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competerscience.bsky.social
Peter
@competerscience.bsky.social
97 followers 470 following 12 posts
Postdoctoral researcher at McGill in #AI #ML core developer of SpeechBrain.

Studies analysis of speech patterns for bio markers, for speech enhancement, robust ASR, continual learning, etc.
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competerscience.bsky.social
I’m excited to see this, I feel it meaningfully moves the needle on discussions of AI and personhood. The comparison with legally holding boats responsible for damage in certain cases made things really clear for me. Great to see Pragmatism getting some of the love it deserves!
jzleibo.bsky.social Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 24d
[1/9] Excited to share our new paper "A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood" published today. We feel this topic is timely, and rapidly growing in importance as AI becomes agentic, as AI agents integrate further into the economy, and as more and more users encounter AI.
November 2, 2025 at 3:13 AM
competerscience.bsky.social
We're excited to introduce forced alignment support in SpeechBrain, thanks to Zeyu Zhao! This new feature leverages CTC-based ASR models and the power of k2, a differentiable WFST toolkit, to perform efficient and accurate forced alignment.

Check it out: speechbrain.readthedocs.io/en/develop/t...
Force alignment using k2 for CTC models. — SpeechBrain 0.5.0 documentation
speechbrain.readthedocs.io
July 18, 2025 at 2:47 AM
competerscience.bsky.social
Fascinating analysis of the implicit values present in machine learning papers, worth pondering if you're in the field -- dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
dl.acm.org
May 21, 2025 at 7:48 PM
Reposted by Peter
timkellogg.me
Do I know any AI engineers that have experience training LoRAs and might be looking for work? Preference for Europe/Africa time zones (DM me)
April 11, 2025 at 1:41 PM
competerscience.bsky.social
Read my new blog post - a conversation between me and ChatGPT about disability and buddhism: peterplantinga.substack.com/p/the-disabl...
"The Disabled God" for Buddhism
I’m posting a new format this time, a chat between myself and ChatGPT.
peterplantinga.substack.com
April 6, 2025 at 3:29 PM
Reposted by Peter
andrew.heiss.phd
I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :(

