NSF proposals, big data

I have been breaking my rules about posting! This is just to protect my reader from the terrifying fact that I have spent every spare second working on my NSF proposals. The only exception was Big Data Lunch, an event I co-organized at NYU, in which Rob Fergus (CS) gave a short seminar about his attempt to organize and classify a set of 80 million images harvested from the web. His results are impressive: He has so many images that he can use brute-force techniques like least-squares to find similar images! The discussion, among about 30 people from around the University, was very lively.