I’m usually skeptical of stunt AI events, mostly because the value of these kinds of events seems to lie more on the PR side of the spectrum and so the benefits, scientifically speaking, aren’t always clear. One the other hand, an occasional dose of PR is a good thing, and it is especially good when [...]
One of the main reasons that I continue to depend heavily on Python is the extensive number of libraries that are available for the platform. For example, here are the first few lines of the file I’m currently editing: import os, sys, getopt, pdb, string from functools import partial import collections import numpy as [...]
I just got back from giving an informal Q&A. The topic was how to propose. In our department, passing the proposal means advancing to candidacy. It involves forming a dissertation committee, writing a proposal document, and giving a 40 or so minute talk outlining your proposed research. There were only two panelists (the Q&A was [...]
I recently passed my proposal exam. Woohoo! Passing the exam is like getting permission to do a whole bunch of work, so from one perspective it’s something like a Pyrrhic victory. On the other hand, the work is the interesting thing and really the whole point, and having some assurance that the proposed work when [...]
Alright, I’m going to throw some stones from the balcony of my glass house. I am inspired in part by a Forum for AI talk that Michael Bowling gave a few weeks ago on his team’s poker playing agent. From the talk abstract: The game of poker presents a serious challenge for artificial intelligence. The [...]
The following interesting resignation/response exchange (found via Daniel Lemire’s excellent blog) is quite interesting, if only because it is a public peek into a number of gray box style academic employment issues. I have to say that as a graduate student, many of my naive notions of academic employment have been turned upside down. What struck [...]
I haven’t been posting lately because of a number of other commitments taking up all my time. I’m working on my proposal at the moment, and I think I’ve got the structure nailed down, and the difficult content already written. I’m not sure how well it will go over, but I think the ideas that I’m working [...]
I’m stuck on what should be the easiest section of my proposal to write because it is the only section I’ve already published. The problem is that, in the time since I worked on that paper, my whole conception of “what’s going on” has changed. At least I had the presence of mind at the [...]
The Turing Test is a famous test of machine intelligence. In the basic setup, a human communicates with an agent through some kind of computer terminal (so the agent is never visible). The human is tasked with determining whether the agent is a machine or another human. The goal of machine agents is to imitate [...]
Today is full of minor little administrative details that need attention and always seem to correlate with 1) the beginning of the classes and 2) returning to Austin after having been away all summer. The end result of all of this is that my mind is all over the place right now, and not nearly [...]