AI News Today

Discussions: Hacker News (397 points, 97 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (247 points, 27 comments) Translations: German, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Russian, Turkish The tech world is abuzz with GPT3 hype. Massive language models (like GPT3) are starting to surprise us with their abilities. While not yet completely reliable for most businesses to put in front of their customers, these models are showing sparks of cleverness that are sure to accelerate the march of automation and the possib

Here is an image from the 10th art of neuroscience contest. It is striking in that it gives a view of the brain, where there are two major parts: the cerebrum and the cerebellum. Of course there are a lot of interesting structures hidden within the cerebrum, but still: Is this a von Neumann architecture, […]

The Covid 19 virus has been with us since late 2019 but only spread into a pandemic in early 2020. That is just seven months ago. Since then there have been thousands of journal articles, news reports, editorials, reports, commentaries, blogs and all other matter of text documents dealing with the virus, its spread and […]

Last month I did an interview for Johan Steyn. It was a great 45-min-conversation where we covered a variety of topics such as: the definition of the singularity; whether we are making progress towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI); open vs closed systems; the importance of consciousness; my Amazon bestseller Conversations with the Future; how I […]

Renée Cummings is a criminologist, criminal psychologist, and an AI ethicist who, among other things, specializes in best-practice criminal justice interventions and implicit bias. Given the global Black Lives Matter movement and the fact that there have been numerous examples where technological solutions have been proven to exhibit a biased or even racist predisposition, I […]

Bibliometrics and scientometrics often involve the monitoring of research, the assessment of the scientific contribution of authors, journals, specific works, or citations as well as the analysis of the dissemination process of scientific knowledge. The discipline has grown rapidly over the last 10-20 years. One of the reasons is the advent of readily available computer […]

John Ford Public Sector Research Psychologist The author can be reached at johnford514@yahoo.com This is the second of two Blogs on the Hiller Dictionary. The first one is titled Hiller Vagueness Dictionary: A Content Analysis Dictionary that Keeps on Giving The Hiller Communication Vagueness scales are useful measures of document clarity because they use vocabulary […]

Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that essentially re-wrote the benchmark kernel, which increase

2020 is the year where machine learning on mobile is no longer the hot new thing. Adding some kind of intelligence to apps has become standard practice. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean Apple has stopped innovating. 😅 In this blog post, I’ll summarize what’s new

Xiaoyi Yin (尹肖贻) has kindly translated this post into Chinese ( 中文 ) </span&

I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers. Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these groups are (including in some qualities that I had assumed were present in great people everywhere, like very high levels of self-belief). So I’ve been thinking about the ways they’re the same, because maybe there is something to learn about qualities of really effective people in general. The best peopl

This is the first of two Blogs on the Hiller Vagueness Dictionary It all started back in the late sixties and early seventies when J.H. Hiller and his collaborators wrote a series of papers exploring communication vagueness. Back in those early days they used computer-assisted content analysis to analyze lectures, students papers and presentations to […]

Sometimes simulating complex systems is the best way to understand them. Read more "HASH: a free, online platform for modeling the world"

Part one of a three part deep dive into the curve neuron family.

Almost every company and non-profit working on COVID-19 that I offered to help asked for support with clinical trials—for companies focusing on developing novel drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics, rapidly spinning up trials is one of their biggest bottlenecks. Science remains the only way out of the COVID-19 crisis. Dramatically improving clinical trials, which are usually time-consuming and cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, is one of the highest-leverage ways to get out of it faster.

Si vous désirez adopter l’analyse sémantique dans vos études marketing, voici deux webinars qui pourront vous intéresser ! Ils sont présentés par Normand Péladeau, CEO de Provalis Research et expert en analyse sémantique. Webinar 1 Analyse de données textuelles : approche qualitative ou machine learning?? Un faux dilemme Beaucoup de solutions d’analyse sémantique reposent essentiellement […]

Starting Thursday, June 11, we intend to hold a series of “Lunch and Learns” for QDA Miner or WordStat. The schedule is posted on our website. We have scheduled one a week until the end of June. There is no charge to attend. The events will feature our trainers as hosts. They will provide a […]

How is the media covering the death of George Floyd and the resulting protests? While we are still in the midst of the protests which are continuing across the U.S. and around the world we thought it would be of interest to examine how several media organizations are covering the event and how they compare […]

This is an archive of an old pseudonymously written post from the 90s from someone whose former pseudonym seems to have disappeared from the internet. I see that Star Trek: Voyager has added a new character, a Borg. (From the photos, I also see that they're still breeding women for breast size in the 24th century.) What ticked me off was the producer's comment (I'm paraphrasing), "The addition of Seven of Nine will give us limitless story possibilities." Uh

