Optimization for Machine Learning

Dear students,

As announced,

• there will be an exam Q&A session in the last lecture next Monday (see also the forum)
• an additional Q&A opportunity will be offered on August 2, 3pm (at CISPA, room 3.21, 3pm) by Xiaowen.

Most projects are now graded (except from some pending re-submissions). Students that have passed all requirements can now register for the exam.

• The exam will take place on August 8, 2pm in room GHH.
• You must register at least one week before the exam.

You can directly register on LSF. The registration link on this side should redirect your there. Some students (e.g. erasmus) cannot register on LSF, for them registration in CMS suffices. If it does not work for you, please contact me (or the study office) early.

Dear students,

As announced last week, there will be no live lecture next week (June 19) due to conference travel. Instead, a video recording is available (as of now) under the Materials tab.

Please use the tutorials to ask questions, and we will also reserve a bit of time in the following week (June 26) to go over questions that you might have on the lecture materials.

Dear students, 

I have uploaded a brief feedback to your project proposals (the ones that have been submitted).

As a general feedback:

- while most proposals had nice ideas, many were lacking rigor in describing how a 'fair comparison/evaluation' would be performed. Please carefully think about this, and also include a discussion in your final report on 'why' you methodology is adequate to evaluate the properties you want to study.

- many projects were submitted by teams of size 1. There might be an opportunity to merge similar projects, or for people that do not have one yet to join one of these (you can use the forum to exchange). The course materials are quite comprehensive and demanding, and therefore I think that tripling the effort for the project work is not an ideal strategy if you need the time for exercises/quizzes, etc.

Now that we have learned about stochastic gradient descent in the lecture, it is about time to start thinking about a cool group project ;-)

The registration is open on the website (note that you can register teams of size 1-3 to submit the project).

Originally, the (voluntary) submission deadline for the project idea was set to be May 22. However, we can also take some time in the next lecture to address your questions. If you want to adjust your project plan based on this discussion, you can also submit it a few days later (e.g. Thursday May 25 - end of day).