Why I So Enjoyed Learning With and From Calvin Massey

[Excerpt] “I am pleased and proud to participate in this tribute to Calvin Massey, with whom I had the pleasure to work and play for about two decades. When I think of Calvin—and I think of him often—I think of a generous friend, a gregarious colleague and a genuinely good man. He possessed many admirable traits, but today I want to focus on three: (1) his breadth; (2) his independent mind; and (3) his thoughtfulness.

An Empirical Study of Stochastic Variational Algorithms for the Beta Bernoulli Process

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) is emerging as the most promising candidate for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models to large datasets. However, the performance of these methods has been assessed primarily in the context of Bayesian topic models, particularly latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Deriving several new algorithms, and using synthetic, image and genomic datasets, we investigate whether the understanding gleaned from LDA applies in the setting of sparse latent factor models, specifically beta process factor analysis (BPFA). We demonstrate that the big picture is consistent: using Gibbs sampling within SVI to maintain certain posterior dependencies is extremely effective. However, we find that different posterior dependencies are important in BPFA relative to LDA. Particularly, approximations able to model intra-local variable dependence perform best.Comment: ICML, 12 pages. Volume 37: Proceedings of The 32nd International Conference on Machine Learning, 201

Copyright Competition: The Shifting Boundaries of Convergence Between U.S. and Canadian Copyright Regimes in the Digital Age

The great copyright debate between protecting creators and encouraging information-sharing has always been a contentious and likely unresolvable battle. However, with the crafting of new legislation designed to rein in unscrupulous sharing in the age of online sharing and piracy, the discussion grows ever more heated. The economies of Canada and the U.S. have always been intertwined, and in a copyright context, this has never been clearer. Since Canada began to appear on the U.S. “Special 301” piracy reports, the two nations have been locked into a system of promulgating ever-more restrictive copyright policy, the logical extreme of which may be to chill creative production entirely. This Note argues that the U.S. and Canada should examine each others’ less restrictive policies, such as Canadian statutory damages and notice-and-notice, and U.S. anti-circumvention, so that balanced copyright regimes may exist on either side of the border

Lessons from California\u27s Recent Experience with Its Non-Unitary (Divided) Executive: Of Mayors, Governors, Controllers, and Attorneys General

It is often said that one of the great advantages of a federalist system is that states can operate as laboratories of democracy, experimenting with common law and statutory frameworks in ways that provide useful policy information to other states as well as the federal government. The utility of this framework is not limited to the common law or experiments by legislatures; it applies with equal, albeit underappreciated, force to matters of constitutional law. Thus, in a symposium dedicated to examining the meaning and future of the federal ¿unitary executive,¿ the experience of states¿almost all of which reject a unitary executive model¿warrants some inquiry