NIPS outstanding student paper award

I am glad to share a good news with all my friends.

My paper with title “Construction of Dependent Dirichlet Processes based on Poisson Processes” receives the outstanding student paper award in NIPS 2010.

Relevant information can be found in the NIPS program booklet. Two papers out of 1200+ are awarded and two others got honorable mentions.

My gratitude is delivered to Prof. Grimson, Fisher, and Willsky, as well as all the friends who have been supporting and encouraging me along my academic exploration.

The basic idea of this work is to exploit the theoretical connections between Poisson, Gamma, and Dirichlet processes in constructing dependent Dirichlet processes. The construction proposed in this paper has essential differences from the traditional constructions that are based on either Polya urn (Chinese restaurant process) or stick breaking. I believe that this work is only a starting point along the line in exploiting this relation, and there remains a lot of room for future exploration. I would be really happy if there could be lots of efforts along this direction that make it into an important methodology in Nonparametric Bayesian learning and estimation. Had this happened, it could be much more significant than this paper itself.

The paper is available by the following link:

http://dahuasky.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/ddp_nips10.pdf

Here is the supplemental document, which contains the description of relevant math concepts as well as the proofs of the theorems in paper:

http://dahuasky.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/supplement_doc.pdf

Any feedback is highly appreciated. Thank you.