This is an incredibly difficult post to write. Michael Benjamin Cohen, an amazing student and person passed away this week in Berkeley. Below is the official MSR statement (where he spent the summer together with many friends) and some personal remembrance. Also this is a picture of one of the many many happy moments we had together this summer at MSR (with Yin Tat Lee too):

Our latest work, titled “Evidence of complex contagion of information in social media: An experiment using Twitter bots” was published in Plos One on September 22, 2017!

I’m assuming that some people who see my talk at Demystifying Data Science conference will be dropping by here, so I wanted to put up a quick post summarizing some of the resources I have made available to data science learners.

1. Azure sample notebooks (run on Azure)

paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.07634.pdf

This year we’re organizing the third NIPS workshop on approximate inference. It is together with Francisco Ruiz, Stephan Mandt, Cheng Zhang, and James Mclnerney—and alongside our amazing committee of Tamara Broderick, Michalis Titsias, David Blei, and Max Welling.

Daily Fantasy Football has exploded in popularity since 2015. Here’s a guide to navigate the murky waters towards treasure island.

** Thu 21 September 2017

Thanks to this post of facial landmarks and the openface project!