MS embedding infer.NET

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• Tuesday, May 08, 2012 10:46 AM

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  Today components of Infer.NET are embedded in Xbox Live movie and game recommendation, and concepts have been used in Bing ad prediction and in Xbox skill ranking. There are other unannounced projects in progress.

  John

  • Marked As Answer by dtosato Wednesday, May 09, 2012 11:22 AM
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• Wednesday, May 09, 2012 11:20 AM

   

   
  

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  Thanks John for your answer. I have two more questions about this topic. Namely, (1) is it plausible to find infer.NET embedded in the next version of Visual Studio? In other words, will the probabilistic programming be a new way to write software in the immediate future? (2) It could be very interesting to combine the graphical schema of a graphical model into a class diagram.  Therefore any change in the class diagram should be reflected into the graphical model (as a program) and vice versa. Will we have this kind of tool in the future? Is it realistic?
  
  Regards,
  Diego
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• Thursday, May 10, 2012 9:39 AM

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  As regards the first question, I am not at liberty to talk  (positively or negatively) about future plans; but you may want to check out http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fun/ which related to your question.

  I'm not sure I follow the second question - can you be more explicit about the terms you use, perhaps giving an example.

  John

   

  • Marked As Answer by dtosato Thursday, May 10, 2012 12:17 PM
  • Unmarked As Answer by dtosato Thursday, May 10, 2012 12:17 PM
  • Marked As Answer by dtosato Thursday, May 10, 2012 12:17 PM
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• Thursday, May 10, 2012 1:11 PM

   

   
  

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  Thanks John.

  Yes, I wold like to know if you will provide a tool like MSBNx for infer.NET that can be embedded into a future version of Visual Studio. I know that infer.NET is already able to plot a factor graph given its probabilistic graphical model, but one of the most interesting feature of a graphical model is that is "graphical", thus one can draw a graph to build the model. So, it can be very useful to have a tool that given a drawn graph, it is able to turn it into infer.NET code. Moreover, as for class diagrams of Visual Studio, it would be nice if a change into the generated infer.NET code is directly visible in the graph.

  To be more concrete, the pipeline I would like to follow build a program written in infer.NET (C#) is: (1) sketch on a paper a pgm; (2) visually model the pgm into a sort of class diagram; (3) give the diagram to a too,which is able to translate the diagram into an infer.NET program. Then any change on the code is reported to the diagram.

  Please do not think that the laziness is the reason why I need a graphical tool to build an infer.NET program. I think the pipeline I have just described is fundamental to exploit infer.NET to tackle complex problems. This because if an inference problem involves several "objects" which have to be modelled into a pgm, it is difficult to keep everything in mind and just code it using the infer.NET.

  Regards,
   
  Diego

  
  

  • Edited by dtosato Thursday, May 10, 2012 1:14 PM spell check
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• Wednesday, May 30, 2012 11:14 PM

   

   
  

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  i'm on Diego's side. John Winn, aren't we asking for the same functionality you gave us with Vibe?

  perhaps you guys are sticking to the (inference) knitting and deploying your research resources on the kernel capabilities of Infer.NET leaving us to wrap that engine in any graphical mechanism we like? clearly, dgml is the mechanism of choice for most of us.

  rwap

  ^m

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