Skip to content

Category Archives: University

Drops of wisdom, food for thoughts.

I am still reading Vapnik’s The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory. I began reading it a first time in March, but then left it aside for months, so I started over in October. It’s enlightening and a pleasure to read, if one can stay focused. Every now and then, Vapnik lets drops of wit fall [...]

Posted on 15 December 2011 † Matteo § English § Nerd ‡ Comments (0) °

Speedy update

This is the kind of post I don’t like to write, but I’m writing one now anyway. It’s just to say that I have very little time to blog about “serious” stuff, meaning “to write very/too long posts in Italian with some philosophical references“. My research is taking “away” a lot of time, I started [...]

Posted on 25 September 2011 † Matteo § English § Personal ‡ Comments (0) °

Libri per vacanza

Cinque giorni all’Isola d’Elba. Quattro libri. Uno già letto, uno iniziato di recente, uno iniziato e mai finito, uno letto a tratti. Uno “di lavoro”, uno di novelle, uno sullo scrivere, uno sulla società. Tre di Italiani, uno di un Russo. Luigi Pirandello — Le Novelle Italo Calvino — Lezioni Americane Tommaso Labranca — Neoproletariato [...]

Posted on 21 July 2011 † Matteo § Italiano § Misc § Nerd ‡ Comments (0) °

Are complex theories practical?

The end of my second year as a Ph.D. student is getting close and I must start thinking about a dissertation topic. At least, I already have some ideas about the areas of my dissertation: databases, data mining, and modern statistics and learning theory. The problem of learning drew my interest since I discovered there [...]

Posted on 26 April 2011 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (0) °

Machine Learning and Theory

This is exactly the point and is where I want to take my research! “Machine Learning has become a very mathematical and statistical-based research area yet the theoretical computer science community hasn’t played the role in this area that we could have.” From a blog post by Lance Fortnow Posted from Providence, Rhode Island, United [...]

Posted on 14 March 2011 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (0) °

Letti? Dove andiamo noi non c’è bisogno di letti.

Anche per questo semestre, la nostra buona (???) notte in dipartimento a lavorare l’abbiamo fatta. Ho quasi difficoltà a credere di aver passato le ultime otto ore ad inserire dati in Excel, per poi darli in pasto a Matlab, ma tant’è. Per fortuna che ho scelto di fare teoria (per quanto molto applicata/applicabile), perché fare [...]

Posted on 29 November 2010 † Matteo § Italiano § Nerd ‡ Comments (0) °

P, NP, and Goedel

Some time ago I had the “intuition” that there should be a connection between Kurt Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem and the P=? NP question. I never found the time to look at the literature on that, but eventually Suresh posted a short summary of a tutorial held at FOCS this year. It’s a nice, short, and [...]

Posted on 24 October 2010 † Matteo § English § Nerd ‡ Comments (0) °

In “praise” of Bickel and Doksum

The only class I am taking this semester (and the second-to-last before I am done with classes) is APMA 2670, Mathematical Statistics 1, an advanced graduate course on statistical inference. Among the suggested references for the course there is P.J. Beckel, K. A. Doksum, “Mathematical Statistics, Vol. I, 2nd Ed.” If you read the Amazon [...]

Posted on 21 October 2010 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (1) °

“Take charge of your PhD project” ?

Rilancio un link segnalatomi da Anna, grad student ad Italian Studies qui a Brown: “Take charge of your PhD project!”. Personalmente la trovo fuffa, nel senso che se hai bisogno di un corso per imparare a gestire le relazioni con il tuo advisor, una persona che, in un modo o nell’altro, dovresti esserti scelto, allora [...]

Posted on 18 October 2010 † Matteo § Italiano ‡ Comments (0) °

Mandelbrot

Come certo saprete, è morto Mandelbrot, il “padre” dei frattali. Una citazione per tutte da “The Fractal Geometry of Nature”: “Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.” (non so se l’ultima sia davvero una “conseguenza” dei frattali, [...]

Posted on 18 October 2010 † Matteo § Italiano ‡ Comments (0) °