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NEXT is a system that makes it easy to develop, evaluate, and apply active learning. The purpose of this wiki is to provide tutorials and documentation for NEXT users.

NEXT users are either

• algorithm developers that want to use/test/evaluate some algorithm. These algorithms should fit into an existing interface (e.g., pairwise comparisons) and have their inputs and outputs specified exactly by Algs.yaml.
• application (or interface) developers that determine the type of question being asked the user (e.g., pairwise comparisons vs triplets).

We anticipate NEXT users being primarily algorithm developers.

Tutorial

This tutorial will walk through creating and deploying a NEXT application

• 0: Overview: Start here to get a broad overview of the concepts and components involved in NEXT
• 1: Application Development: Here we cover the steps to writing a NEXT application
  • 1.1: Algorithms: Algorithms are the mathematical heart of an appliction
  • 1.2: Interface: The interface defines your application's required inputs and outputs
  • 1.3: Application Code: The application code itself is the glue that allows a single uniform interface across many algorithms within an application
  • 1.4: Widgets: Widgets are HTML pages that display NEXT queries
  • 1.5 Dashboard: Dashboards are HTML pages that display any desired statistics about your application, including monitoring and timing information as well as mathematical statistics such as a computed embedding
• 2: Launching on EC2: One way to deploy a NEXT application is on Amazon's EC2
  • 2.1: EC2 account quick start, a short guide about how to interact with AWS and obtain the key pair/secret access key/etc.
• 3: Run an Experiment: Once NEXT is running, we want to launch an experiment
• 4: Debugging: If your code does not work, here's how we debug it

Dataflows

• initExp
• getQuery
• processAnswer
• getModel

Reference

• Butler API: The Butler is the mechanism for storing and accessing stored data in a NEXT application
• Base Interface: All NEXT applications must implement this basic interface (and may extend it)
• AWS Account Quickstart: How to get set up with an Amazon Web Services account

Builtin Apps Documentation

• PoolBasedTripletMDS
• DuelingBanditsPureExploration
• CardinalBanditsFeatures
• CardinalBanditsPureExploration