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talhairfan.bsky.social
@talhairfan.bsky.social
6 followers 75 following 21 posts
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Reposted
alexxthiery.bsky.social
Fantastic #neurips keynote by Arnaud Doucet! Really like this slide tracing back many of the modern flow-matching / stochastic interpolants ideas to a 1986 result by probabilist Istvan Gyongy describing how to "Markovianize" a diffusion process (eg. having coefficients depending on all the past)
December 13, 2024 at 3:45 PM
talhairfan.bsky.social
The SlidesLive team deserves a lot of credit for streaming (a number of sessions in parallel) these conferences with incredible efficiency. Their behind-the-scenes team are like firefighters who deserve pats on the back for enabling all this. 👏
neuripsconf.bsky.social NeurIPS Conference @neuripsconf.bsky.social · Dec 11
The opening remarks are currently in progress! #NeurIPS2024
December 11, 2024 at 2:21 AM
Reposted
shubhendu.bsky.social
The RL book by Kevin Murphy is finally online (copied shamelessly from the other place) arxiv.org/abs/2412.05265
Reinforcement Learning: An Overview
This manuscript gives a big-picture, up-to-date overview of the field of (deep) reinforcement learning and sequential decision making, covering value-based RL, policy-gradient methods, model-based met...
arxiv.org
December 9, 2024 at 6:25 AM
Reposted
drannecarpenter.bsky.social
Highly recommend (long) read for anyone who's been leading a lab 10+ years!
I suppose, then, I am well qualified to say something about staying in the game. I have done it for over twenty years. I have contributed to research on several topics in biology and the social sciences. I hold a full professorship in a decent research-intensive university. I get some very nice academic invitations. So it seems I have avoided the ‘exit academia’ arrows, possibly even with aplomb. But—and this is what qualifies me—I haven’t avoided them nearly as easily as you probably think. If it looks that way from the outside, that’s only because you lack the data I have. You don’t see the failures, the false starts, the wasted time, or the awkward conversations with the Dean. (These are ubiquitous, by the way, just not well written up in the literature.) And opposite the Scylla of the ‘exit academia’ arrows has always lurked the Charybdis of my own demoralization: walking away from the game even if the game does not eject me. I gave up completely once, for several years, then eventually clawed my way back in; a second time I partly gave up but left myself attached by a lifeline, a lifeline I duly climbed up within a year or so; and probably two or three more times over the years I reached the point of starting to make other plans. Periodic demoralization and depression are not rare amongst researchers. It’s not not caring any more, or not being able to be bothered, as depression is often and erroneously characterized. It is caring so much, being so bothered, that one cannot advance on any front. One drowns in one’s own disorganized and gradually souring passion. This feeling is probably near- ubiquitous too.
December 9, 2024 at 4:24 PM
Reposted
stanfordnlp.bsky.social
The extraordinary recent takeover of ML/AI by #NLP is well-known but insufficiently reflected on.

Look at the @neuripsconf.bsky.social tutorials in 2024!

neurips.cc/virtual/2024...

14 tutorials; 6 have "LLM" in the title; 4 more cover foundation models, with large NLP coverage. That's > 70% 😲
NeurIPS 2024 TutorialsNeurIPS 2024
neurips.cc
December 9, 2024 at 7:29 PM
Reposted
camw.ing
In 2025 (less than 30 days away), PayPal will start selling your transaction history for targeted advertising.

I very highly recommend logging into your account and going to Settings > Data & Privacy > Personalized Shopping.

