Posted by Lexing Xie. Thanks to Mario Günther, Ignacio Ojea Quintana, Swapnil Mishra and Atoosa Kasirzadeh for many great suggestions.

Fig. 1: Overview of three concurrently evolving timelines in the development of cars². Top (green) - key events in engine and early system developments. Middle (red) - key events in car and road-safety related legislations. Bottom (blue) - rough separation of eras in car styling. Key events selected from Wikipedia narratives on cars and history of the automobile³. See article for discussion. For readability, time scales are not uniform.

posted by Lexing Xie and Alex Mathews

posted by Lexing Xie, additions and edits by Aditya Menon

I like cakes, and I enjoy reading logically lucid research articles. This post argues that research papers can benefit from explicitly thinking about and planning its four logical layers, just like a multi-layered Mille-feuille, or Napoleon cake (image credit: alyonascooking).

posted by Sam Toyer and Sylvie Thiébaux

Planning algorithms try to find series of actions which enable an intelligent agent to achieve some goal. Such algorithms are used everywhere from manufacturing to robotics to power distribution. In our recent paper at AAAI ‘18, we showed how to use deep learning techniques from vision and natural language processing to teach a planning system to solve entire classes of sophisticated problems by training on a few simple examples.

posted by Quyu Kong, with edits from Lexing Xie

Sports is a prominent theme in Canberra. This post celebrates two of our competitive athletes, and looks back at two outings when the whole lab flexed our muscles and got a little bit wet.

posted by Lexing Xie

We look for new team members who value curiosity, critical thinking, and diversity in ideas, skills, and cultural perspectives.

posted by Marian-Andrei Rizoiu , edited by Lexing Xie

“The fundamental scarcity in the modern world is the scarcity of attention.” – Herbert A. Simon.

Human attention is a limited resource and influencing the mechanisms governing its allocation is the holy grail of advertisement. Our ICWSM’17 paper applies the recent HIP popularity modeling to further examine popularity under promotion and answer questions such as:

• How much promotion is required for this item to rise to the top 5% in popularity?
• How fast will an item respond to a given amount of promotion?
• Why is constant promotion desirable?

posted by Marian-Andrei Rizoiu , edited by Lexing Xie

One major gap in understanding social media is to precisely quantify the relationship between the popularity of an online item and the external promotions it receives. Our recent WWW’17 paper supplies the missing link. We use a mathematical model to describe the continuous interaction between external promotions (e.g. tweets about a video) and popularity dynamics (e.g. daily views). This in turn answers several practical questions:

• Can we explain the complex multi-phased popularity dynamics widely seen online?
• Can one predict what could become viral?
• Can one predict what would not become viral even if heavily promoted?

posted by Siqi Wu, edited by Marian-Andrei Rizoiu and Lexing Xie

We are in an era when information consumption and production are democratized. Regular users not only consume information, but they digest, mutate and produce new information which gets passed on to other users. Prompted by a press inquiry from the Polish online news www.press.pl, we analyze the impact of these emergent sources of information versus traditional media, in the context of politics. More precisely, we study how YouTube videos posted by two traditional news sources (BBC news/UK, ABC news/USA) and two emergent online news sources (The Alex Jones Channel, The Young Turks) are viewed around the time of the US political elections of 2016.

posted by Lexing Xie

This post is the first of a series on modeling social media popularity using the Hawkes Intensity Process. “Expecting to be HIP (II)” gives an overview of results and interpretations on a large YouTube video dataset. “Expecting to be HIP (III)” further quantifies the effects and interpretations of promotion.

posted by Lexing Xie

Markov chains and random walk on graphs are long-standing subjects in applied math and related disciplines. Given a markov chain / transition matrix / graph, properties of the random walk such as steady state distribution, mixing time are well-studied. Only in recent years, however, the inverse problem has started gaining interest – that is, given some measurements after random walk on a graph, infer some version of the graph. This blog post compares three related but different problem settings in recent literature from (Kumar15), (Mackay15) and (Xie13).