IREvalEtAl

I’ve recently developed a morbid interest in the literature of financial disasters. In this vein, I’ve just finished reading Kindleberger et al., Manias, Panic, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises — an interesting book, but remarkable for the confused way the writing is organized, with constant re-iterations, digressions, and non-sequiturs, as if someone had taken several working revisions, cut them up, dropped them on the floor, and then re-assembled the pieces without too much care for their coherence.

Anyway, one of the chapters of the original book (spread out over several fragments in the re-assembled version) describes the boom turned bust in Japan in the late 1980s. Kindleberger relates, for instance, the story of the Japanese bank which paid $600 million-odd for an office complex in the states, when the asking price was $300 million, merely so that they could gain the record for the world’s most expensive office purchase. Another anecdote is that at the height of the boom, the real estate covered by the Imperial Palace in Tokyo had a value greater than all of the real estate in California.

If such stories of dizzying excess captivate you, then you’ll not want to miss the EVIA 2010, the Evaluating Information Access workshop, held at NII in Tokyo, just across the expressway from the Imperial Palace itself! This is the third iteration for EVIA, the first international workshop dedicated to information retrieval evaluation issues. I’ve been invited to join Tetsuya Sakai, the eminence grise of Asian information retrieval research, and Mark Sanderson, as co-chair this year. It’s an interesting time for evaluation research, with increasing interest in HCIR issues and the emergence of crowd-sourced evaluation using Mechanical Turk and the like.

Deadline for submission is March 31st; please see the Call For Papers.

Bertrand Russell’s practically-minded grandmother used to disapprovingly refer to his studies of higher mathematics as “this life you are leading”. I have my own bookish degeneracy, namely, books. When at work I think with guilty pleasure of getting home, getting into my armchair, and reading. Besides reading, my preferred pastime is — being at work. Staying home, on holiday, renders me liable to impressment into the sort of extended, aimless social activity that leaves me feeling vaguely psychopathic. My partner and I are in the happy equilibrium of being able to return home, me from work, her from the beach, and commiserating each the other on the rigours endured. My officemate Anh artfully combines the two activities; he feigns work so as to get time away from his family at the weekend, in the office, reading novels.

I am in the habit of summarizing interesting articles as draft postings on my blog, in order to get the content of the article into my head. Generally, I don’t go on to fully polish and publish the summarizing post. But if I absent-mindedly hit the “publish” button when what I want is “save draft”, then I do end up publishing the post, without any polishing. This happened to my notes on a Wired article on the rise and rise of the placebo effect. It’s gone from my blog now, but if you subscribe via a reader, the disjointed sentences likely ended up in your in tray. Apologies.

Alistair passed me a copy of the latest issue of Information Retrieval, which is devoted to reports from the Reliable Information Access workshop. The workshop was run in 2003, and the reports are being published in 2009, so we are not discussing breaking news here. Still, the concept of the workshop was very interesting: invite a dozen leading information retrieval research groups to a six-week, on-site experiment employing seven different retrieval systems, to tackle (broadly speaking) the question of why information retrieval technology is not improving. There were two specific subtasks: an intensive failure analysis of why retrieval systems, individually and collectively, performed poorly on certain topics and not on others; and a multi-dimensional exploration of the effectiveness, limits, commonalities, and differences of pseudo-relevance feedback techniques, one of the few promising general-purpose retrieval techniques that go beyond keyword matching.

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Is the notion of establishing a neo-Spartiate state ruled by technocratic Philosopher Kings, after the fashion of Plato’s Republic, on everyone’s lips at the moment, or is it just the social circle I move in?

I hold two envelopes, and tell you that one holds twice as much money as the other. I then let you choose and keep one. You are about to take the envelope in my left hand, but then decide to do a quick probability calculation. Let the amount of money in the left envelope be . Then the amount in the right envelope is either or . Now, since you picked the left envelope at random, these two amounts are equally likely for the right envelope. Therefore, your expected gain in switching to choosing the right envelope is , whereas your gain in stick with the left envelope is . So, logically, you should switch. But then, if you’d chosen the right envelope first, then the same logic would dictate that you should switch to the left one. And that can’t be right. So what’s wrong in your reasoning?
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OK, stick with me on this one. Latex is derived from the rubber plant. Rubber is one of Malaysia’s chief exports. There is a widely-used typesetting tool called LaTeX. Therefore (pay attention to the clever link here), it is only natural that the Malaysian LaTeX User Group blog should be one of the most fruitful and creative out there when it comes to clever LaTeX hints and tricks, particularly relating to creating rich layouts and presentations. Highly recommended.

Via Jeff Dalton and the LingPipe blog, comes Reading Tea Leaves: How Humans Interpret Topic Models, an enjoyable paper on evaluating the meaningfulness to humans of the topics that topic models like Latent Dirichlet Allocation produce. The authors come up with a couple of interesting evaluation tasks, which they execute on Mechanical Turk. The one I particularly liked was to introduce an alien word into the word list of a topic, and then see whether the user can locate the intruded word — something like the old “which of these things is not like the other” song/game on Sesame Street. Their finding is that human evaluation and the automated or statistical evaluation techniques generally used do not agree on which topic model is the most effective; but it is the inventiveness of the method they developed to test the human interpretation of topic coherence that I particularly liked.

According to Tetsuya Sakai, who runs information retrieval research throughout greater Asia via a number of front organizations, AIRS 2010 will be hosted by the National Taiwan University in Taipei, which is great, because it gives me an excuse to visit Taipei again. Tetsuya also announced that AIRS is changing its name from the Asian Information Retrieval Symposium to the Asian Information Retrieval Societies conference. The change is a valid one, since AIRS really is a conference, not a symposium (that is, it is an occasion for carrying things together, not a drinking party). However, the name change has had the interesting side effect of bringing into existence a whole new class of organization, namely an Asian Information Retrieval Society.

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Sorry:

A.) For not blogging frequently during CIKM. I was exhausted at the end of day one, drunk at the end of day two, and lazy at the end of day three. I’ll write up some notes later, but I realize that they’ll lack that tweet-like freshness.

B.) That my blog went down. My swap partition decided to go on holiday on someone else’s VPS. We seem to be back now.

C.) To Professor Hara. While your eyes do look like the moon reflected in a lake at night, I now realize that this was inappropriate to say to a married man over the banquet table.