If you're reading this, turn that off RIGHT NOW before you forget.
A screenshot of PayPal's terms of service. Big wall of legalese text, which I will be pasting in below. You don't need to read it, here's the important part: "The key update to the Privacy Statement explains how we will share information with merchants to personalize your shopping experience and recommend our services to you. Personal information we disclose includes, for example, products, preferences, sizes, and styles we think you’ll like. Information gathered about you after the effective date of our updated Privacy Statement, November 27, 2024, will be shared with participating stores where you shop." Here's the whole paragraph: We are updating our Privacy Statement to explain how, starting early Summer 2025, we will share information to help improve your shopping experience and make it more personalized for you. The key update to the Privacy Statement explains how we will share information with merchants to personalize your shopping experience and recommend our services to you. Personal information we disclose includes, for example, products, preferences, sizes, and styles we think you’ll like. Information gathered about you after the effective date of our updated Privacy Statement, November 27, 2024, will be shared with participating stores where you shop, unless you live in California, North Dakota, or Vermont. For PayPal customers in California, North Dakota, or Vermont, we’ll only share your information with those merchants if you tell us to do so. No matter where you live, you’ll always be able to exercise your right to opt out of this data sharing by updating your preference settings in your account under “Data and Privacy.”
December 5, 2024 at 9:12 PM
talhairfan.bsky.social
Alhamdulillah, Syria is free and @neuripsconf.bsky.social is starting. Exciting days ahead!
December 9, 2024 at 3:28 AM
talhairfan.bsky.social
It's appalling to see how these "advanced" countries continue to deny visas to paper authors. Saw an oral author in ECCV being unable to present and now whole team (again an oral) is unable to present in NeurIPS since their visas were refused.
December 5, 2024 at 2:32 AM
talhairfan.bsky.social
Democracy wins!! #SouthKorea
December 4, 2024 at 6:38 AM
talhairfan.bsky.social
قَالَ رَسُولُ اَللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم

إِنَّ رَبَّكُمْ حَيِيٌّ كَرِيمٌ, يَسْتَحِي مِنْ عَبْدِهِ إِذَا رَفَعَ إِلَيْهِ يَدَيْهِ أَنْ يَرُدَّهُمَا صِفَرًا
December 1, 2024 at 6:09 AM
talhairfan.bsky.social
Opened Twitter after ages to check updates on the brutal crackdown on protestors in Islamabad. It turns out that Twitter has become too much managed to be feared by the authorities anymore.
November 27, 2024 at 12:37 PM
Reposted
alexxthiery.bsky.social
Recommended!
arxiv.org/abs/2403.14606
November 26, 2024 at 8:04 AM
talhairfan.bsky.social
Joined Bluesky to follow Academics and now I am having the same anxiety/inferiority complex (its not imposter's syndrome as it's based on facts) which I do when opening LinkedIn. 🫠
November 25, 2024 at 6:32 AM
Reposted
emilyliu.me
While Bluesky looks like other social apps on the surface, it’s actually quite different. It’s an open network.

I blogged about it here:
Benefits of an open network
emilyliu.me
November 24, 2024 at 11:53 PM
talhairfan.bsky.social
What's an oppressor's dream? Everyone would become an innocent bystander. Being silent on human rights (or any) issues is never an option.
November 22, 2024 at 2:44 AM
talhairfan.bsky.social
Blocking @bsky.app within a couple of weeks of "Xodus" shows the terrible state of mind Pakistan currently is. Look at the internet freedom status (which will keep on getting worse with time) where Pakistan is having almost same score as monarchs like Saudi Arabia

freedomhouse.org/explore-the-...
November 19, 2024 at 2:40 PM
talhairfan.bsky.social
I had left X and joined Bluesky as X is blocked in Pakistan. But now it's blocked too? Wow!

Blocking @bsky.app within a few days of its launch shows how much Pakistan is failing as a state. I have never seen this level of unnerving before.
November 19, 2024 at 12:52 PM
talhairfan.bsky.social
Been a year since travelled in the skies #OhWell
November 18, 2024 at 5:12 AM
talhairfan.bsky.social
@madelonhulsebos.bsky.social Thank you for introducing this. Thanks to your curated list of ML people, this forum seems scary like X again :D
November 18, 2024 at 5:10 AM