This last week a nine-week online course entitled “Learning From Data”started, taught by by Caltech Professor Yaser Abu-Mostafa. As they promoted… “A real Caltech course, not a watered-down version, broadcast live from the lecture hall at Caltech.” The course objective is “machine learning that covers the basic theory, algorithms, and applications, that enables computational systems to adaptively improve their performance with experience accumulated from the observed data.” A book by the same title...
read moreI was poking around in Nathan Yau’s FlowingData blogs and found a historical gem. On January 1, 2008, Nathan wrote a blog on John Tukey, the pioneer in exploratory statistics. I did not realize that Tukey was also a pioneer in the early use of computers for data visualization! In 1972 using “32 buttons and a lightpen” on “an Information Display’s IDIIOM refresh CRT driven by a Varian 620/i minicomputer linked to an IBM 360/91″, Tukey developed the PRIM-9 program to do multivariate analysis. It handled up to...
read moreIn the overview blog of the VAST Challenge, we described the background and focus of the challenge, along with available data. In this blog, let’s survey the geography of this weird planet called BankWorld. It is the same size of Earth, but consist of a single large land mass, about the size of Europe and Asia, but situated over North American, the north part of South American and the Pacific Ocean out to the Hawaii Islands. The best way to visual this geography is Google Earth, especially since the challenge designers gave a set of KML...
read moreThe Visual Analytics Community released their VAST Challenge 2012. [By the way, VAST stands for "Visual Analytics Science and Technology".] This challenge has a ten-year lineage initiated by the Human Computer Interface Lab at the University of Maryland and archived at the Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository. The challenge will conclude on July 9 and become a session at IEEE VisWeek, which this year is in Seattle on October 14-19. What is the challenge? The challenge deals with “Big Data” although the total amount of data is less...
read moreFrom personal experience, I knew that innovative ideas within my discipline often come from research in quite dissimilar disciplines. Michelle Borkin of Harvard University hit that nail squarely, driving it through the 2×4 with this TED talk. She relates medical imaging from MRI scans to astronomy data of distant nebulae. And, then she proceeds from there. Her parting comments is “You really never know where your next great idea is going to come from.” Note the many ways that 3D data is gradually emerging from research in many...
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