When routine bites hard…

When is Clustering Hard?

of Work in Progress PASCAL Workshop on Statistics and Optimization of Clustering, July 2005 We propose questions regarding the informational and computational limits of learning a mixture of Gaussians—the sample sizes necessary in order to recover the generating mixture with unbounded, and bounded, computation. We would like to quantify the gap between the two, i.e. the excess information requi...

When is Rotations Averaging Hard?

Rotations averaging has become a key subproblem in global Structure from Motion methods. Several solvers exist, but they do not have guarantees of correctness. They can produce high-quality results, but also sometimes fail. Our understanding of what makes rotations averaging problems easy or hard is still very limited. To investigate the difficulty of rotations averaging, we perform a local con...

Bio-Bites!

Bio-Bites!

Vermont has mandated labeling of food containing genetically modified ingredients by July 2016. Representatives of the food and biotechnology industries and the Us Grocery Manufacturers Association in Washington DC are opposed to the law, and it is likely to be challenged in the federal court. References the week in science: Britain pledges to be more open about animal research; stanford Univer...

Bio-Bites!