Carl Smith : Dec 1

"This week I plan to present topics from the first half (chapters 1-5) of Wainwright and Jordan's "Graphical Models, Exponential Families, and Variational Inference". I will emphasize the ideas of 1) conjugate duality between partition function and negative entropy, and 2) nonconvexity in mean field approaches to inference. I will present the following week on some combination of ideas from the second half of the same paper, related papers by Wainwright, and related stuff Liam and I have been working on, depending on time and what people are interested in after the first hour."