I am attending NIPS this year for the first time, and so I figured it would be good to blog about some of it here. I totally dropped the ball on Allerton, so maybe I’ll make up for it by writing more about the actual talks here. Fortunately, or unfortunately, most of the conference is about things I have almost no experience with, so I am having a bit of an explore/exploit tradeoff in my selection process.

Every day of the conference has a poster session from 7 to midnight — there are 90+ posters in a single room and people go in and out of hanging out with friends and looking at posters. My poster (a paper with Kamalika Chaudhuri and Kaushik Sinha on differentially private approximations to PCA) was last night, so I was on the presenting end of things. I gave up at 10:30 because I was getting hoarse and tired, but even then there were a fair number of people milling about. Since I was (mostly) at my poster I missed out on the other works.

During the day the conference is a single-track affair with invited and highlighted talks. There are two kinds of highlighted talks — some papers are marked for oral prevention (ETA: presentation), and some are marked as “spotlights,” which means that the authors get to make a 5 minute elevator pitch for their poster in front of the whole conference. Those start today, and I’m looking forward to it.

In the meantime, here is a picture from the hike I took yesterday with Erin:

Mountain Range on a hike near Lake Lily.