2003 VIGRE Graduate Student Travel Fund Recipients

Vivian Ng

I attended the International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML conference in Washington D.C. on August 21-24, 2003. This conference is among all major conferences for computer scientists, from industries and universities, to exchange the latest research results and development on machine learning and data mining. Because the conference is designed for computer scientists, there are not many statisticians among the huge crowd of researchers and students. Nevertheless, the most of the research topics are basically statistical problem. The conference covered a board range of topics by running several workshops each of which is on different topic. The primarily reason I attended the conference was because these research areas were closely related to mine. There was a workshop on Imbalanced Data Sets, which was related to my own research topic. Also, the talk on Machine Learning in Bioinformatics was of my own interest as well. There were numerous short talks, each was about 20-30 minutes long, and most of the talks were very informative. In particular, I gained a lot from the section on Dimension Reduction. I learned the latest methods on dimension reduction and at the same time, these talks inspired new direction and idea on my own research. Besides talks on my research area, there were many talks on topics like ensemble methods, decision tree, support vector machine SVM, and semisupervised learning. These talks introduced me to new methods and ideas and updated my knowledge in machine learning. Lastly, I have to thank the VIGRE program for giving me this valuable opportunity to attend the conference.