Don't forget the TQFRs

As you'll see on HW7, it's really important to me that you guys take the time to fill out the TQFR reports.  I really benefit from the feedback you give on the course and certainly will take it into account when I update the course next year.  So, please fill them out ... and please do more than just give ratings, also write comments (since those are the most informative things).

If you manage to beat the percentage of surveys filled out by last year's class, everyone will get 5 points, and if you manage to get 100% completion percentage I'll give everyone 10 extra credit points!

Clickmaniac results

As you know, clickmaniac ended yesterday. Here's the final standings for posterity! There were lots of changes in the final days and here's how it ended up...

Reach:
1) Tobias, Gustaf, Shiyu 910,760
2) Hari, Micheal B. 823,841
3) Kevin, Nathan, Mikhail, Stasja 668,576

Connections
1) Robert, Brock 1304
2) Kevin, Nathan, Mikhail, Stasja 1192
3) Brian M, Lucia, Tuling, Timothy 189

Clicks
1) Kevin, Nathan, Mikhail, Stasja 1660
2) Robert, Brock 1128
3) Hari, Michael B. 1082

End of clickmaniac

Clickmaniac is quickly winding down....  Remember that we'll start class today with a viewing & discussion of the results.  So, please make sure someone from your teams is present to be able to comment on what worked and what didn't...

Extra lecture this Friday 1-2:30

With all the holidays causing us to miss lectures, I'm going to have to take one extra lecture if I'm going to get through the material you need for the last HW...  So, we'll have an extra lecture this Friday Feb 23 at 1-2:30 in ARMS 155 (same time and place as normal).  I hope that everyone can make it ... it will be the start of our section on "routing games", which is a particularly fun topic I think.

Office hours this week

As we discussed in class today, since there is no HW due this week, we will skip Wed night office hours and just hold them on Thursday night (normal time & place).

Another relevant Lunch Bunch this week

This week the lunch bunch is given by a Caltech alum who was instrumental in developing AdSense!  He'll be talking about one of his new startups -- Factual.  Details below...

HOWARD & JAN ORINGER SEMINAR
**A Special IST Lunch Bunch Event**
Tuesday, February 21st
12:00 - 1:00pm
105 Annenberg

*Lunch will be provided*

A Discussion on Open Source and Open Data

Gil Elbaz
Founder, Factual

Bio:
Gil Elbaz was named a Young Alumni Trustee at Caltech in 2008 and serves on two standing Committees: Institute and Alumni Relations and Student Experience.  He is an accomplished entrepreneur and pioneer of natural-language technology, or converting human language into more formal representations that are easier for computer programs to manipulate. In 1991, he earned his bachelor's degree from Caltech, with a double major in engineering and applied science as well as economics.

After college, Elbaz worked in engineering roles at IBM, Sybase, and SGI. He cofounded Applied Semantics (ASI) in 1998 with fellow Caltech alumnus Adam Weissman (BS '90). ASI helped define and build new addressable markets with its AdSense and other contextual advertising products.  The company was acquired by Google in 2003, at which point Elbaz became director of engineering for Google's Santa Monica office. His work helped establish Google's place as a leader in the field of online advertising.  Elbaz left Google in 2007 to start Los Angeles-based Factual Inc.

Active in a number of nonprofit areas, Elbaz is on the board of trustees for the X Prize Foundation and a member of the Los Angeles Social Ventures Partners.  He and his wife, Elyssa, also manage the Elbaz Family Foundation, supporting environmental and educational causes.

**************

The Oringer Seminars are made possible through the generosity of Howard (MS 1963 EE) and Jan Oringer.  These seminars present scientists and engineers, alumni and key industry leaders in fields related to Information Science and Technology to hear of their experiences and approaches firsthand to convert ideas into knowledge and commercial endeavors. Through these stories of achievement, we aim to inspire our Caltech community, particularly our student body, and to challenge all of us to make a lasting impact on our world.  We acknowledge Howard and Jan Oringer with deep gratitude for their generosity and commitment to Caltech and to its IST initiative.

