Grateful

Christmas time is approaching. You can always help someone close to you. In so many ways...

My dad sent me this video, and the final sentence is so inspiring for me, not because I think I have some special talent but because I would like to think that I always tried to do the right thing.

"Your talent is God's gift to you. What you do with it is your gift back to God"

Leo Buscaglia

"Little drummer boy"

GENTRY.

Is there no end?

*Deep learning*...It seems the *panacea* for everything that is complicated in *computer vision and pattern recognition*.

Well, people can do very interesting things. For instance, THIS.

Youtube video, below.

Rachel Thomas and *The democratic Artificial Intelligence*

Very nice *Ted-Talk* by Prof. Rachel Thomas on avenues and opportunities in Artificial Intelligence.

There are several *take home messages* here, but my favourite appears at (mm:ss) 16:18 in this video:

...Sometimes people ask me if it is dangerous to make AI accessible to more people. What is dangerous is a homogeneous & exclusive group creating technology that impacts us all.

Video, below. Well worth the time.

Human Rights and Beings...

I am glad to see how machine learning is taking new avenues that will hopefully help us being *a better society*.

Research made by people like Dr. Kristian Lum (link HERE) is definitely going in this direction...

On the other hand, I can frankly feel how this field of research is accelerating and impacting more and more...

Examples of this are the *brand new* degree programs that are being offered (link HERE - and video in there worth having a look into).

Data driven science? Why not, *purists*? Come down from your pedestal!

Computer Vision and Machine Learning *reinforce* themselves in order to get aims that are impacting daily lives of almost any human being on Earth. Denying that is simply straying from the truth.

Models applied in Computer Vision work many times based on data and are *built from* data.

That is NOT inherently wrong!

Many times there is NO other way to do it!

Waiting for a *non data-driven* model to be obtained could take centuries, in some cases!

This is (below) what Computer Vision and Machine Learning have got so far. Congratulations to those who achieved this and also to those people who genuinely appreciate it!

It is a little bit old (2017, :-)) but worth seeing it.

Why didn't I ask that?

When I was at high school I used to hold my hand up and ask as many questions as I thought I needed in order to understand something.

Of course, this depends on the person, but there is another piece of research supporting the idea that (a significant amount of) women systematically think of failure, feel fear about it, and then act the way they would not really want to act.

I do not know if this is a by-pass product of the "Impostor Syndrome" some research studies also show when referring to women in academia and their careers.

This post in NATURE is very interesting (link HERE), related to the following paper:

Carter AJ, Croft A, Lukas D, Sandstrom GM (2018) Women’s visibility in academic seminars: Women ask fewer questions than men. PLoS ONE 13(9): e0202743. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202743

It can be read HERE.

"MACHOs aren't the answer"

It is quite strange, but sometines I find nice and even funny acronyms for R&D projects, scientific instruments, concepts, etc.

In a recent Discover magazine article (it can be found HERE) a Section was called "MACHOs aren't the answer".

In this case, MACHOs stands for Massive Compact Halo Objects and the author wanted to say that these objects do not satisfactorily explain the great rotation speeds that stars at a galaxy's edge have.

I know of some other acronyms, but I prefer to keep them for myself :-)

When I am happy (mostly) when you are...

This video has some time now...Anyway, worth seeing...

It was worth it for me, but...Katia Levecque et al Research

I just found the following paper:

Katia Levecque, Frederik Anseel, Alain De Beuckelaer, Johan Van der Heyden, LydiaGisle, "Work organization and mental health problems in PhD students", Research Policy, 46, 4, 868-879, 2017 (Link HERE).

which (I think) it is considered as one of the most serious quantitative research studies on the effect of the stress on students associated to carrying out a PhD thesis.

Katia Levecque was very recently interviewed (link HERE) and it seems they have plans to expand the aims and population of the research published in the Research Policy Journal. Good news then!

