[This is a refactoring of the material that should have been broken out from yesterday's discussion of the expected reciprocal rank evaluation metric.] Yahoo! is hosting an online Learning to Rank Challenge. Sort of like a poor man’s Netflix, given that the top prize is US$8K. [Update: I clearly can't read. As [...]

Expected Reciprocal Rank Evaluation Metric In this post, I want to discuss the evaluation metric, expected reciprocal rank (ERR), which is the basis of Yahoo!’s Learning to Rank Challenge. The ERR metric was introduced in: Chapelle, Olivier, Donald Metzler, Ya Zhang, and Pierre Grinspan. 2009. Expected reciprocal rank for graded relevance. In CIKM. The metric [...]

Shell code attacks are starting to speak English, firewalls have their work cut out for them.

One of the things people seem to find confusing is the distinction in wildcard or captured generics between extends and super. Wild Card extends One issue with Java generics is that even though String extends CharSequence, List<String> does not extend List<CharSequence>. The most specific variable to which we can assign either list type is List<? extends [...]

Genetic activation is hierarchically structured at many different levels. Tight clusters of associated genes are co-activated to construct molecular machines or participate in genetic pathways. Biologists spend considerable time trying to work out these pathways down to the rate equation level. More abstract interaction graphs are available from the KEGG Pathway Database, [...]