Rock 'n' Roll Half-Marathon

Hello class, I guess this is technically a spam post on this blog, but I got a couple of questions from people about the location near Caltech where you can catch the course administrators (Adam and the TAs) and from what I hear, even a couple of your classmates, running on Sunday morning. So, here is a link to the course map:

Course Map

Wilson Avenue between Del Mar and San Pasqual would be the closest place to Caltech where you can spot us. That is roughly the half-way point, so you can expect to see some of us there starting at 8:15am and perhaps up to 9:15am. We'll all be wearing bright red T-shirts, so we're hard to miss!

P.S.: If you are wondering, yes, I tried to make this a required part of Homework 6 (as question zero), but Adam didn't approve it!

Rankmaniac results

...and here're the results!

For google:
1) Michael Burd, Michael Hirshleifer, Ramya Vinayak
2) Kevin Lo, Nathan Watson, Michael Sushkov, Ernest Lee, Stasja Stanisic
3) Shayan Doroudi, Henry Li, Haoyang Ren, Joe Wang

For bing:
1) Shayan Doroudi, Henry Li, Haoyang Ren, Joe Wang
2) Laura Conwill, Chris Dudiak, Riley Patterson, Ben Weitz
...and no others got listed!

Project proposals -- extension!

Talking to some students after class I was convinced to give an extension on the project proposals so that it's easier to manage time between the HW and the proposals.

So, now the project proposals are due Wednesday Feb 22.  I hope this means that I'll get even better proposals. 

The end of rankmaniac

As you all know, rankmaniac comes to an end on Wed at 12:30.  We'll be doing the "final search" in ARMS 151 (just across the hall from the normal room) at 12:30 on Wed.  We'll have pizza to keep it fun...  Please make sure that at least 1 person from your team is there so that we can be sure to find each groups images quickly. 

It's almost time for the final push!  I see that many of you in the top 5 are bouncing up and down daily...

Relavent Lunch Bunch talk

This week's lunch bunch is right on topic for us...so I hope to see all of you there Tuesday!

Please join us for the IST Lunch Bunch!

Tuesday, February 14th
12:00 - 1:00pm
105 Annenberg

*Lunch will be provided*

SPEAKER:
Vanja Josifovski, Yahoo! Research

TITLE:
Who, Where and When - Targeting for Display Advertising

ABSTRACT:
Graphical display advertising places graphical ads alongside content on variety of pages around the Web. From its early beginning in the 1990s, display advertising has grown into a $7 billion industry that supports a big swath of the Web eco-system: from large publishers to niche web sites, allowing for great diversity of sites and content. Targeting has been a key technology that improves the utility of all the participants in the display advertising by providing better audience to the advertiser, more relevant ads to the user and increased revenue to the advertiser. In this talk, I will give a general overview the targeting as an area of computational advertising and then discuss a some case studies of recently reported results in this area. The discussion will include scientifically challenging details about how the computational aspects work.

Graded HWs and Solutions

Since it's midterm time, I want to make sure that everyone has had a chance to pick up their HWs and the solution sets.  If you didn't know, they are sitting outside of my office right next to the box for turning in HWs.  The TAs have put in a lot of effort to grade the sets, so I hope their comments help you to learn from your mistakes.  Also, the TAs have put a lot of effort into making sure that the solutions comment on the common mistakes in the class, so they should be good learning aids. 

So, please come pick up the HWs and solutions if you haven't already!
(HW3 will be turned back in class today, and will then be added to the box.)

Important note regarding Rankmaniac

I've gotten a couple emails from folks at wikipedia about spam being added to pages there for the rankmaniac projects.  While I encourage everyone to think creatively, please do so with respect for the policies of the sites you are interacting with.  In the case of wikipedia, there is an assumption that added links are meant to improve the project.  If you add links in that manner it is acceptable, but adding spam is not.  Also, as I hope you've figured out, links at wikipedia are not even helpful for pagerank!  Wikipedia specifically prevents our
external links to be counted in computing page ranks via the rel=nofollow attribute!

So, I've seen a lot of great ideas being implemented for the project so far, but be careful to distinguish what you're doing from "spamming"...

