Around the Blogs in 78 Summer Hours: Phase transitions, infinite CS and earliest version of phase transitions ?

Ever since the last around the blogs, we had quite a few interesting blog entries but first things first. Here are some feedbacks. Following up on the CoSeRa blog entry pointing to the presentations slides there, I felt there was a connection between those and the inifinite dimensional issues arising in a later blog entry and sent an email out to both Anders Hansen and Holger Rauhut. Holger responded with: 

Dear Igor,

Thanks for your remark and for mentioning CoSeRa 2013 in your blog. There is another recent paper of Rachel Ward and myself which goes into a similar direction, see

http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0759

Best wishes,

Holger

while Anders Hansen sent me the following:

Thanks so much for again writing about infinite-dimensional compressed sensing on your blog (you are doing a great job). This is an important topic that is getting more and more attention. Just to let you know, there will be a mini-symposium at the "8th International Conference on Curves and Surfaces (2014)" entitled "Sampling and compressive sensing over the continuum", that will focus specifically on these issues.

http://smai.emath.fr/curves2014/

Best wishes,

Anders

Yes, we all agree that in the context of dealing with field equations, the theory needs to provide as much input as possible to the hardware folks. If this issue of phase transition can be added to the current infinite dimensional CS or in the context of TV/weighted series, then we ought to witness a Donoho-Tao moment in the Radar community at the next CoSeRa meeting :-). As a reminder the Donoho-Tao moment was well put in this 2008 IPAM newsletter:

....It’s David Donoho [5] reportedly exclaiming a panel of NSF folks “You’ve got Terry Tao (a Fields medalist [6]) talking to geoscientists, what do you want?” ....

Fall 2008 UCLA Math Department Newsletter, Mark Green Ends His Remarkable Odyssey at IPAM 

Also, following up on a comment I made in comment on a comment on "The Mathematical Shape of Things to Come", Emmanuel Candes reminded me that the phenomenon of phase transition was initially observed  in the June 2004 Robust Uncertainty Principles:Exact Signal Reconstruction from Highly Incomplete Frequency Information specifically in Figures 2 and 3. 

Which gets me to be thinking: Is this phenomenon of phase transition new provided that we already established there was a 200 year gap ? While anybody come up with signs of the phase transition in 1-D, is there an earlier version of a phase transition in 2D or 3D ?
Thanks Anders, Holger and Emmanuel for the insights and informations.
The blogs provided some very insightful subjects to read on. Here there are in no particular order. Let us note that one of them (Andrew) will be speaking at the upcoming Paris Machine Learning Meetup on Wednesday. For more, check and register here if you want to attend. In the meantime, enoy:
Dusty

• A fully automatic problem solver with human-style output
• Probably Approximately Correct

Olimex

• Weekend Programming Challenge: Week #28 Sudoku Solver

Danny

• Kaggle Titanic Contest Tutorial
• First Spark Summit
• New SOSP paper: a lightweight infrastructure for graph analytics
• Spark raises 14M $ to compete with Hadoop
• GraphLab Internship Program (Machine Learning Summer Internship)

Andrew

• Visualization, “big data”, and EDA
• Gladwell and Chabris, David and Goliath, and science writing as stone soup
• Chris Chabris is irritated by Malcolm Gladwell
• Mister P: What’s its secret sauce?
• A Bayesian approach for peer-review panels? and a speculation about Bruno Frey
• Ideas that spread fast and slow
• Give me a ticket for an aeroplane
• Scientific communication that accords you “the basic human dignity of allowing you to draw your own conclusions”

Larry

• Assumption-Free High-Dimensional Inference
• Estimating Undirected Graphs Under Weak Assumptions

SAGE

• A Symphony of Cursors" (guest post by Jason Grout)

Christian

• Statistics for spatio-temporal data [book review]
• relativity of falsification?
• interacting particle systems as… facebook

Albert

• Post-Doc Opening at TU Delft

Vladimir

• Samsung Invests in Structured Light 3D Imager Startup
• Bacterial Imager Proposed
• Crosstalk Reduction Between Multiple Structured Light Cameras
• European IR Sensor Industry Consolidates

NoI

• What stops us defining Truth?

Pip

• Proving Cook’s Theorem

Dick

• Rating FOCS 1973
• Stealing Strategies

Mikael

• Random generalized linear models

WR

• Python division by zero is not IEEE compliant

Laurent

• Conference: Is there a place for beauty in our research? A few thoughts inspired by Richard Hamming

Meena

• The connection between Linus Pauling and fMRI

Djalil

• Vieillissement
• Premier cours à Dauphine

Anand

• GmailTeX

Cable

• Manifold Flow
• Phase Separator in Operation

Dirk

• The Kurdyka-Łojasiewicz inequality and gradient descent methods
• Post-it for convex optimization for optimal transport, value functions, accelerated forward backward and Bayesion inversion

Kaggle

• POWERDOT awarded $500,000 and Announcing Heritage Health Prize 2.0

David

• Chomsky vs. Hinton
• The Free Lunch Theorem

While on Nuit Blanche, we had:

• An Empirical-Bayes Approach to Recovering Linearly Constrained Non-Negative Sparse Signals
• OrderedLASSO : Statistical Estimation and Testing via the Ordered L1 Norm - implementation 
• Phase Retrieval: Covariance Estimation, Sparse Signals
• Infinity Continues to Matter: Generalized sampling: stable reconstructions, inverse problems and compressed sensing over the continuum
• Slides: Second Edition of the International Workshop on Compressed Sensing applied to Radar (CoSeRa 2013)
• Compressed Counting Meets Compressed Sensing
• Imaging strong localized scatterers with sparsity promoting optimization
• About t'em breakthroughs and a comment on a comment on "The Mathematical Shape of Things to Come"
• Ceci n'est toujours pas le blog de Nuit Blanche
• Saturday Morning Video: The mathematics of weight loss
• Paris Machine Learning LinkedIn group and Meetup #4
• The Tale of Three Breakthroughs: Matrix Sketches, Face Recognition and an AMP based LASSO
• CfP: ITWIST'14: "international - Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology"
• Videos: Succinct Data Representations and Applications
• Nuit Blanche In Review (September 2013)
• Internet of Things #2 Paris Meetup summary
• 2497..2498..2499..
• Videos: Big Data Boot Camp Day 2,3 and 4, Simons Institute, Berkeley
• Accurate Profiling of Microbial Communities from Massively Parallel Sequencing using Convex Optimization - implementation -
• Videos: Big Data Boot Camp Day 1, Simons Institute, Berkeley
• Around the blogs in 78 Summer hours: Dina Katabi Mac Arthur Fellow, Big Data at the Simons Institute and more ....

Credit photo: Interphase Transport Lab, Texas A&M University.
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