Later, Sam

Second RIP post in less than 24 hours, sad, hopefully the last one of these for awhile. RIP Sam Roweis, one of my heroes in computer science. Just watch the video below, hot-linked from http://videolectures.net/sam_roweis/ to see what I mean. I never got the chance to take a course from him (being rejected from UofT, damnit), but I remember watching this video and thinking "I want to be you." I hope he's still working on machine learning wherever he is. Most of what I know about Sam Roweis is through his work, honestly I'm only really familiar with the local linear embedding (LLE) algorithm, which was in Science, (which is the serious hotness). I may get around to summarizing that paper at some point, since I've been really interested with manifolds and computational geometry as it relates to learning algorithms as of late.

Reading:
1. Roweis, S. T., and L. K. Saul. "Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction by Locally Linear Embedding." Science 290.5500 (2000): 2323.