Google at NIPS 2010

January 27, 2011

Posted by Slav Petrov, Doug Aberdeen, and Lisa McCracken, Google Research



The machine learning community met in Vancouver in December for the 24th Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS). As always, the single-track program of the main conference featured a number of outstanding talks, followed by interesting late night poster sessions. A record number of workshops covered a wide variety of topics, while allocating sufficient time for skiing in Whistler - after all, many of the most interesting research conversations happen while riding the lift in-between ski runs. This year’s conference also featured a symposium dedicated to Sam Roweis, providing a retrospective on Sam’s life and work. Sam, a fellow Googler and professor at NYU, was at the heart of the NIPS community and is terribly missed.

As always, Google was involved in various ways with NIPS. Here at Google, we take a data-driven approach when solving problems. Therefore, Machine Learning is in one way or another at the core of most of the things that we do. It is therefore unsurprising that many Googlers helped shape the program of the conference or were in the audience. This year, three Googlers served as area chairs and even more were reviewers. Googlers also co-authored the following papers:

Additionally, Googlers co-organized three well attended workshops:

Finally, Yoram Singer gave a great talk on Learning Structural Sparsity at the Sam Roweis symposium and Googlers presented the following talks during the workshops:

Overall, it was a very successful conference and it was good to be back in Vancouver one last time. This coming year NIPS 2011 will be in Granada, Spain. Hasta luego!