Community

I spend a lot of time supporting and influencing the machine learning community.

• With OpenAI's support, I created the Self-Organizing Conference on Machine Learning, a conference where the participants create the content instead of attending talks that were selected by an organizing committee. The conference strongly promotes diversity of the group of participants (many kinds of diversity: gender, race, area of machine learning study, role of researcher/developer/student, academia/industry, nationality, amount of machine learning experience, sexual orientation, etc.) and emphasizes a code of conduct that creates a very welcoming environment where newcomers to the field and prominent influential leaders of the field discuss research ideas in a spirit of egalitarian camaraderie. The conference was inspired by the observation that for many people the most valuable part of many other machine learning conferences is often the lunch and hallway conversation; SOCML captures the spirit of these less curated conference spaces and extends them to be the entire event.
• I co-organized an ICML workshop on representation learning with Yoshua Bengio and Dumitru Erhan.
• I have been an area chair / meta-reviewer for NIPS and ICLR.
• I have been a reviewer many times for NIPS, ICLR, ICML, IJCAI, CVPR, UAI, JMLR, and many other publications.