UCR Time Series Classification/Clustering page

Eamonn Keogh just posted this announcement:

We are please to announce a new resource for researchers working on time series classification and clustering.

The UCR Time Series Classification/Clustering page has the largest collection of test datasets (with objective class labels) in the world.

Furthermore, in order encourage research that is both reproducible and comparable to other works, we have created training/test data splits, and listed results for some standard benchmarking algorithms such as Euclidean Distance and Dynamic Time Warping.

We have also made Matlab code available that allows all results to be exactly reproduced.

The page is located here: http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/time_series_data/

We encourage donations of datasets/results and suggestions/bug fixes.

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The Cost of Graduation

From Ian I got to this Observer article. The story is that university education is becoming less attractive as the costs increase and the salaries for graduates don’t correspondingly increase. The net result is that universities might be in an increasingly competitive game as western universities progressively lose their edge in the world wide market and as students look for more cost efficient alternative.

(…) more and more A-level students ask about alternatives to university, said the author of the research, Peter Brown, director of Gabbitas Educational Consultants. (…) we are seeing Chinese universities [are also] more financially attractive.

Asian universities stand to win big. In the western world, the first university to offer high quality, but significantly cheaper university education, by essentially cutting down on the fat and keeping what really matters, is going to win big time.

We are at a pivotal point where it might be good timing for a radical rethinking of university education.

Did I mention that you can listen to Stanford lectures on your ipod? See http://itunes.stanford.edu/. Chances are good that Stanford will be among the winners.

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On moving a sofa around a corner

I just thought it was a cool title for a paper (if anyone has read it, let me know if it is any good):

On moving a sofa around a corner

in Geometriae Dedicata, Volume 42, Number 3, June 1992

Joseph L. Gerver

A necessary condition is given for a region of the plane to have the greatest possible area of any region able to move around a right-angled corner in a hallway of unit width. A region is constructed, with area 2.2195… and bounded by 18 analytic pieces, which satisfies this condition. It is conjectured that this is the unique region of maximum area.

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Problem Solving Heuristics

Ian recalls some of the basic problem solving heuristics:

If you are having difficulty understanding a problem, try drawing a picture.
If you can’t find a solution, try assuming that you have a solution and seeing what you can derive from that (“working backward”).
If the problem is abstract, try examining a concrete example.
Try solving a more general problem first. This is the “inventor’s paradox”: a more ambitious plan may actually have more chances of success.

While I never studied these heuristics, I think I use them all. I probably learned them by trial and error. Maybe we ought to teach those.

I would add a few which I feel are very potent:

Try to sketch a solution hastily, then try to find faults in your solution.
If you can’t solve a problem, try to solve a related, but simpler problem.
If you can’t solve a problem, try dividing into smaller problems (divide-and-conquer).

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The Combinatorial Object Server

It looks like it is quite old, but I found the Combinatorial Object Server for the first time this week and I thought I’d share it with my readers. I was looking for irreducible polynomials with binary coefficients (don’t ask why) and I found that this server can generate them on the fly for you! A beautiful application of the web.

Here are some things it can do: