[#ml-discuss] IRC Channel for doubt/discussions related to **good stuff**

[Rishabh Mehrotra]

Hello everyone,

First of all, apologies for cross-posting and spamming your inboxes, but this might help someone, someday, somewhere.

We have created an IRC channel(#ml-discuss) for everyone to discuss doubts, ideas or anything related to Machine Learning / NLP / DM / Statistics / Algorithms / Complexity_Theory / any related field. If you are new to the concept of IRC, please note that IRC is just another way of group communication along with private chats, etc. All you need to do is click the link below and chose a name for yourself and then you can join the IRC channel and post your queries and/or discuss things related to Machine Learning with anyone online.

http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=%23ml-discuss

[Ubuntu people can use Xchat to login, save transcripts, etc]

Incase you want to discuss something among your friends, you can just fix some time among yourselves and ask them to come online and join the channel. The good thing about this is that in case you have any doubt and someone else (any random person online on the channel) knows anything better/more informative, he too can contribute. IRC channels are primarily used by Open Source organizations to discuss projects among its members(the whole world- as its Open Source). Getting along with IRC kind of communications is pretty easy and would help you(v.slightly) if you plan to apply for GSoC in the future.

We believe that as more people become aware of this channel, we'll have more no. of people online, thereby increasing the chances of your doubts being answered. Please note that since this channel is pretty new, it would take some time to get this thing working effectively.

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Tip: Shoot away your views or doubts on the channel and keep this thing running on your browser, so that when someone sees and answers your doubt then you can have a look. Keep this channel open on your browser, preferably always, so that you can always come back and see what people have discussed.

Current Members: As of now we had(some 50 hours ago) given this link to some people we know are(/were/can be/should be/will be) interested in ML/... related stuff. Try to pass along the link to people you know who have similar interests. Since we are all starting off so we can collaborate, discuss potential research ideas, et cetera, though this seems highly unlikely right now, but who knows!

Discussions Till Now: In these 50 hours I have seen discussions on Bayesian Learning (dealing with prior probability, Gaussian distribution etc), a bit of Information Retrieval related discussion on Learning to Rank algorithm(ListMLE) and today we talked a bit about a Contour Completion algo <of which I hadn't even heard of before> published at CVPR-2012 which just got over on 21st June. The good thing being, even if I don't really know anything, I can blatantly ask point blank, and someone will answer me. :)

Bonus: If you come across any paper from among the following conferences, atleast few of us will be **very very delighted** and would love to participate in any discussion on the same. Those conferences being: NIPS, ICML, CVPR, AAAI, ACL, COLT, AISTATS, WWW, KDD, ICDM, FOCS, STOC, SIGIR, VLDB, IJCAI. Google them if you haven't  come across them before.

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Hope to see you on the channel. Have fun!

Cheers,

Rishabh.

Please DO NOT reply to this email. You/we can discuss anything on the channel. Though you can send appreciation mails directly to me. :-D <kidding>