Ant foraging simulation
For those of you unfamiliar, there is a very nice, very general multi-agent simulation library called MASON developed at GMU by Sean Luke and some of his students. It comes with a number of simulations and tutorials that he and his students created … in some cases to showcase certain facilities, and in some cases simply because they were working on research for which they used MASON.
The Ant Foraging MASON app is one of the latter examples: Drs. Luke and Panait have several publications about ant algorithms for which MASON was used. If you go to the main MASON page, about half-way down there is button to launch an applet that lets you run these pre-built apps. Ant Foraging is the first app.
Project presentations & schedule changes
I considered input from the class and have made the following changes to the schedule:
- On Thursday, we will commit to a presentation schedule, finish the ACO discussion, and discuss project presentation / paper expectations
- Next Tuesday (24.Nov), we will have our one an only review for the exam
- Project presentations will be Tu.1.Dec and Tr.3.Dec
- The project paper is due Tu.1.Dec, the third review is due Tr.3.Dec
Here’s how I will decide the presentation schedule:
- Each group will have a total of 15 minutes (including Q & A) — three will go on one day, four on another
- Those who are willing to go first (on Tu.1.Dec), tell me prior to my deciding assignments this Thursday
- Preference to the Tu.1.Dec slot will be given on a first-come-first-serve basis for no more than four groups
- All remaining groups will be decided randomly, if necessary. If I have to choose randomly, I will make the split three / four between Tuesday and Thursday
Incentive to volunteer to go on the first presentation day:
- For groups that volunteer to go on Tuesday (whether or not you are selected): students in such groups will receive 5 point out of 5 on the third review whether or not they turn in the review.
- The recompense is for being willing to be flexible, not for what day you present. Once I make the assignment, groups can choose to fill an empty spot on Tuesday or “swap” with another group if all are in agreement, but the deal for review three will not be transferred or awarded after the fact.
Miscellaneous logistical factoids
Note the following:
- I wont be in office hours again today (Tue.10.Nov), but feel free to call by PII office to make an alternative appointment, if needed. I’ll be there on Thursday.
- The final review assignment is finally posted (w/ appropriately adjusted due date).
- I changed the class schedule to reflect a shift in the last lecture to ACO.
- Sample homework for the last couple of weeks will be up today or tomorrow, so check back soon.
- Second review grading will be sent back soon.
Exam statistics
Here is the graph I showed in class displaying the overall statistics for the exam. The light blue bars on the left side are a histogram, the dark blue line is the class mean (73.22). Grades slightly above this line are in the A- ballpark, grades slightly below it are in the B+ ballpark. You may also want to look at:
Here is the graph I showed in class displaying statistics broken out per question. Again, you may want to understand boxplots, in addition to the notion of correlation.
Hi everyone! My name is Jade, and I’m still working on a proposal for a project. If there is anyone else in the group who hasn’t found a partner, I’m still open to ideas on what to work on. I’m currently interested in stuff like SOAR and ACT-R, which are machine learning tools that link back to cognitive science, my primary field of interest. If there are any two-person groups who are willing to take in a third person, please consider me. I don’t know any programming, but I’m willing to do grunt work in order to do my share. My e-mail address is jikuu (at) knights (dot) ucf (dot) edu. Thank you for your time!
There were several problems with my discussion of Problem 6.6 (Naïve Bayes) in our review on Tuesday. I spent some time today writing out a less hasty discussion of the problem.
Please download it and look it over.
Genre Music Recognition Project
Hello everybody! My name is Piotr and I want to know if anyone would be interested in the following Machine Learning project. The topic of the project is : Genre Music Recognition. We would concentrate on 5 genres: Pop, Rock, Metal, Jazz, Classical. Then we are going to extract feature vectors (MFCC coefficients, frequency based feature) from the 30 second samples. Given feature vectors we will choose one classifier (k nearest neighbors, neural networks or other) and teach our machine. The next step will be testing using another set of songs. All work will be done in Matlab with the help of free libraries. If anyone has questions please contact me reksiak [at] gmail.com.
Joel Lehman lectures on Tuesday
Tomorrow, Tuesday 8.Sep, Joel Lehman will lecture on neural networks and backpropogation. I should be back on Thursday.
I will not be available during office hours on Tuesday, either. Again, I should be available on Thursday.
Update: Joel has made his slides for the class available here [PPT, about 700K].
New free book on metaheuristics
Sean Luke at George Mason University has recently put out a new book: Essentials of Metaheuristics. This is a great book, and it is available as free open text at: http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/book/metaheuristics . The book takes an optimization perspective, but most (if not all) the techniques can be applied to certain machine learning contexts. More after the cut.
Assignments page fixed
I have finally managed to update the “Assignments” page to include information about the first review.
On the off chance that at least one of you is mildly interested in the problem: The latest versions of Word Press apparently trap certain phrases for security reasons, phrases that include text that might be malignantly intended to get parsed with the PHP processing and executed somehow.
Blocking the post text itself seems like an unnecessarily draconian way to solve this problem to me, but such is life. The short of it is: if you use Word Press and suddenly get a 403 access error when committing a post or page edit, you might look into the text itself to see any obvious triggers.