A lot of people seem to think that distributed tracing isn't useful, or at least not without extreme effort that isn't worth it for companies smaller than FB. For example, here are a couple of public conversations that sound like a number of private conversations I've had. Sure, there's value somewhere, <a href="https://twitter.com/mattklein123/status

We spent one day 1 building a system that immediately found a mid 7 figure optimization (which ended up shipping). In the first year, we shipped mid 8 figures per year worth of cost savings as a result. The key feature this system introduces is the ability to query metrics data across all hosts and all services and over any period of time (since inception), so we've called it LongTermMetrics (LTM) internally since

The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. But giving founders an idea almost always doesn’t work. Having ideas is among the most important qualities for a startup founder to have—you will need to generate lots of new ideas in the course of running a startup. YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea

We trust that you are well and staying safe during these challenging times. Our team in Montreal is working from home as mandated by the government until at least May 4. We are working together providing regular services to all our customers including support, developing new features of the software, doing demos for prospective customers, […]

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by James Bickerton of the Daily Express. We discussed transhumanism, the Singularity, AI, and the threats to democracy, among other things. Here is the description from James Bickerton’s YouTube channel: I interview Nikola Danaylov (@singularityblog), founder of the Singularity Weblog and author of Conversations with the Future: […]

In this Blog we are highlighting papers authored with the use of our qualitative data analysis software QDA Miner and our content analysis and text mining software WordStat. This post features a paper where the authors use visual content analysis by employing QDA Miner to code images of sculpture taken by tourists and posted on […]

Dr Uwe Ewald Director of the International Justice Analysis Forum Uwe Ewald is the director of the International Justice Analysis Forum. IJA-Forum offers support in evidentiary analysis required for complex (international) crime cases, based on its expert network and roster of analysts and researchers. He started using qualitative data analysis software QDA Miner and the […]

How to tune hyperparameters for your machine learning model using Bayesian optimization.

I have previously interviewed a few fantastic scientists and philosophers but rare are those strange birds who manage to combine together both deep academic training and the living ethos of those separate disciplines. Prof. Massimo Pigliucci is one of those very rare and strange people. He has 3 Ph.D.’s – Genetics, Evolutionary Biology, and Philosophy, […]

To paraphrase the theme song of a 1960s U.S. TV show Mr. Ed, A horse is a horse of course, of course, and no one can find so many horses unless, of course, you are using WordStat! (inspired by original lyrics by Jay Livingston). See Video on YouTube. WordStat and QDA Miner software have […]

In this Blog we will be introducing you to different people who use Provalis Research software in their work. We hope this will give users and potential users of the software an idea of the type of work people are doing and the capabilities of the software. Our first profile is of Lara Gautier who […]

Framing is an active, evolving process to construct meaning and the evolution of frames reflects change in social movement or among activists. (Benford and Snow (2000)). Framing allows people to make sense of their world or events by putting it into context. In their paper Opposition to Abortion Then and Now: How Amicus Briefs […]

The media and the Democrats have never been popular with Fox News which many would argue is a large part of its appeal. Even with a global pandemic threatening the country not much has changed. Of course, this is something the mainstream media writes about and comments on with regularity. Lee Moran from Huffington Post […]

The 2020 Democratic primary elections are underway, and ‘Super Tuesday’ has put Biden in the lead following endorsements by withdrawn candidates Buttigieg and Klobuchar. You may have seen our tweet, showcasing the potential of text analytics to describe the debates and the candidates, in this case via a deviation table and correspondence analysis plot. We […]

Blackcurrent, blueberry, pancetta, chestnut, spicey, crisp, complex, oxidized. What do all these words have in common? They were used by “civilians” and experts to describe wines in three regions of Australia and Bordeau, France. In their paper Using Content Analysis to Characterise the Sensory Typicity and Quality Judgements of Australian Cabernet Sauvignon Wines, Lira Souza […]

Over the past 18 months or so, a number of new neural network achitectures were proposed specifically for use on mobile and edge devices. It seems that pretty much everyone has figured out now that large models such as VGG16 or ResNet-50 aren’t a good idea on small devices. 😉 I have previously written about MobileNet v1 and v2 , and hav

A Google interview candidate recently asked me: "What are three big science questions that keep you up at night?" This was a great question because one's answer reveals so much about one's intellectual interests - here are mine: Q1: Can we imitate "thinking" from only observing behavior? Suppose you have a large fleet of autonomous vehicles with human operators driving them around diverse r

An overview of all the neurons in the first five layers of InceptionV1, organized into a taxonomy of 'neuron groups.'

Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal. Either we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the world goes below 1, a good enough treatment that people no longer need to be afraid, or we develop a great culture of testing, contract tracing, masks, and isolation. I wish that the federal government were doing much more—it would be great to see even a few percent of the recent stimulus bill go to fun