Amanda Stent

Chickadee, Maine, March 24 (yes still snow)

Lots of discussion on social media about AI. Meanwhile wind and rain (exacerbated by climate change) take out power to half my state, and wonderful power company workers come from across the country to fix. *Humans* cause problems and (usually other) humans can fix them.

[1/5] Introducing VisDiff - an #AI tool that describes differences in image sets with natural language. VisDiff can summarize model failures, compare models, find nuanced dataset differences, discover what makes an image memorable, and so much more! …derstanding-visual-datasets.github.io/VisDiff-websit…

“Many articles [...] that compare with weak baselines, exaggerate claims, fail to report full computational costs, completely ignore limitations of the work, or otherwise fail to provide sufficient information, data or code to reproduce the results.” nature.com/articles/d4158…

2/2 There are over 150 years of bird observations and you can help! Check out ebird or birds.cornell.edu/home/staff/bec… (I tried; I can't find anything ethically bad about this! Just point your camera away from others!)

The annual theme for @DavisInstAI this year is PLAY! so I'd like to share an application of AI that gives me joy and may contribute to a better understanding of climate change. This nifty CV-enabled bird feeder allows me and many others to monitor birds in our backyards. 1/2

New from me, and I think important: How do we regulate AI? Here's how: techpolicy.press/the-pillars-of… Even includes some charts to fill out, for direct operationalisation within a tech company. (1/n)🧵

With the OpenAI clownshow, there's been renewed media attention on the xrisk/"AI safety" nonsense. Personally, I've had a fresh wave of reporters asking me naive questions (+ some contacts from old hands who know how to handle ultra-rich man-children with god complexes). 🧵1/

I have no details of OpenAI's Board’s reasons for firing Sam, and I am conflicted (lead of Scalable Alignment at Google DeepMind). But there is a large, very loud pile on vs. people I respect, in particular Helen Toner and Ilya Sutskever, so I feel compelled to say a few things.

Now is probably the time to announce that I've been writing a book about @OpenAI, the AI industry & its impacts. Here is a slice of my book reporting, combined with reporting from the inimitable @cwarzel. Inside the year of chaos that led to this weekend. theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

@thamar_solorio Nice ASR, AI enabled meeting notes! Equivalent now built into Teams, Zoom

What is Otter? I'm seeing more and more "Otter of X person" joining online meetings and I have no idea what that is. Are these automated assistants? Does that mean that these Otters are recording what is being said? #onlinemeetings #AcademicChatter #clueless

Two years in! And we have: new #ai related faculty; 600+ student seats in #ai related courses, an #ai concentration and first year cluster, two postdocs, many collaborations. Building AI-with-everyone on the hill.

Colby students, faculty, and staff, please join us tomorrow, October 13th, from 12-2PM on the steps of Olin Science Center. Free food, music, swag, a student pitch, and inspiring innovators and entrepreneurs from Colby's past and the Maine startup ecosystem #ai #colbycollege

Next Tuesday, Prof. Lindsay Grace will be coming to Colby! Read more about Prof. Grace in last week's newsletter (or this week's coming soon), and we hope to see you on Tuesday! #ai #artificialintelligence #ml #machinelearning #davisai #colbycollege

Or possibly ancient Greece. (Depends on definition of university!)

Founder of the CLT, says (per theguardian.com/us-news/2023/s…) “I’m not saying anybody needs to be Christian or Catholic, but it is the intellectual tradition that gave birth to the university.” I think the first university was Muslim, in Morocco.

Your Face Belongs To Us is out in the world today! penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691288/y… It starts with a shocking tip that I got a few years ago: a radical startup had scraped a billion faces from the internet without people’s consent to build a face recognition app for the police. (1/11)

This week's newsletter hit your inbox yesterday. Give it a look if you haven't already! #davisai #ai #datascience #colbycollege