There is a wide range of symptoms called as "mental health problems", including just "depression" and "anxiety", and if that is the case, I had them (who did not?).

In the end, I believe it was worth it for me, but I can only talk for myself...

Good for you!

Good "reviews" the short film One Small Step is receiving, and awards as well (winner of the SIGGRAPH2018 Electronic Theater audience choice award; see HERE).

Haven't seen it yet, but would like to:

"I always believed the world is what we make of it"

I enjoy my life going by and I see some thoughts of mine have not changed almost anything for so many years...

Too few Dr. Eleanor Arroway like people...

It just comes and it will stay

I am not an expert in anything related to music. I feel, however, puzzling that one of the most beatiful effects music has in people, which is to create emotions, does not seem to have been researched in depth.

I do not know if the "Theory of musical equilibration" (link HERE) was just a beginning, and I do not know either whether this research is serious enough or not (sorry again, as I said, my knoweldge about music lays between zero and null space) but I can only say that, for may times I hear this song, for many years that time may go by, my heart always shrinks when I hear it.

No gates for the open plain (?)

Nice piece of research for 3D social interaction capture and analysis in:

Hanbyul Joo, Tomas Simon, Xulong Li, Hao Liu, Lei Tan, Lin Gui, Sean Banerjee, Timothy Scott Godisart, Bart Nabbe, Iain Matthews, Takeo Kanade, Shohei Nobuhara, Yaser A Sheikh, "Panoptic Studio: A Massively Multiview System for Social Interaction Capture", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 2018 (DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2017.2782743).

Link HERE.

Please, have a look at Figure 2.

Synthesizing me

I am always willing to reading the new research papers co-authored by Prof. Frédo Durand. I am really impressed by what they show that were able to achieve in:

1) Guha Balakrishnan, Amy Zhao, Adrian V. Dalca, Fredo Durand, John Guttag,
"Synthesizing Images of Humans in Unseen Poses",  arXiv:1804.07739 (pdf file available HERE).

What do you think about Figure 1? :-)

Peter Turchin and Evolution Of The (Complex) Human Societies

I find it very interesting the research approach that is carrying out Prof. Peter Turchin when analysing the evolution of human societies from thousand years ago to the resent day.

In this sense, I see that his (and co-workers) approach described in (link to paper HERE):

Peter Turchin et al. "Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 115, 2, E144-E151, 2018

seem to show that Machine Learning and his field of research could live a golden age of cooperation in the very near future.

Don Quixote - "Freedom, Sancho..."

A part of my "wonder times".

Chapter LVIII

"When Don Quixote saw himself in open country, free, and relieved from the attentions of Altisidora, he felt at his ease, and in fresh spirits to take up the pursuit of chivalry once more; and turning to Sancho he said, "Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven has bestowed upon men; no treasures that the earth holds buried or the sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honour, life may and should be ventured; and on the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can fall to the lot of man. I say this, Sancho, because thou hast seen the good cheer, the abundance we have enjoyed in this castle we are leaving; well then, amid those dainty banquets and snow-cooled beverages I felt as though I were undergoing the straits of hunger, because I did not enjoy them with the same freedom as if they had been mine own; for the sense of being under an obligation to return benefits and favours received is a restraint that checks the independence of the spirit. Happy he, to whom heaven has given a piece of bread for which he is not bound to give thanks to any but heaven itself!"

Hope for the best. Plan for the worst...

...and do your bit.

Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence

The Dunning-Kruger effect

A friend of mine just directed my attention to the so-called (in psychology) Dunning-Kruger effect. We can find in Wikipedia the following (LINK):

"In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority derives from the metacognitive inability of low-ability persons to recognize their own ineptitude; without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence".

The original paper related to this effect is:

• J. Kruger, D. Dunning, "Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 6, 1121-1134, 1999.

A pdf file of the paper can be found HERE

I found many problems to track recent research work on this topic and I find it very interesting...