Tag: academic

> Since CS is (or at least should be) learning how to apply known algorithms to problems and the development of new algorithms to solve problems, CS should be very similar to math, and computer scientists ought to seem fairly similar to mathematicians.

For researchers in the ‘theory’ and ‘algorithms’ sub-fields of CS, I’d say they are mathematicians. They work with axioms and theorems and stuff just like other mathematicians do.

Other CS researchers are empiricists instead, e.g. most of those who do data mining or statistical natural language processing. And of course there’s lots of other stuff in between. (E.g., network researchers may start off with an algorithmic concept but then run simulations to demonstrate their algorithm’s effectiveness.)

There’s a family of jokes to the effect that PhDs in computer science don’t know anything about computers or programming or whatever. In actuality the individual’s engagement with computers/programming will vary very much with the sub-field he’s in. These days a theorist will need to be able to use LaTeX to write papers and read e-mail to see the conference announcements, but doesn’t need to program at all. OTOH someone doing experiments with genetic algorithms will probably write their own code for their experiments, and may even turn into a hardware geek by building beowulf clusters to run the massively CPU-intensive experiments on.

> Most early CS people, as I understand it, were math people with an interest in computers.

I think you can still find a lot of older CS professors with degrees in applied mathematics. Computers were around long before CS departments even existed.

“It has become very very clear that this war isn’t over.” — British officer in Iraq, June 24 2003

I am finally done with the Bayesian Classifier. I have been working on it on and
off for 3 weeks now. Glad to get it over with. So far, I have only been able to
plug a decent accuracy of 82% with too many false positives. Its disheartening,
but at this point of time, I feel it is the best that I can do. I thought I should
blog my feelings at this turn. In another 2 hours I have to go home. I’ll go home
and have a bath, been at the lab all night. I hope my efforts payoff.

Alright friends, I am blogging my first steps towards some meaningful research
today. :))))))

I walked into the lab today and Vineet tells me that our classifier is doing a
100% accurate classification feeding off itself. Yes, I know that does not mean
much, but this opens a whole new set of possibilities. (For those not into data
mining, take my word for it, for the experts, just bear !!)

Some of the things we plan to look at
1. Can we boost the accuracy with Intelligent Keyword selection
2. Can we actually use incremental learning algorithms to induce decision trees
3. Do we need to bias the filters in filtering out junk email towards more
conservative filtering?

Now that we have the infrastructure in place we can answer all these questions.
Thanks Vineet for getting us this far!!!

In an attempt to model the brain, Computer Scientists came up with the Neural
Network. On of the interesting things I learn about an NN is that it takes 15
days to ‘learn’ one task or problem (blunt but a laymans point of view).
So that would make it probably comparable to the learning rate of a child …
are we there yet?