Tea-time Talks 2007

brian extend  

Today's Tee Time talk will be in Room CS 333. The talk will start at 4:30. Please come 5 - 10 minutes early to get settled and enjoy cookies and tea. Mohammad will be presenting "Analyzing Feature Generation for Value-Function Approximation" paper.  

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A good paper for our TTT is ''Automatic basis function construction for approximate DP and RL'' by Keller, Mannor, and Precup.  You  can find it at

http://imls.engr.oregonstate.edu/www/htdocs/proceedings/icml2006/057_Automatic_Basis_Func.pdf

I also have another suggestion. It'd be great if someone can talk about "Locally Weighted Regression" in our TTT.  

Mohammad

Today's Tea Time talk will be in Room CS 333. The talk will start at 4:30. Please come by 4:15 to enjoy cookies and tea. Today's presentation is by Rich. Paper is titled "On the Role of Tracking in Stationary Environments".  

I have created the schedule for next 30 days. Please have a look. If some dates do not work for you swap with someone else.

Thanks,

Varun  

Today's Tea Time talk will be in Room CS 333. The talk will start at 4:30. Please come by 4:15 to enjoy cookies and tea. Today's presentation is by Alborz.

Topic: Online Control With Least-Squares Methods (NIPS 2007 submission)

Abstract:
 Policy evaluation using least-squares techniques (such as LSTD and iLSTD) have been shown to estimate the value of a policy with far less data than traditional TD techniques.  Unfortunately, they make use of policy-dependent statistics that have to be discarded when the policy changes.  This makes it difficult to use the techniques for online control problems.  In this paper, we explore the effect of policy on the least-squares statistics, distinguishing three fundamental effects.  We then introduce the framework of least-squares Sarsa (LSS and iLSS) and empirically evaluate previously suggested approaches for handling data from older policies in the least-squares statistics.  We show these approaches can maintain the least-squares data efficiency in some control problems, identify circumstances where least-squares approaches can be problematic and where special handling of data from older policies improves learning.  

What do people think about not having TTT this week due to ICML. Some people have told me that they would rather not present during this week. Please send me your opinion. If enough people oppose the talks this week then we can move them next week.  

We will not have TTT for rest of this week due to ICML :(
I will update the schedule and move this week's talks to next weeek.  

Today's Tea Time talk will be in Room CS 333. The talk will start at 4:30. Please come by 4:15 to enjoy cookies and tea. Today's presentation is by myself. I am presenting a paper titled "Apprenticeship Learning via Inverse Reinforcement Learning".  

Today's Tea Time talk will be in Room CS 333. The talk will start at 4:30. Please come by 4:15 to enjoy cookies and tea. Today's presentation is by Martha on "To transfer or not to transfer".  

Today's Tea Time talk will be in Room CS 333. The talk will start at 4:30. Please come by 4:15 to enjoy cookies and tea. Today's presentation is by Yaki on "Information Value Theory".  

Unfortunately, CSC 333 is booked today till 5:00. Therefore, we will have the TTT in room CSC 249 instead. Sorry for the mess up.  

Hey TTTimers,

 I am to present next Wednesday but my sister is getting married this weekend and I will be out of town starting tonight and I won't be back until Tuesday. Anyway I do not have the time to prepare a talk, is anyone able to switch me? Sorry for the short notice.

-James  

TTimers,

I am off for a month. Vlad will be taking over the responsibilities of TTT for the next month. Please send your question/queries/grievances about TTT to Vlad. Thanks Vlad for volunteering.  

Please join us for tea and cookies in CS 333 at 4:15. At 4:30 I will present "Scaling Learning Algorithms towards AI" by Bengio and LeCun.  

Please join us for tea and cookies in CS 333 at 4:15. At 4:30 Mark will present "Automatic basis function construction for approximate DP and RL" by Keller, Mannor, and Precup.  

Please join us for tea and cookies in CS 333 at 4:15. At 4:30 David will give his ICML talk on "Combining Online and Offline Learning in UCT".  

Please join us for tea and cookies in CS 333 at 4:15. At 4:30 Masoud will present his work on "Disturbance reinforcement learning".  

Please join us for tea and cookies in CS 333 at 4:15. At 4:30 Sandra will talk about "Basic Concepts of Algorithmic Learning".  

Please join us for tea and cookies in CS 333 at 4:15. At 4:30 Masoud will present "Automatic shaping and decomposition of reward functions" by Bhaskara Marthi.  

There will be no tea talk today. We will continue tomorrow when I will present "Potential-based shaping and Q-value initialization are equivalent" by Eric Wiewiora.  

Dear RLAI'ers.
I just returned from vacation, and found out that I'm scheduled to give a another TT talk on the coming monday (Aug.13), in what I guess is the 2nd round of talks.
As we're leaving at the end of the month, I'm terribly busy, and won't be able to prepare a talk until monday.
I'll appreciate it if someone who hasn't given a 2nd TT talk could replace me in that spot.
Thanks, Yaki.  

Please join us for tea and cookies in CS 333 at 4:15. At 4:30 Yasin will talk about "Variance of Response in Bayesian Networks".  

There will be no teatime talk today. Also, the schedule has been updated so please have a look to see if you are giving a talk.  

Since nobody volunteered to replace me today, I actually did prepare something for my talk today. Sorry for not writing earlier!
I'll talk about tile kernels - see you at 16:30!
Yaki.  

Today, August 14th 2007, Dan will be discussing transportation and planning for our trip to Banff for the iCore. It is *imperative* that everyone going to Banff next week attend this meeting. Same tea-time, same tea-place.  

Please join us for tea and cookies in CS 333 at 4:15. At 4:30 Amir massoud will present "The Linear Programming Approach to Approximate Dynamic Programming" by de Farias and Van Roy.  

Please join us for tea and cookies in CS 333 at 4:15. At 4:30 Rich will talk about his plans for a new book.  

Please join us for tea and cookies in CS 333 at 4:15. At 4:30 Hamid will talk about using the Wake-Sleep algorithm for representational learning.  

Please join us for tea and cookies and a special suprise (!) in CS 333 at 4:15. At 4:30 Adam will give a talk.  

There will be no teatime talk today. The next talk is on Tuesday, September 4.  

Please join us for our last teatime talk of the year at 4:30 in CS 333. At 4:45 Varun will talk about various sequence models.