Hi Everyone!

*** UPDATE: Visit https://twimlai.com/meetup for information on the current meetup! ***

Thanks for your interest in the paper reading group. I’m excited that so many folks have expressed interest. I’d like to use this page to share my thoughts on how this will be organized, the input I need from the community, and how you can help. Please submit your thoughts via the comments.

  • Event: This will be run as a monthly online meetup. We could do the first one as soon as mid-August, giving participants a full month to read the first paper. We would continue on a monthly basis, and announce the next paper at the end of each meetup and by email.
  • Presentations: The meetup will consist of a mix of community-driven presentations (75-90%) and invited presentations (10-25%). By this I mean most of the time members of this community present papers of their choice at the meetup–not necessarily their own. Occasionally we will bring in researchers to present their own papers, which I think would be fun twist.
  • Meeting Format: The meetups will consist of a 45-60 minute presentation of a given paper, plus a Q&A period that goes “until,” i.e. until the last participant drops out of the meetup. I’d expect them to go two hours on average. The presenters are expected to prepare and deliver slides to support their presentations.
  • Technical Level & Presentation Goals: This will vary from week to week, and depend on the presenter and the community. I expect it to be fairly technical, but I think the job of the presenter is to:
    • Explain the broader context of a paper. Why is it interesting and significant? What assumptions does it make?
    • Take us beyond the equations. What’s the point? What do the equations mean? Where do they come from?
    • Show us; not just tell us. This might be too much to ask, but I think it’d be great if every presenter at least tried to implement the paper and did a demo, if appropriate to the paper.

    Beyond these points, I think folks can get more technical in the Q&A.

  • Days & Times: I’m not sure if folks see this as an extra-curricular activity that should happen during the weekend, or a career/study activity that should happen during regular hours. One thing I’ve seen well is to stagger the hours from meetup to meetup and around the presenter’s availability so at least no one is perpetually excluded or inconvenienced.

Papers to Consider:

  • Pedro Domingos (2012). A few useful things to know about machine learning. [High level]

  • Classic DL Papers: LeNet, AlexNet, GoogLeNet, ResNet

  • GANs (2014)

  • Generating Image Descriptions (2014)

  • Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) (1997)

That’s about all I have right now. Please let me know what you think and any ideas you have. Also let us know where you’re located geographically, so we have a sense of the time zones that may work for you.

I’d like to identify 3 or 4 community members to help with the organization of this. Please let me know if you’re interested.