When I started writing this post, I was sitting on a train from Granada to Madrid. I had spent the last two days in Sierra Nevada, a National Park in Spain known for its great ski slopes. The Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference for 2011 had its workshops there in December, and I was an invited speaker for the “Machine Learning for Sustainability” workshop. I had a good time there, and look forward to attending this year too.
During the 40 hours that I was in Sierra Nevada (yes, unfortunately it was a short trip), there were talks on many different topics, which was very refreshing for me. Besides talks focusing on energy, the topic I work on, there were talks on global climate models, ecosystem modeling, species conservation and water monitoring. Overall, it was a well organized event that shows promise.
At the end of the day, it seemed as if there were basically two main things that could be improved for next year’s version of the workshop: (a) better advertisement and (b) clearly define a few interesting problems in sustainability along with the challenges they pose to the machine learning (ML) domain, so that more people from the ML community can join in.
The first issue I am battling by writing about the workshop here. I will attempt to address the second issue by summarizing my talk on another post later. I spoke about “Machine Learning Challenges in Building Energy Management”. For now, however, I will leave you with some pictures of Sierra Nevada and La Alhambra, as well as with the following thought: are the carbon emissions associated with a transatlantic flight to a sustainability conference in any way less harmful? A positive answer would help me feel better about myself.
Sierra Nevada, view from the hotel.
La Alhambra
La Alhambra, one of the gardens in the Palacios Nazaríes.