the next weeks. Although we planned to have mloss.org t-shirts at ICML'08 it remained unclear whether we are being reserved a table to distribute them. We therefore decided to postpone t-shirts for NIPS'08 again. After all it makes a lot of sense to distribute them there in case we get the workshop accepted :-).

Finally, the SHARK C++ Machine Learning Library got accepted in JMLR. We again highlight the software interlinking it with the jmlr publication. Note that SHARK in contrast to LWPR is the first full fledged toolbox - implementing more than just a single algorithm - that got accepted.