Nuit Blanche: The Way You See It.

Every once in while, I have to explain what Nuit Blanche is. I often trip on what the goals of the blog are and eventually always mentioned that it really is targeted toward specialists. I don't think it's a good way to introduce the subject :-) Here is what some of you had to say about it following the recent Favor to Ask entry.

Patrick Gill
Senior Research Scientist at Rambus

Igor's Nuit Blanche blog is a fantastic resource for the entire compressed sensing community, both for its comprehensiveness and for its cogent summaries of cutting-edge work.

Meena Mani
Brain image analysis: data analysis and neuroscience

Igor's blog is a great resource/bulletin board for all that is going on in the world of compressed sensing and related areas. I have attended workshops that I wouldn't ordinarily have after learning about them on Nuitblanche. I am impressed not only by Igor's energy and enthusiasm but also his generosity and interest in encouraging graduate students and young researchers.

Danny Bickson
Co-Founder at GraphLab

Let me make it short: Igor is found everywhere. Igor knows everything. With unlimited energy he follows research in multiple disciplines and got to a level of a science guru. One million page reads of science a year says it all. Igor sets a new bar we should all strive to.

Thomas Arildsen
Assistant Professor at Aalborg University

Igor provides a great service to the scientific community with his Nuit Blanche blog which is a must-follow for anyone trying to keep track of compressed sensing.

Thong Do
Co-Founder at ADATAO, Inc.

Igor has a great vision to build the Nuit Blanche blog for the compressed sensing research community. This blog is very helpful for grad students, researchers and other professionals who are interested in compressed sensing and its development. When I was a grad student, I read the blog daily to get myself always updated with latest advances in the field. The blog gave me a fast and very efficient way to acquire state-of-the-art knowledge of the field without spending a lot of time to search around. The blog contributes partially to the rapid growth of the compressed sensing field as it helps research works/papers become more visible to other researchers in a timely fashion. Igor also has many great ideas and actions to build a stronger research community around his blog. He often shares his own discussion with other researchers about some specific topics or about their latest published works/papers publicly on the blog. Those discussions bring out many valuable insights to other researchers in the field. In short, I strongly believe that the blog and Igor's approach to build a research community around it are disruptive innovations that fundamentally changes the way people do research and publish their research works.

Elan Pavlov
at Deductomix

Igor provides an invaluable resource to the compressed sensing community. Igor acts as an informal clearing house for new results in the field and interesting and novel hypothesis.

Jean-Luc Bouchot
Visiting assistant professor @ Drexel University

Igor administrates blogs, websites, and groups revolving around compressive sensing and matrix factorization. His ressources are of very high quality and serve as reference for anybody (beginners to advanced/expert researchers)

I always get only useful information out this.

Paul Shearer
Research Fellow at University of Michigan

Nuit Blanche is a must-read for anyone interested in the latest exciting ideas in signal processing and machine learning. Igor does a great job of sifting the wheat from the chaff, delivering the best of the day, week, and month to researchers around the world. 

Igor is a strong advocate and facilitator of the best practices in modern science. He encourages researchers to make their results reproducible, open access, and open source, and facilitates open discussion of preprint articles to assess and improve their quality. He collects the latest algorithms and software into useful repositories such as the Matrix Factorization Jungle, which is the largest collection of links to matrix factorization implementations online.

These are the sorts of things that the whole research community should be doing, but relatively few actually do. I don't know of anyone else who does more to make these good things happen, and he does it for free, out of the love of science. That is something very special, and I just hope he keeps it up.

Laurent Jacques
Professor and F.R.S.-FNRS Research Associate at Université catholique de Louvain

Since I started to work in compressed sensing and inverse problem solving, I know and use frequently the blog Nuit Blanche developed and maintained by Igor Carron. Reading it daily is a permanent source of inspiration and help every researcher to stay informed with the most recent developments in the community. I have to say that this is probably the only website that covers all the aspect of these two topics, from the most advanced theories to recent applications and technologies. Igor's skills in detecting and explaining intuitively difficult concepts extend also to other fields like matrix completion, computational biology, astronomy or computational photography.

Emmanuel Candes and Terry Tao also wrote about Nuit Blanche in the Dec. '08 issue of the IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter with these words:

 For instance, the blog Nuit Blanche [1], edited by Igor Carron, has at least one entry per day, each introducing two or three—sometimes even more— papers in the field. This blog is widely read and Igor reports a few thousand daily hits. In the academic community, the level of excitement is also clearly perceptible in several special issues that have been dedicated to this topic, see [2] for example.

Thank you Patrick, Meena, Danny, Thomas, Thong, Elan, Jean-Luc, Laurent, Emmanuel and Terry for the good words. If you feel like you want to say something similar about Nuit Blanche, you can add a recommendation on my LinkedIn profile.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/IgorCarron

Credit:NASA/ESA, SOHO

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