Keynotes at ACML 2013

Posted by Cheng Soon Ong on November 14, 2013

We were very lucky this year to have an amazing set of keynote speakers at ACML 2013 who have made key contributions to getting machine learning into the real world. Here are some links to the open source software projects that they mentioned during their talks. The videos of the talks should be available at some point on the ACML website

We started off with Geoff Holmes, who spoke at MLOSS 06. He told us about how WEKA has been used in industry (satisfying Kiri Wagstaff's Challenge #2), and the new project for streaming data MOA. Later in the day, Chih-Jen Lin told us how important it was to understand both machine learning and optimisation, such that you can exploit the special structure for fast training of SVMs. This is how he obtained amazing speedups in LIBLINEAR. On the second day, Ralf Herbrich (who also gave a tutorial) gave us a behind the scenes tour of TrueSkill, the player matching algorithm used on XBox Live. Source code in F# is available here and the version generalised to track skill over time is available here.

Thanks to Geoff, Chih-Jen and Ralf for sharing their enthusiasm!