Friday, May 10, 2013

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:


Sebastien: ORF523: Optimization with bandit feedback

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

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:




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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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Here is a talk about the D-Wave quantum computer given at Princeton last December.

http://www.pppl.gov/events/adiabatic-quantum-computing-d-wave-one

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