It makes me happy that the common machine-learning phrase "test set" is a palindrome.
Michael Littman
1,332 posts
Michael Littman
@mlittmancs
- Airline installs chatbot. Customer gets bad information from it. Customer asks for refund. Airline says "the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions" (!). Court says no. (Whew.) Airline makes refund and turns off chatbot.
- Nice blog post (co-authored by a Brown PhD student!) explaining how systems like ChatGPT are built using clever combinations of unsupervised (for language), supervised (for preferences), and reinforcement (for applying the latter to the former) learning:
- Charles's's @NeurIPSConf keynote from last night can be viewed even if you aren't registered for the conference. Don't let the title fool you---it's a sociotechnical romp. Actually, don't let the presenter name fool you either---there's more there's, too.
- Filled out my passport renewal and was surprised that three slots---hair color, eye color, and employer---all had the same answer.
- My book, "Code to Joy: Why Everyone Should Learn a Little Programming", has been sent to MIT Press for production. Woo! It covers elements of programs, how to use them to solve problems, and how ML/AI can help make programming easier for all of us. Should be out Fall 2023!
- Replying to @sydgibsMy wife named our first child Max. I begged her to let me name the 2nd one Min. I'm afraid you might be right.
- A paper I reviewed yesterday asserted that the quality of a researcher's reviews declines over the years. At least, I think that's what it said. I didn't read it that closely because I was pretty sure I'd end up rejecting it just like 100s and 100s of others I've read before.
- Is it just me, or have weekdays become the time to have meetings with the purpose of gathering action items to work on over the weekend? It seems wrong. I need a better plan.
- Happy to be celebrating my 2^5 wedding anniversary today. The power of two people celebrating a power of two!
- Starting a new "rotating" position shortly as Division Director of Information and Intelligent Systems at NSF (AI, HCI, ML, etc.). I'll be learning about what the research community needs, what NSF provides, and how to bring the two closer together!
- I had an idea for a book, wrote a proposal, negotiated with publishers, signed a contract, wrote a draft, worked with an editor, got peer reviewed, arranged for image rights, edited the index, folded in copyeditting feedback, waited a little longer, and POOF, it's real! Magic!
- I wrote a book! I met today with my editor at MIT Press and she says she thinks it's ready to be sent out for review, 3 months ahead of schedule. Woo! If all goes smoothly, it'll be on sale Fall 2023. (She said books, like "human babies" take about 9 months to gestate.)
- Tonight, I attended the ceremony for the Turing Award (the "CS Nobel"). It was a great honor to see @ylecun , @geoffreyhinton , and Yoshua Bengio recognized for their stunning contributions (and leadership). After, I entertained Yann by spinning my new Fellow's certificate.
