I’m headed out today for RecSys 2012, and have my fingers in a number of pies. Places you can see things I’m connected with somehow:

• I will have a poster for our short paper on identifying when different recommenders make different mistakes (particularly, when is one wrong but another right?) at the poster session.
• Daniel Kluver is presenting our paper on estimating the information content of ratings. This is a very cool line of work some of our newer students are spearheading, providing interesting tools for measuring and quantifying certain aspects of how recommender systems relate to their users.
• The demo session is looking amazing (I have the privilege of serving as demos co-chair this year). We’ve got a great mix of academic and industrial projects showing off their work. Really looking forward to it.
• I’ll be giving two talks at the RecSys Challenge, one about the MovieLens data set and another about LensKit.

Of course, I’ll be around all week. I’ll also be at the Decisions workshop on Sunday.

Run me down & say hi - I’d love to meet you! Or reconnect, if we know each other already.

I am proud of my ancestors. The ones whose stories I know were Swedish immigrants who left their famine-ravished home in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s in search of such luxuries as food, pay, and land to work. My great-great grandfather was an immigrant, a carpenter, and a farmer, building the house where my family now lives and farming there for a number of years.

The idea of denying someone else the opportunity to leave such a legacy for their grandchildren is abhorrent to me.

These men and women were brave (my grandmother’s father left Sweden alone, at the age of 16, with $20 in his pocket). They seized what opportunity they could to live, to work, to raise families or provide for the ones they already had.

I believe America can still be that land of opportunity, if only we will let it.

The GOP’s embrace of self-deportation (a la AZ SB 1070) is official. From the 2012 Republican Platform:

We will create humane procedures to encourage illegal aliens to return home voluntarily, while enforcing the law against those who overstay their visas.

Shrouded in the language of humanity and choice is an insidious plot. For this approach to work, it is necessary to create and present a version of America sufficiently bad that people think it is better to return to

• watch their children starve to death in abject poverty (or, if their children are lucky enough to have been born in the U.S., leave them in foster care).
• suffer under unchecked, unaccountable labor abuse.
• live with persistent, imminent threat of violence.