
NIPS 2017 Notes [pdf] - stablemap
https://cs.brown.edu/~dabel/blog/posts/misc/nips_2017.pdf
======
pdxdabel
Hi all! David (the author) here -- first, thanks for the kind words and thanks
to @stablemap for sharing! I'm glad folks have found them useful.

I'm planning on putting these together to future conferences I attend, too
(I'm currently a 3rd year Ph.D student so I should be attending a few in the
coming years).

~~~
mi_lk
Hi David, very impressive of your notes, especially in this knowledge-intense
machine learning conference, the way you organize diverse topics and have
short summaries about them seems like a very useful skill to have. Do you have
any methods/tips that you can share about your note-taking skills?

~~~
pdxdabel
Investing in a particular set of tools has been really critical for me -- once
I found that I liked the flexibility and power of latex, I put effort into
simplifying the process of using it.

So, for instance, I made some macros for commands that I use frequently, and a
put together a latex template that includes the packages and basic structure
of documents I write. Otherwise, just practice! I forced myself to write notes
during class in latex when I took information theory earlier in grad school
and that helped a lot.

Hope this helps. If I think of anything else I'll be sure to come back and
post!

------
eli_gottlieb
It's interesting that when asked about why we use hierarchical methods in RL,
ML, and cogsci, people haven't talked about the circuit complexity and
information-theoretic reasons for using hierarchies. IIRC, a "deeper" circuit
can represent a given function with exponentially fewer units/gates than a
"shallower" circuit, and hierarchical methods also narrow down only the
predictive information in the (supervised) dataset, according to information-
bottleneck methods.

------
hackandtrip
Wonderful content, appreciate those notes over usual videos that come out,
really more usable. Is there a place where wonderful people usually share
notes on conference like those?

------
emmelaich
NIPS stands for "Neural Information Processing Systems"

(took me a while but I found it!)

------
Dangeranger
It makes me laugh thinking that these notes were probably written in LaTex and
then exported.

The formatting for this overview is pretty great though. PDF with a TOC makes
a very nice means of navigation.

~~~
castle-bravo
It may have been done in org-mode and then exported to LaTeX. That's how I'd
do it, anyway.

~~~
pdxdabel
(David/author here): I haven't actually seen org-mode before. I'll take a
look!

I wrote these in sharelatex using a template and commands file I put together
that help write notes quickly in latex (they're available here if anyone is
interested: [https://github.com/david-
abel/latex_docs](https://github.com/david-abel/latex_docs)).

~~~
Dangeranger
Gary Schwartz[0] and Howard Abrams[1][2] both have nice explainers about org-
mode which explain the advantages and how to get started.

There's also a nice discussion on the Emacs Reddit page[3] about "Why Org-
Mode?"

[0] [https://harryrschwartz.com/2016/04/29/getting-started-
with-o...](https://harryrschwartz.com/2016/04/29/getting-started-with-org-
mode.html)

[1] [http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/learning-org-
mode.h...](http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/learning-org-mode.html)

[2] [http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/journaling-
org.html](http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/journaling-org.html)

[3]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/3nvmvr/why_orgmode/](https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/3nvmvr/why_orgmode/)

------
daferna
Somebody get this guy a PhD!

------
fredmonroe
thanks for doing these, really appreciated

------
formalsystem
Wow can't appreciate this enough. You put this together really quickly!

------
tuxguy
these are awesome !!! thanks a bunch David, @stablemap !

------
DyslexicAtheist
The event has also been compared to a dumpster fire[0] due to "sexualized
events & speeches", is this guy exaggerating or is it safe to go there for
women? Pretty off-putting tbh

[0]
[https://twitter.com/haldaume3/status/939910697911066624](https://twitter.com/haldaume3/status/939910697911066624)

~~~
yamaneko
Smitha Milli gave a bit more of context about what happened. Link to her
thread:

\-
[https://twitter.com/SmithaMilli/status/940012716797739008](https://twitter.com/SmithaMilli/status/940012716797739008)

~~~
briga
This seems like a pretty harmless joke to me. I have difficulty imagining why
anyone would be offended by this, unless there's more to the story

~~~
peoplewindow
Well, according to the notes there was an entire talk about bias where the
example of a Turkish sentence that didn't contain gendered pronouns "X is a
nurse, X is a doctor" gets translated to "She is a nurse, he is a doctor" by
Google Translate. And apparently that's a problem that needs fixing rather
than a reasonable translation, although we all know that Google Translate is
trained on the work of human translators, where it presumably learned this
(demographically correct) bias from. So I guess they need fixing too.

Seems like NIPS might have a systematic issue with hyper-sensitivity to
perceived slights. But it's the intersection of academia and SV companies so
is it really a surprise?

