Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 2

The current boom of artificial intelligence (AI) is based on neural networks (NNs). In order for these to be useful, the network has to undergo a machine learning (ML) process: work over a series of inputs, and adjust the inner weights of the connections between neurons so that each of the data samples the network was trained on produces the right set of labels for each item. Federated learning (FL) appeared as a reaction given the data centralization power that traditional ML provides: instead of centrally controlling the whole training data, various different actors analyze disjoint subsets of data, and...

If humans and robots were to be able to roam around the same spaces, mutually recognizing each other for what they are, how would interaction be? How can we model such interactions in a way that we can reason about and understand the implications of a given behavior? This book aims at answering this question. The book is split into two very different parts. Chapters 1 through 3 are mostly written with a philosophical angle. It starts by framing the possibility of having sentient androids exist in the same plane as humans, without them trying to pass as us or...

Since December 2023, I have been publishing the reviews I write for Computing Reviews as they get published. I will do a slight change now: I will start pushing the reviews to my blog as I write them, and of course, will modify them with the final wording and to link to their place as soon as they are published. I’m doing this because sometimes it takes very long for reviews to be approved, and I want to share them with my blog’s readers! So, please bear with this a bit: I’ll send a (short!) flood of my latest four...

I have been a very happy user of my two SK-8845 keyboards (one at my office, one at home) since I bought them, in 2018 and 2021 respectively. What are they, mind you? ) The beautiful keyboard every Thinkpad owner knows and loves. And although I no longer use my X230 laptop that was my workhorse for several years, my fingers are spoiled. So, both shift keys of my home keyboard have been getting flaky, and I am basically sure it’s a failure in the controller, as it does not feel to be physical. It’s time to revisit that seven...

As it seems ChatGPT would phrase it… Sweet Mother of God! I received a mail from my University’s Scholar Administrative division informing me my Doctor degree has been granted and emitted (yayyyyyy! 👨‍🎓), and before printing the corresponding documents, I should review all of the information is correct. Attached to the mail, I found they sent me a very friendly and welcoming XML file, that stated it followed the schema at https://www.siged.sep.gob.mx/titulos/schema.xsd… Wait! There is nothing to be found in that address! Well, never mind, I can make sense out of a XML document, right? Of course, who needs an...

Please note: This review is not meant to be part of my usual contributions to ACM's «Computing Reviews». I do want, though, to share it with people that follow my general interests and such stuff. This article was published almost a year ago, and I read it just after relocating from Argentina back to Mexico. I came from a country starting to realize the shock it meant to be ruled by an autocratic, extreme right-wing president willing to overrun its Legislative and bent on destroying the State itself — not too different from what we are now witnessing on a...

How long has it been since you last saw a conversation over different blogs syndicated at the same planet? Well, it’s one of the good memories of the early 2010s. And there is an opportunity to re-engage! 😃 I came across Evgeni’s post “naming things is hard” in Planet Debian. So, what names have I given my computers? I have had many since the mid-1990s I also had several during the decade before that, but before Linux, my computers didn’t hve a formal name. Naming my computers something nice Linux gave me. I have forgotten many. Some of the names...

Almost exactly four years after I started with this project, yesterday I presented my PhD defense. My thesis was what I’ve been presenting advances of all around since ≈2022: «A certificate-poisoning-resistant protocol for the synchronization of Web of Trust networks» Lots of paperwork is still on the road for me. But at least in the immediate future, I can finally use this keyring my friend Raúl Gómez 3D-printed for me:

As people around the world understand how LLMs behave, more and more people wonder as to why these models hallucinate, and what can be done about to reduce it. This provocatively named article by Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries and Joe Slater bring is an excellent primer to better understanding how LLMs work and what to expect from them. As humans carrying out our relations using our language as the main tool, we are easily at awe with the apparent ease with which ChatGPT (the first widely available, and to this day probably the best known, LLM-based automated chatbot) simulates...

While artificial intelligence (AI) applications for natural language processing (NLP) are no longer something new or unexpected, nobody can deny the revolution and hype that started, in late 2022, with the announcement of the first public version of ChatGPT. By then, synthetic translation was well established and regularly used, many chatbots had started attending users’ requests on different websites, voice recognition personal assistants such as Alexa and Siri had been widely deployed, and complaints of news sites filling their space with AI-generated articles were already commonplace. However, the ease of prompting ChatGPT or other large language models (LLMs) and getting...