Learn from the Best

Learn from the Best

What is more inspiring than a discussion with the leading scientists in your field? As a student or a young researcher, you have likely been influenced by mentors guiding you in your career and leading you to your current position. Any discussion with or advice from an expert is certainly very helpful for young people. But how often do we have the opportunity to meet experts? Do we make the mos...

Applying Benchmarking to Learn from Best Practices

Assessments are a proven and widely used method to measure one’s software process strengths and weaknesses. This helps determine where to start software process improvement programs. However, an assessment uses information internal to an organisation, but does not compare its processes to a competitor’s. Benchmarking is a way to compare one’s practices with other organisations. These types of c...

Applying MDL to learn best model granularity

The Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle is solidly based on a provably ideal method of inference using Kolmogorov complexity. We test how the theory behaves in practice on a general problem in model selection: that of learning the best model granularity. The performance of a model depends critically on the granularity, for example the choice of precision of the parameters. Too high preci...

The best is the enemy of the good--can research ethics learn from rationing?

Can We Learn to Beat the Best Stock

A novel algorithm for actively trading stocks is presented. While traditional expert advice and “universal” algorithms (as well as standard technical trading heuristics) attempt to predict winners or trends, our approach relies on predictable statistical relations between all pairs of stocks in the market. Our empirical results on historical markets provide strong evidence that this type of tec...