So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/
Screenshot of the linked Quarto website, with input checkboxes to change different conditions for a regression model that predicts economic performance based on US political party, with a reported p-value
March 20, 2025 at 6:30 PM
competerscience.bsky.social
I have a new substack up about the awesomeness that is #Wicked and its connection to #disability themes and #bodyqueer themes open.substack.com/pub/peterpla...
Wicked is Bodyqueer at Heart
I saw the new (2024) Wicked film adaptation and, wow what a film.
open.substack.com
January 7, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Peter
talyarkoni.com
i asked Claude to write a Barthelme-esque short story with the aesthetic sensibilities of "The School", and it gave me this. i mean. i mean.
For six months we watched the pigeons building their civilization on top of the skyscrapers. First came the architecture: nests made not just of twigs and paper, but of lost earbuds, expired credit cards, and the tiny silver bells from cat collars. Then came their laws. "They have a supreme court," said Dr. Fernandez, who'd been studying them since the beginning. "Nine pigeons who sit on the ledge of the Chrysler Building and coo about justice." We didn't believe her at first, but then we didn't believe a lot of things that turned out to be true. The pigeons developed a currency based on blue bottle caps. They established schools where young pigeons learned to dodge taxi cabs and identify the most generous hot dog vendors. Some of us tried to join their society, climbing to rooftops with offerings of breadcrumbs and philosophy textbooks, but the pigeons regarded us with the kind of pity usually reserved for very small children or very old cats. "They're planning something," the conspiracy theorists said, but they always say that. Still, we noticed the pigeons holding what looked like town halls, thousands of them gathered on the roof of the public library, bobbing their heads in what might have been voting or might have been prayer. Our own civilization continued below theirs. We went to work, fell in love, lost keys, found keys, forgot anniversaries, remembered too late, all while the pigeons above us built something that looked suspiciously like a scaled-down replica of the United Nations building out of discarded takeout containers and stolen Christmas lights. Sometimes they dropped things on us: rejection letters for poetry we'd never submitted, tax returns from years that hadn't happened yet, photographs of ourselves sleeping that we couldn't explain. Dr. Fernandez said this was their way of communicating. We said Dr. Fernandez had been spending too much time on rooftops. The pigeons started their own newspapers, printed on leaves that fell upward instead… For six months we watched the pigeons building their civilization on top of the skyscrapers. First came the architecture: nests made not just of twigs and paper, but of lost earbuds, expired credit cards, and the tiny silver bells from cat collars. Then came their laws. "They have a supreme court," said Dr. Fernandez, who'd been studying them since the beginning. "Nine pigeons who sit on the ledge of the Chrysler Building and coo about justice." We didn't believe her at first, but then we didn't believe a lot of things that turned out to be true. The pigeons developed a currency based on blue bottle caps. They established schools where young pigeons learned to dodge taxi cabs and identify the most generous hot dog vendors. Some of us tried to join their society, climbing to rooftops with offerings of breadcrumbs and philosophy textbooks, but the pigeons regarded us with the kind of pity usually reserved for very small children or very old cats. "They're planning something," the conspiracy theorists said, but they always say that. Still, we noticed the pigeons holding what looked like town halls, thousands of them gathered on the roof of the public library, bobbing their heads in what might have been voting or might have been prayer. Our own civilization continued below theirs. We went to work, fell in love, lost keys, found keys, forgot anniversaries, remembered too late, all while the pigeons above us built something that looked suspiciously like a scaled-down replica of the United Nations building out of discarded takeout containers and stolen Christmas lights. Sometimes they dropped things on us: rejection letters for poetry we'd never submitted, tax returns from years that hadn't happened yet, photographs of ourselves sleeping that we couldn't explain. Dr. Fernandez said this was their way of communicating. We said Dr. Fernandez had been spending too much time on rooftops. The pigeons started their own newspapers, printed on leaves that fell upward instead…
December 16, 2024 at 4:48 AM
Reposted by Peter
nic221.bsky.social
Researchers reduce bias in AI models while preserving or improving accuracy https://news.mit.edu/2024/researchers-reduce-bias-ai-models-while-preserving-improving-accuracy-1211 #AI
Text Shot: MIT researchers developed a new technique that identifies and removes specific points in a training dataset that contribute most to a model’s failures on minority subgroups. By removing far fewer datapoints than other approaches, this technique maintains the overall accuracy of the model while improving its performance regarding underrepresented groups. In addition, the technique can identify hidden sources of bias in a training dataset that lacks labels.
December 14, 2024 at 12:46 AM
competerscience.bsky.social
Proud of this work published a few days ago at SLT 2024 on continual learning for end to end ASR. Turns out changing the CL paradigm to parallel training on different tasks and merging these experts can reduce the forgetting rate to as low as 0.4%! poonehmousavi.github.io/assets/publi...
poonehmousavi.github.io
December 9, 2024 at 12:38 AM
competerscience.bsky.social
I love Arrival so much, this makes me happy
tedunderwood.com Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · Dec 1
Did you know that attention across the whole input span was inspired by the time-negating alien language in Arrival? Crazy anecdote from the latest Hard Fork podcast (by @kevinroose.com and @caseynewton.bsky.social). HT nwbrownboi on Threads for the lead.
Transcript of Hard Fork ep 111: Yeah. And I could talk for an hour about transformers and why they are so important. But I think it's important to say that they were inspired by the alien language in the film Arrival, which had just recently come out. And a group of researchers at Google, one researcher in particular, who was part of that original team, was inspired by watching Arrival and seeing that the aliens in the movie had this language which represented entire sentences with a single symbol. And they thought, hey, what if we did that inside of a neural network? So rather than processing all of the inputs that you would give to one of these systems one word at a time, you could have this thing called an attention mechanism, which paid attention to all of it simultaneously. That would allow you to process much more information much faster. And that insight sparked the creation of the transformer, which led to all the stuff we see in Al today.
December 1, 2024 at 2:54 PM
competerscience.bsky.social
I’m participating in my first big #ML challenge, does anyone have some tips for me? www.drivendata.org/competitions...
PREPARE Challenge - Phase 2: Model Arena (Acoustic Track)
Advance algorithms and analytic approaches for early prediction of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias based on voice recordings, with an emphasis on explainability of predictions. [Model Arena ...
www.drivendata.org
November 29, 2024 at 2:25 PM