Christian Thurau

I put together some code I wrote earlier this year into a matrix factorization library for Python http://pymf.googlecode.com. PyMF currently includes methods for Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), Convex non-negative matrix factorization (CNMF), Semi non-negative matrix factorization (SNMF), Archetypal analysis (AA), Simplex volume maximization (SiVM), Convex-hull non-negative matrix factorization (CHNMF), Binary matrix factorization (BNMF), Singular value decomposition (SVD), Principal component analysis (PCA), K-means clustering (Kmeans), CUR decomposition (CUR), and Compaxt matrix decomposition (CMD). Descriptions of the methods and links to the papers are included in the code. The library is not very well tested and probably needs some beautification ;). Most methods should work fine with data stored in hdf5 tables (see h5py for details).

Our paper Yes We Can - Simplex Volume Maximization for Descriptive Web-Scale Matrix Factorization got accepted at CIKM 2010 as a short paper. Out of the 945 submissions, 127 (13.4%) were accepted as full papers and 169 (17.9%) as short papers.

Our CIG 2010 (IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games) paper on Analyzing
the Evolution of Social Groups in World of Warcraft got accepted, acceptance rate is 50%.

At CIG, I will give a tutorial on Game Mining – Data Mining in Games at CIG, and together with people from KD and VSM we (Chistian Bauckhage, Olana Missura, Thomas Gaertner, and Kristian Kersting) organize a special session on Game Mining.

Together with Kurt Driessens and Olana Missura I currently organize an ICML 2010 Workshop onMachine Learning and Games . Really looking forward to it!

We got 6 papers accepted at ICPR 2010. Have a look at the publications list for more details.

Our paper on convex non-negative matrix factorization in the wild has been selected as on of the best papers at the Int. Conf. on Data Mining 2009 (we won a possible publication in Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS), nice :-)

Stationary advertisements in the MMORPG World of Warcraft are strictly forbidden and considered impossible. Interestingly, gold-selling companies found a way of circumventing this prohibition (probably exploiting a bug) by carefully aligning corpses to form a Web-address. While this sounds really strange at first, it works surprisingly well as can be seen on the picture (this also works for longer addresses ) - weird.

Our ICDM 2009 paper on Convex Non-Negative Matrix Factorization in the Wild got accepted as a regular paper. Acceptance rate for regular papers is 8.9%. From 786 submissions 140 were selected for presentation, 70 as a regular paper and the remaining 70 as short papers.

Our ICMI 2009 paper on Multi-Modal and Multi-Camera Attention in Smart Environments got accepted, acceptance rate is 36%.

I just returned from the ICVSS summer school on Machine Learning for Computer Vision. It was a great week with interesting talks and fantastic sicilian food. I was quite impressed by Takeo Kanade's talk, from the title ("Computer Vision and Machine Learning: the past, the present, and the future") I feared it might end up being rather boring. However, it turned out to be one of the most fun talks I had listened to in years. The lectures of David Forsyth and Andrew Fitzgibbon were also great.

Our ICSC 2009 paper on Archetypal Images in Large Photo Collections got accepted. Acceptance rate is 30%.

DAGM paper on archetypal analysis accepted.

Our CAIP 2009 paper on GPU-based convolutional networks for face detection got accepted. Acceptance rate is 37%.

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