And then - Magic!

Just uau!

I recently discovered Diego Catalán and I am amazed by his painting and drawing work.

I can not reproduce it here. Just go to the links above and enjoy!

Disentangling Luke Skywalker - Darth Vader connection

Two questions:

- Would Machine Learning be able to convince Luke Skywalker that Darth Vader is his father?

- What would have happened in the case of Luke and Princess Leia?

I just found by chance a very interesting paper by Prof. Theo Gevers et al about the possibility to infer not only the probability that two people are kins, but also the type of kinship between them. 

I was not even aware that kinship verification was another research topic in machine learning. More specifically, the aim now is about kinship identification.

Details are as follows:

1) Wei Wang, Shaodi You, Sezer Karaoglu, Theo Gevers, "Kinship Identification through Joint Learning Using Kinship Verification Ensemble" 

arXiv:2004.06382

PDF HERE 

Scientific Déjà Vu

I have just read a blog entry (HERE) by Prof. Yoshua Bengio about the current publishing dynamics in machine learning.

Insightful analysis about how scientific reviewing process might be improved.

Reading this blog has allowed me to discover The Slow Science Manifesto

Do your own homework: Fermi problem

This is not an Enrico Fermi problem, but somehow close to it (or inspired by).

Would you be really interested to know the impact a phenomenon like COVID-19 may have in a country's life?

Play with numbers a little bit:

1) Write down the entire population of a country: A

2) Assess the percentage of people would be expected to be in contact with the virus, and infected: 40%, for instance

3) Assume a 3% mortality rate in relation to the number of people that were infected

4) Do the following product:

Total death number = A * 0.4 * 0.03

Do you think this is not serious enough?