Federal Budget 2007

The federal government is extending its funding for their top-tier graduate scholarships.

Canada Graduate Scholarships are currently awarded to the top 2,000 masters and 2,000 doctoral students each year and are worth $17,500 and $35,000 dollars per year respectively. The addition funding promised will mean an extra 1000 scholarships awarded over the next 2 years. This is good news, especially when you appreciate that as of the 2006 budget, all post-secondary scholarships are tax exempt.

Flckr Photos

There are some wonderful photographs of the Unversity of Toronto campus on Flickr. To showcase these great photographs I have wrote some javascript which uses the Flickr API to grab a random photo from the list the most interesting photos tagged with uoft and display it.

Now, I took care to only grab the photo which use a creative commons license that allows there distribution, however, if you see an image of yours that you would rather not see here, please just let me know and I will take it down.

Minimax Regret and MDPs

One topic I am currently thinking about is calculating policies for Markov Decions Processes when we are uncertain about the reward function. I find this to be an interesting question because we have good tools for allowing domain experts to specify the dynamics of a decision process, yet specifying the reward function is not always easy or intuitive.

Here's the idea: let a domain expert specify some kind of an incomplete reward function and use the minimax regret criterion to measure how much one could regret choosing a particular policy given the unknown reward function. We can further use the minimax regret to compute questions to ask a designer to quickly eliminate the uncertainty in the reward function.