Posts by Year

2024

Hedging and Hawing about AI and Jobs

3 minute read

This is in reply to reading this article from the BBC, “AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says” (January 15, 2024, Annabelle Liang, BBC)

That Which Dreams are Made Of

4 minute read

In William Shakespeare’s Tempest, the old wizard Prospero at one point famously opines…

Movie Liveblog - The Creator

14 minute read

It’s almost a new year and while I don’t always make New Year’s resolutions (and I definitely don’t always keep them for long) I feel this blog is in need of...

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2023

The More Things Change…

2 minute read

Today I held 80 million year old dinosaur bones in my hands and used pics and brushes and glue to piece them back together into a rib. The tools I was using ...

It’s Made of People!

2 minute read

An idea that I have been converging on in discussions recently spawned by Chat-GPT is that, for the purposes of risk assessment and impact, we should to thin...

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2022

Twitter Isn’t Even A Social Network

5 minute read

I’ve tried to write this blog post several times, and each time I get around to it my intro statement is no longer true.

Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

less than 1 minute read

This week the world lost two beautiful people who stood for hope, caring and kindness. These people happened to also be actors who most famously played chara...

The Ancient Battle Continues

less than 1 minute read

Reposting now given the latest iteration of this neverending battle, because this never gets old.

Why Build a Meta-Verse?

4 minute read

Some spontaneous thoughts on the multiverse of metaverses and whether it’s all worth the effort.

Is AI Just a Passing Fad

2 minute read

Someone important recently expressed a thought to me along the following lines:

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2021

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2019

ECML 2019 Notes

17 minute read

In September 2019 I had the good fortune to attend ECML 2019 in beautiful Wurzburg, Germany.

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2018

17 Days of AI for Good

6 minute read

In a couple weeks I will have the good fortune to be attending the second AI for Good Summit in Geneva. The summit is run through collaboration between the X...

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2017

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2016

How Bad is it Going to Get?

1 minute read

Here’s another great article about impending job losses over the next decade due to advanced automation, and it’s not just factories anymore. As the tasks th...

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2015

Computers Cannot Make Ethical Choices For Us

5 minute read

I came across this interesting post on the legal and insurance implications of Tesla’s upcoming autonomous driving feature. The new feature would only work f...

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2014

Computational Sustainability at AAAI

less than 1 minute read

This week in Québec City the Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference is being held and for the fourth year running there is a special track on Computational Sustainabi...

Making Hard Choices Optimally

6 minute read

This TED talk by Ruth Chang, a Philosopher at Rutgers University, is really thought provoking and useful. I disagree with some of her logic about non-numeric...

Reviewing Papers by Reading Group

4 minute read

I love reading groups, and I just had an idea for how they might be able to save scientific peer review. In case you’re outside academia let me just describ...

The Big Deal about Big Data and Deep Learning

less than 1 minute read

Recently, you may have been hearing a lot about “Big Data”, this refers to our growing ability to find patterns and process very large amounts of data with o...

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2013

Review of RLDM2013 Conference

2 minute read

Last week I attended the first multidisciplinary conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM2013) and I think I speak for most people who ...

Twitter Truth

less than 1 minute read

Not everything on Twitter is true, not by a long shot. But everything that is true will show up and be reshared on Twitter before it shows up in a newspaper.

Machines want your job : Recruiters

less than 1 minute read

One of the reasons I think it is so important for the everyone person to keep up to date which the advance of science and technology is that is the only way ...

Robot Lifeguards?

less than 1 minute read

Here’s some interesting research on a Neural Network approach to teaching a machine to detect when someone is drowning. This could lead to better detection o...

NIPS Conference 2012

less than 1 minute read

A month ago I attended the 2012 Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Lake Tahoe Nevada. I’ve already posted some of my thoughts on some of it ...

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2012

Could Machines Make Art?

less than 1 minute read

Fascinating study out of the University of Trento on using Machine Vision algorithms to learn how people respond emotionally to abstract art. ** Link :** Com...

Machines Want Your Job

3 minute read

I’ve been planning for a while to write a series of posts on this blog about how advances in science and technology have the potential to make certain curren...

Machine Morality

1 minute read

This post started as a response to a provocative question by +David Brin on Google+:

Talking Robots and Psychedelic Drugs

less than 1 minute read

Baby robot learns first words from human teacher — tech — 15 June 2012 — New Scientist I’m always glad to see more methods from research in Artificial Intel...

Building the Enterprise? Seriously? Why not?

3 minute read

I ignored this the first time I saw it and then I was going to make snarky comment that we should just send a bunch of ships to mars instead of building the ...

Scientists angry about research facility closure

less than 1 minute read

Link : Scientists angry about research facility closure — Manitoba — CBC News. This is exactly the kind of thing we need more of not less of. The only way to...

Do you believe in the Multiverse?

1 minute read

Great review article of cosmology by Martin Rees, the British Astronomer Royal : One universe among many? Some people complain that scientists should be war...

Automated Myth Debunking In your Inbox

1 minute read

Hmm…. LazyTruth is “an inbox widget that surfaces vetted information when you receive an email forward full of political myths, urban rumors, or security thr...

Project: Evolution in Action

less than 1 minute read

Project: Evolution in Action | RocketHub ScienceFund is like Kickstarter for Science! Pitch in money to help researchers collect and analysis data like this ...

The Snowy Owl Invades

less than 1 minute read

If you are looking for a good example of the growing intersection of sustainability science and computer science I suggest taking a look at this fascinating ...

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2011

In Defence of Algorithms

2 minute read

(I seriously never imagined I’d have to write that title.) Today I came across an odd analysis of several legitimate problems by Barry Devlin. (via Marshall...

AAAI 2011 Wrap-Up

2 minute read

So I didn’t post an update about the AAAI 2011 conference every day, but really, this is more posts than I would have predicted with my prior model of my beh...

AAAI 2011 — Day 2

2 minute read

Day two of tutorials and workshops at AAAI 2011. The crowd is starting to grow and the robots are being set up. Things don’t get fully started until tomorrow...

AAAI 2011 — Day 1

2 minute read

I skipped the afternoon tutorial sessions to work on my presentation and go around town a bit but I did attend a very interesting morning tutorial on time se...

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