Coordinate descent is a general strategy for convex optimization problems. The basic idea is iteratively solve the problem by optimizing the objective only with respect to one optimization variable at a time while keeping all other dimensions fixed. While the order in which the dimensions are optimized can be chosen arbitrarily, it is crucial for convergence guarantees that updates occur sequen...

PAGODA (Probabilistic Autonomous GOal­ Directed Agent) is a model for autonomous learning in probabilistic domains [desJ ardins, 1992) that incorporates innovative techniques for using the agent's existing knowledge to guide and constrain the learning process and for representing, reasoning with, and learn­ ing probabilistic knowledge. This paper de­ scribes the probabilistic representation and...

The first session of this semester’s Algorithms Reading Group dealt with the problem of parking cars on the streets of New York City. The goal is to analyze different parking behaviors and observe to what extent following some parking strategy can affect the maximum number of cars that can be parked on the street. Such analysis can be useful for finding out what parking patterns provide the max...

The fundamental challenge for human-computer interaction (HCI) is to invent and design a culture in which humans can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. Cultures are substantially defined by their media and tools for thinking, working, learning, and collaborating. New media change (1) the structure and contents of our interests, (2) the nature of our cognitive and...

We describe efforts to create corpora to support development and evaluation of handwriting recognition and translation technology. LDC has developed a stable pipeline and infrastructures for collecting and annotating handwriting linguistic resources to support the evaluation of MADCAT and OpenHaRT. We collect handwritten samples of pre-processed Arabic and Chinese data that has been already tra...