This is in 2 days now and may be of significant interest given the broad cross-section of research taking place.

Ameet Talwalker mentions the automl-decathlon cs.cmu.edu/~automl-decath… which seems fun. A deadline of Nov. 10 with a $15K prize.

A rational Russia would not have invaded. Failing that, it would have sued for peace after the retreat from Kyiv.

Now, the mismanagement of this war appears a dire threat to the integrity of Russia itself. Will Russia undergo an internal breakup?

The Russian rout in Ukraine this week may reverberate for decades.

I'm excited about a (remote) talk at University of Maryland MARL (sites.google.com/view/universit… ) Sept 8 @3pm EST about Latent State Learning.

There are exciting developments here---see: controllable-latent-state.github.io and please register/join if interested.

Personalized models improve privacy-accuracy tradeoffs in federated learning. Come see our poster tonight at #ICML ! w/ Chen-Yu Wei, Miro Dudik John Langford Steven Wu

paper: arxiv.org/abs/2202.05318
page: icml.cc/virtual/2022/s…
poster #700

Griffin just released Vowpal Wabbit 9.2 (vowpalwabbit.org/blog/vowpalwab… ) which we are planning to discuss at ICML (icml.cc/ExpoConference… ) Sunday at noon along with the new Personalizer service aka.ms/personalizer capabilities.

Please drop by if interested :-)

Microsoft made the Responsible AI standard blogs.microsoft.com/wp-content/upl… public.

That's great---as machine learning becomes used pervasively, working out how we can/should make it work with people is very helpful.

For the first time in a couple years, I registered to attend a conference (ICML) in person. Looking forward to it.

I understand early registration ends tomorrow in case you want to as well.

Of interest to me and perhaps you as well...

A thoughtful article on CAPTCHAs: return.life/2022/05/11/are… that I did an interview for.

We are installing a ground source heat pump en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_so… via Dandelion dandelionenergy.com to zero out natural gas usage at our house.

Europeans can use our gas instead of supporting the Russian invasion and our kids suffer less global warming.

I'm looking forward to this in a couple hours. In my experience, reviewing is one of the persistent problems where there are no silver bullets, but there are good ideas which genuinely help.

The ability to learn to ignore the irrelevant is groundbreaking, so I expect this to be very useful in the long term. The presentation at iclr.cc is in a few hours.

VW has 'daemon mode', which allows you to just dispatch examples amongst preforked processes listening on a port with a shared model.

Also, Azure Personalizer (aka.ms/personalizer ) provides 9s of support, online joining, mirroring, and counterfactual evaluation using VW.

We have 3 new applied scientist positions in RL at aka.ms/rl_hiring , one of which is in my group. Please apply to help create an interactive learning future :-)

Unfortunately, I don't see a quick end.

Ukrainians have generations of experience with leaders decimating them. People from Donbass used as cannon fodder in this war kyivindependent.com/national/russi… is representative of the stakes and a fate to avoid in Putin's next war.

If you want to follow the war in Ukraine more closely, I've found Michael McFaul Alexander S. Vindman Mark Hertling Kamil Galeev understandingwar.org militaryland.net interesting and sometimes leading or driving the headlines.

We have continued to donate.

The RL Open Source Fest microsoft.com/en-us/research… is accepting applications again (due April 4).

If you're open source inclined, this could be a fun program.