Randomized Thoughts and Around the Blogs in 78 hours

I did not say it aloud but the reason the paper featured in The Phase Transition of Matrix Recovery from Gaussian Measurements Matches the Minimax MSE of Matrix Denoising is important comes back to an argument I made a while back in If there is revolution in rank minimization and nobody hears about it, is this a revolution ?: Having a phase transition is our only hope toward evaluating good from less optimal solvers.

In Quantum computer passes speed test we get to learn that Catherine McGeoch has come out with a paper comparing PCs with D-wave "quantum" computers in Experimental Evaluation of an Adiabatic Quantum System for Combinatorial Optimization, by Catherine C. McGeoch and Cong Wang. In the Nature piece, one can read:

McGeoch found that D-Wave Two did just as well at finding the right answers, but in a half-second run time. That’s 3,600 times faster. “It was really amazing,” she says.

In the paper, one can also read:

As a case in point, our second project compares the V5 hardware chip used in our first study to a V6 chip that became operational after the study was completed. V6 is three to five times faster than V5, and can solve problems as large as n = 502.

The lesson from this ? Do not ever mess with the steamrollers. Of related interest: Sunday Morning Insight: Quantum Computing and the Steamrollers.

Vladimir's illustration of the 2012 Imec Scientific Report features a CMOS based hyperspectral imager and echoes the same Do Not Mess with CMOS I made last year.

Other news from the blogs of note included:

Danny

• Fun Readings about Startups
• New collaborative filtering functionality in GraphLab and GraphChi
• Speeding up parallel ALS
• GraphLab Challenge @ SC13

Charles: Advances in Convex NMF: Part 1 Linear Programming

Sebastien: ORF523: Optimization with bandit feedback

Terry/Ingrid: Planning for the World Digital Mathematical Library

Dirk: A digital mathematical library for the whole world

Bob: Paper of the Day (Po'D): On Theorem 10 Edition

Hein: TED: “The key to growth? Race with the machines”

Larry

• Aaronson, COLT, Bayesians and Frequentists
• The Perils of Hypothesis Testing … Again

Dick:  A Most Perplexing Mystery

Vladimir

• DSLR Sensor Progress
• MIPI M-PHY IP by Synopsys
• XTR Founder Promotes 2D Webcam-based Gesture Recognition
• Omnivision Proposes Dual Camera Module
• Panasonic Proposes Another Version of 3D Color Imager
• More from 2012 Imec Scientific Report

Laurent: Signal Processing for Chemical Sensing: ICASSP 2013 Special session

Anand: Persi Diaconis on coincidence

Don't forget, next week, there is this meeting on Big data: theoretical and practical challenges on May 14-15, 2013 in Paris

Meanwhile on Nuit Blanche we had:

• Analysis Based Blind Compressive Sensing - implementation -
• The Phase Transition of Matrix Recovery from Gaussian Measurements Matches the Minimax MSE of Matrix Denoising - implementation -
• Enhanced Compressed Sensing Recovery with Level Set Normals - implementation -
• How to find real-world applications for compressive sensing
• Phase retrieval for imaging problems - implementation -
• Squeezambler: Distilled Single Cell Genome Sequencing and De Novo Assembly for Sparse Microbial Communities - implementation -
• I like round numbers
• Reader's Reviews: Fabio, Quantum Imaging, Dick Hamming's Notes and Around the webs in 78 hours
• K-SVD/IPR: Learning Incoherent Dictionaries for Sparse Approximation using Iterative Projections and Rotations - implementation -

Full-Res: W00080657.jpg

W00080657.jpg was taken on May 06, 2013 and received on Earth May 07, 2013. The camera was pointing toward SATURN-RINGS at approximately 881,013 miles (1,417,853 kilometers) away, and the image was taken using the CL1 and CL2 filters. This image has not been validated or calibrated.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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