Office hours

Since nothing is due this week, we'll only have 1 evening of office hours... It'll be Thursday 7-9 in Ann 107.  You can come and bound your Rankmaniac ideas off the TAs, or just start the theory part early.

Talk on "Startups" Monday at 4pm

 Later in the afternoon, after our class on Monday, there will be a very interesting talk by a Caltech CS alum about what it's like to join a startup.  I highly recommend attending!  Details are below...

Title: Skills You Should Have at a Startup
Speaker: Anthony Chong (Caltech Alum)

Date: Monday, January 23, 2012
Time: 4:00p.m.
Place: 213 Annenberg

Abstract: After leaving Caltech, I moved in with a friend from high school as the first employee at Adaptly (a startup in NYC).  Rather than going for a safer future in industry or grad school, I figured a few years in a startup would provide a faster learning environment and better vehicle for doing social good.  In the first year we went from three of us working out of the living room of our apartment to 30+ people working out of our offices in New York and sales office in London. I plan to address three topics:
1.  What is it like to work at a startup?
2.  What are useful tools Caltech grads should know/get familiar with to contribute quickly to the software development life cycle?
3.  How do you get the most out of professional development at a startup?

Homework submission guidelines

Here are a few reminders and tips that come to mind, based on what we're seeing from the first problem set.

List your collaborators

Remember to list the classmates you worked with for each problem.

Attach your source code

It's part of your work too! This also applies to Mathematica/Matlab codes and commands. If you used Excel, type up the relevant formulas and functions used to produce your results, graphs, etc.

Manual submission time

If you turn in a hard copy of your set, please write down the date and time of when you turned it in. This includes late sets as well.

Email submission format

This is a plead from the TAs! We get a lot of submissions by email, and we need your help to speed up our manual process of printing everything out.

First of all, please save everything as a single PDF file to make sure your submissions are formatted properly (which isn't guaranteed for Word documents when opened in Linux). Source can be saved as a PDF file by the "Print to PDF" function (native, Mac/Linux or CutePDF, Windows).

If you have multiple PDFs (e.g. math as well as source code), you can merge them into a single PDF file using programs like pdfsam (Windows/Mac) or Ghostscript (Windows/Mac/Linux). Just remember to look over the output file to make sure you've combined everything in the right order. :)

Source code in LaTeX

If you use LaTeX to write up your sets, it's very easy to attach the source code: use the listings package and specify the filename of the source code, and the generated PDF file will automatically copy the code over with proper syntax highlighting. More details here.

Be polite with your crawlers!

I'm glad to see that many of you are well on your way with the crawler assignment!  Some of you are producing very optimized crawlers, which is great...but be careful to be polite!  If you're crawler is really optimized and you hit a particular server up with too fast a request rate you can cause some trouble...it can seem like a DoS attack.  So far, this has caused some issues with UGCS and the Library! 

Don't get me in too much trouble!

P.S.  It's great to see so many blog posts go up in recent days. So far they have all been quite interesting, so the first round is setting a high bar for those of you later in the alphabet. 

Lunch Bunch on "Green" data centers Tuesday

I just wanted to highlight one thing that I mentioned at the beginning of class last week-- I'll be giving the lunch bunch talk tomorrow (Tuesday) 12-1 on "Energy-efficient data centers" in Annenberg 105.  This is a topic that's very related to what we'll be doing later in the course, so I recommend attending.  Think of it as a "bonus lecture" for the course.

Also, in general I recommend that Juniors and Seniors attend all the Lunch Bunches.  They are meant to be at a "Scientific American" level so that you can get something out of them, and they'll be very useful in helping you to understand what is going on in various research areas and companies.  Oh, and they have free lunch!  Think of them as the followup to CS9, where now you're ready to hear more of the details.

New room (again): Arms 155

Okay, we have another new room for lecture.  We're now in Arms 155...  See you all there on Wednesday!

New room: Steele 102

I have confirmed a new room: Steele102.  See everyone there on Monday.
In the mean time, don't forget about the probability refresher in Annenberg 213 Friday 1-2:30.