iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Fredrik Johansson @frejohk.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Reposted by Uri Shalit

We are hiring a *PhD student* in my group to work on machine learning generalization "out-of-table". Help build methods that learn from large volumes of tabular data to generate models for new tasks! Apply here: www.chalmers.se/en/about-cha...

chalmers.se

Vacancies

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Reposted by Uri Shalit

Knight First Amendment Institute @knightcolumbia.org · 15/04/2025

In a new essay from our "Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms" series, @randomwalker.bsky.social & @sayash.bsky.social make the case for thinking of #AI as normal technology, instead of superintelligence. Read here: knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...

knightcolumbia.org

AI as Normal Technology

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

They are graded on giving full proofs. LLMs are quite bad at that. Though I’m sure there’s also quite a bit of test data leaks going around

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Reposted by Uri Shalit

uai2026 @auai.org · 13/02/2025

Have you worked recently on a cool topic 📚 and now you think it is time to teach it to the whole #UAI2025 community 🗣️? If so, submit a proposal to give a #Tutorial in #Rio 🇧🇷! 👉 www.auai.org/uai2025/call... 🕓 deadline: Apr 14, 2025

auai.org

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Tangentially related: interesting to think of the biblical law of jubilee in this context. It says that every 50 years debts are dropped, indentured servants released and land is returned to “original” owners

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

This piece from August seems like a good writeup: mathscholar.org/2024/08/new-... It mentions a new book from 2024 by Jack Szostak and Mario Livio called “Is Earth Exceptional? The Quest for Cosmic Life”. Szostak is a leading scientist in the field (I haven’t read the book yet)

mathscholar.org

New developments in the origin of life on Earth « Math Scholar

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Hi everyone, amazing student Marah Ghoummaid and myself are presenting our work “When to Act and When to Ask: Policy Learning With Deferral Under Hidden Confounding” at #NeurIPS2024 today! Come talk to us 11:00 - 2:00, West Ballroom, poster #5106! Paper: openreview.net/forum?id=taI...

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I love this sketch of a Purkinje cell (a type of neuron found in the cerebellum) by Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Detailed hand-drawn sketch of a Purkinje cell, showing its dendritic structure

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to be fair, ICLR is a far cry from what Yann is suggesting in that piece. I'm not questioning the need for reform. My question is why didn't the push for reform succeed back then, and what can we learn from that? (in the spirit of "Everyone will not just")

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Proposal for A New Publishing Model in Computer Science

I recall that Yann LeCun had some interesting suggestions back in 2013-2014. Despite his clout the community didn't move much* yann.lecun.com/ex/pamphlets... *ICLR public reviews and TMLR are small steps which I think followed from the discussions going around back then

yann.lecun.com

Yann LeCun's Home Page

Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

This is such a good point, and I love the connection you're making in the paper to resilience to hidden confounding. In many cases the treatments that would shift are exactly those that have more "exogenous randomness" in them, and for these units the effect might be more easily identified from data

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Breaking the Maya Code, by Michael Coe, about the deciphering of Mayan script One of the people involved in the story is Yuri Knorozov, pictured below

A black and white photo of a very intimidating looking Yuri Knorozov scowling wearing a dark Soviet suit and holding a beautiful light-furred cat in his arms

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Instead some scientists just said “close schools!” , conflating their own priorities with science and hurting the credibility of scientists overall. Their intentions were good but I think the overall outcome is not 2/2

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

an example where I think some scientists stumbled: during COVID after the first few months, imo a responsible scientist would say “closing schools has these benefits and these harms (w/uncertainty), the politicians and public should weigh them and decide” 1/2

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Reposted by Uri Shalit

NeurIPS Conference @neuripsconf.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

NeurIPS Conference is now Live on Bluesky! -NeurIPS2024 Communication Chairs

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Related to this, been enjoying this paper by Icard, @jfkominsky.bsky.social & Knobe looking at how "normality" affects the way humans judge causes. eg in when you need two factors to cause an event (say oxygen + match to cause a fire), humans will judge the less "normal" element to be more causal

sciencedirect.com

Normality and actual causal strength

Existing research suggests that people’s judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. …

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

I'm now getting a much better signal-to-noise for ML discussions here than on Xitter plus funnier/more profound shitposting, and much, much less rage inducing screaming and general junk

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

I don’t know about other domains, but in healthcare I’ve seen the term used to basically mean “a model of how a patient would respond to a treatment other than the one they’ve actually received”. When used in that sense it’s just corpo ai brainwash as @natolambert.bsky.social said

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While I think this is a great paper, I also think that the focus on causal features (which is only part of what the paper is about) is a bit of red herring bsky.app/profile/uris...

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OTOH consider a severe headache. While the pain itself is probably not immediately causal, it’s a strong and stable symptom of underlying conditions and this it’s a stable feature. Indeed almost any classic diagnosis of disease by symptoms is anti-causal yet stable (3/3)

E.g. consider the time of day someone goes into an ER. That might influence who sees them and how quickly which will influence many downstream outcomes causally. But the specifics of this effect will vary wildly between different ERs making this an unstable feature (2/3)

To be fair, I think there’s no strong reason to think that causal features are a priori more stable than others (1/3)

I’d like to hear your spicy ML takes

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Great idea! I'd love to be added

Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

There’s a long line of literature starting from the ICP paper arxiv.org/abs/1501.01332, with IRM being an important (if imperfect) checkpoint arxiv.org/abs/1907.02893 I also really like the anchor regression paper arxiv.org/abs/1801.06229 and this is our work (calibrate!) arxiv.org/abs/2102.10395

arxiv.org

Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals

What is the difference of a prediction that is made with a causal model and a non-causal model? Suppose we intervene on the predictor variables or change the whole environment. The predictions from a ...

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 08/11/2024

Let me know if you’re around!

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

The milk in Hersheys chocolate goes through lipolysis, which breaks down some of its fatty acids in order to extend shelf life. The problem is that lipolysis yields butyric acid, an acid which is literally found in vomit and gives Hersheys that very specific revolting taste

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 15/09/2024

יש לי בראש שלפני איזה חודש חודשיים היו שם אופציות יותר מעניינות של להראות רק חלק מהתגובות לפי … כל מיני קריטריונים שאני לא זוכר בדיוק אבל שהיו לי שימושיים מקווה שיחזירו את זה

Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 15/09/2024

בsettings יש את Following feed preferences ואני חושב ששם אפשר לשלוט בזה

Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 08/09/2024

Hi BlueSky people :) I'll be spending the next year on sabbatical with Google DeepMind in London I would love to meet people around here, so if you're in the area please feel free to drop me a line

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 02/09/2024

My knee jerk is “assumption which might hold only in special situations / do not accept easily that it’s true”. Fascinating to see in the replies how people read it completely different

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 31/08/2024

Seems like bluesky naturally lends itself to dunking on SUTVA (n=2, p<∞) bsky.app/profile/uris...

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 26/08/2024

!! Arabic Afrikaans is one hell of a mashup

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 26/08/2024

Cochin Jews are also an interesting medieval (possibly earlier?) community, in south India. I love that they had their own dialect, Judeo-Malayalam en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochin_...

en.wikipedia.org

Cochin Jews - Wikipedia

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 12/07/2024

This is surprising to me! I would love to better understand why you think that’s the case?

Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 27/03/2024

If you read some piece of information that seems to exactly confirm everything bad you ever thought about <something you hate>, there’s a good chance it’s misleading or wrong

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Uri Shalit @urish.bsky.social · 26/03/2024

Is there something analogous to Riemann’s series theorem, but for rearranging parentheses while keeping the order of the summands fixed?