I measure the quality of a conference in terms of the density of information, interactions, and insights – something along these lines: (# of new ideas) x (# of discussions) / (# of days). By this or any related metric, the Workshop on Information in Networks, which I just attended at the NYU Stern Business [...]
Friends from photos
Next time you upload a picture to Flickr, you could be giving clues as to who your friends are – even if they didn’t appear in the picture. A group of researchers recently showed that they could infer many of an individual’s friends using only the time-stamp and coordinates of the photos she uploaded to [...]
McGill CS ranks 23rd in the world
For some time, McGill has enjoyed informal recognition as a world-class institution for Computer Science education. This has finally been validated in the first ever international ranking of Computer Science and Information Systems programs, which placed McGill’s CS program at 23rd. Our department is home to professors with expertise ranging from robotics to computational genetics [...]
Workshop brings together two centers of excellence for bioinformatics research
On May 13th the bioinformatics and systems biology communities from McGill and the University of Toronto met for a day of talks, posters, and discussions. This was the first time the two communities, both well-known research centers, had ever come together to explore areas of mutual interest and opportunities for future collaboration. The workshop is [...]
Using Twitter on a phone changes how you tweet
If you access Twitter through a smartphone, then chances are that you use online social platforms quite differently from those who use web browsers and desktop clients to login to their accounts. This is the general finding advanced in a paper by Mathieu Perreault and Derek Ruths that was recently accepted to the International Conference [...]
McGill Python Workshop #1: Why Python is Awesome
On Wednesday March 23rd, our lab hosted the first in a series of workshops introducing and exploring the power and ease of the Python programming language. Organized by Professor Derek Ruths and Mathieu Perreault, the workshop attracted more than 80 attendees, most of them students from McGill University. The purpose of this first Python workshop [...]
TEDxMcGill: Spoons, Cancer, and Civilization
This past Saturday, I had the amazing opportunity to speak at TEDxMcGill 2010. Much like the now-famous TED talks, this event was organized around an afternoon of 10-18 minute talks delving into “ideas worth spreading.” In my talk, I discussed what spoons, cancer cells, Ancient Roman roads, and online social networks all share in common: [...]
Brushing up on artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence, despite being a field of research unto itself, provides many powerful techniques that can solve problems across the computing sciences. This fall we’re reading through one of the best known textbooks on the topic: Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig’s “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.”
Fellowship funds interpretation of gene knockouts
One way of figuring out what something does is by taking it away. Pull the leg off of a table and you’ll find out that it was providing support. Biologists do this to cells to figure out how genes work: remove a gene and see what happens to the cell. If it dies, for example, [...]
TEDxMcGill 2010
