Articles by WALID SABA
Communications of the ACM
When Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology at semiconductor manufacturer Marvell, needed to familiarize some new engineering hires with one of the challenges facing their industry, he borrowed a bunch of LEGO blocks from his kids. He presented the group with a select number of mismatched blocks. The pieces, Kuemerle explained to his new initiates, were meant to represent different chips with particular functions.
Technical Marvels, Part 7: Musical Clocks and Organs
Many clocks contain musical mechanisms: table clocks, standing clocks, longcase clocks, flute-playing clocks, and pocket watches. Automaton figures, furniture (e.g. desks), jewelry, as well as picture clocks sometimes also have built-in musical mechanisms. For the musical program, historical systems used different sound recording media: pinned cylinder, perforated disc, perforated cardboard tape, and perforated paper roll were widely used.
Communications of the ACM
“Perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves.”1 Considerable effort in software research and practice is spent on bugs. Finding bugs, reporting and tracking them, triaging them, attempting to fix them automatically, detecting “bug smells”—these comprise a substantial portion of large projects’ time and development costs, and are a significant subject of study for researchers in software engineering, programming languages, security, and beyond. But, what is a bug, exactly?
mCaptcha: Replacing Captchas with Rate Limiters to Improve Security and Accessibility
For many years, publicly accessible Web applications have been protecting their services from bots and scripts by asking users to solve captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart), puzzles designed to be challenging for machines to solve yet simple for humans, such as clicking on certain locations in an image or recognizing elongated characters or digits.
Do All Problems Have Technical Fixes?
Robin K. Hill The Techno-Pro Attitude https://bit.ly/3XgIziS June 10, 2024 Tech solutionism, as identified by Moss and Metcalf,7 is the notion that all problems have tractable technical fixes. We see variants in the naming and definition of this phenomenon: the technology imperative,8 or “the underlying technocratic philosophy of inevitability”,4 or even old-fashioned technocracy itself.
Communications of the ACM
In 1956, John Kelly of Bell Labs derived a formula for figuring out how much to bet when you are favored to win but it is not a sure thing. In an even-money bet, if your probability to win is q, then the criterion says to bet the fraction 2q -1 of your capital. For example, if you have a 0.55 chance of winning, you should bet 1.1 – 1 or 10% of your money. Something like this should make intuitive sense.
Elevating Security with Arm CCA
In some significant markets, such as defense, government,1 and banking,9 private datacenters and on-premises computing remain widespread. While shared computing in the public cloud can bring cost and environmental benefits arising from economies of scale, it is traditionally associated with a loss of some control when compared with in-house corporate infrastructure.
Technical Perspective: Optimizing Convolution Neural Nets with a Unified Transformation Approach
There is no denying that deep learning, especially with generative models AI, has deeply transformed how we use computers. It has also quickly become where a very large fraction of the world’s computing resources is now focused. Most deep-learning systems implementations involve expressing the machine learning (ML) model in some higher-level framework (for example, Caffe in the early days, then TensorFlow, and now PyTorch).
Using Generative AI to View Questions Through Different Academic Disciplines
Our last post introduced a novel interface with a facial expression drawn on the sides of a cube made of a sponge, to guide the tone of a Generative AI response. Showing a face to the camera on a phone or tablet prompted Generative AI’s response to come from a curious, thoughtful, skeptical, or confident point of view. Besides getting people to see how tone affects responses, the unusual interface might help people remember the experience well.
No Generalization without Understanding and Explanation
McCarthy and his Prediction Regarding ‘Scruffy’ AI John McCarthy, one of the founders of (and the one who supposedly coined the term) artificial intelligence (AI), stated on several occasions that if we insist on building AI systems based on empirical methods (e.g., neural networks or evolutionary models), we might be successful in building “some kind of an AI,” but even the designers of such systems will not understand how such systems work (see, for an example, [1]).
Advancing the Search Frontier with AI Agents
As many of us in the information retrieval (IR) research community know and appreciate, search is far from being a solved problem. Millions of people struggle with tasks on search engines every day.
The Impact of AI on Computer Science Education
Last fall, Eric Klopfer decided to conduct an experiment in his undergraduate computer science class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He divided the class into three groups and gave them a programming task to solve in the Fortran language, which none of them knew. One group was allowed to use ChatGPT to solve the problem, the second group was told to use Meta’s Code Llama large language model (LLM), and the third group could only use Google.
When Colorless Green DNNs Sleep Furiously in an Unexplainable Fantasy
It seems that the misguided hype surrounding deep learning and in turn artificial intelligence (AI) does not seem to be subsiding.
Let's Be Objective about Large Language Models
View as: Print Mobile App Share: Credit: Walid S. Saba Created using Generative AI Tools 1. Large Language Models: The End of History? Since the advent of the transformer and attention mechanisms [1] large language models (LLMs) have been all the rage, not only in the artificial intelligence (AI) community but in all of science and technology and even in business and society at large (the query "Large Language Models" I recently executed on Google returned over 2 billion hits).
Let us be Objective about Large Language Models
View as: Print Mobile App Share: 1. Large Language Models: The End of History? Since the advent of the transformer and attention mechanisms [1] large language models (LLMs) have been all the rage, not only in the artificial intelligence (AI) community but in all of science and technology and even in business and society at large (the query "Large Language Models" I recently executed on Google returned over 2 billion hits).
Machine Learning: the Road to Artificial Intelligence?
View as: Print Mobile App Share: 1. Introduction Before we commence, we need to clarify what we men by learning. To make this clarification we first need to discuss our use of the phrase ‘I know’. To be sure, our folk use of the phrase ‘I know’ in our everyday linguistic communication is utterly overloaded to the point that it has misguided the most learned amongst us and has caused us to ignore the critical difference in the two major uses of the phrase.
How Did Scientists Succumb to Aunt Edna? The Dangers of a Superintelligent AI is Fiction
By Walid S. Saba May 23, 2023 Comments View as: Print Mobile App Share: Send by email Share on reddit Share on StumbleUpon Share on Hacker News Share on Tweeter Share on Facebook How Did Scientists Succumb to Aunt Edna? The Dangers of a Superintelligent AI is Fiction Speaking of the existential threat of AI is science fiction, and bad science fiction for that matter because it is not based on anything we know about science, logic, and nothing we even know about ourselves.
New Research Vindicates Fodor and Pylyshyn: No Explainable AI Without 'Structured Semantics'
By Walid S.
Machine Learning Won't Solve Natural Language Understanding
The Empirical and Data-Driven Revolution In the early 1990s a statistical revolution overtook artificial intelligence (AI) by a storm – a revolution that culminated by the 2000’s in the triumphant return of neural networks with their modern-day deep learning (DL) reincarnation.
Math Unsupervised
Throughout my many years in math education as a tutor, TA, and teacher, one thing that stood out to me was that my students consistently had strong feelings about math. I wondered if this phenomenon extended beyond my students. This led me to the questions, how do people talk about math? And, can I use data to explore topic trends? My expectation going into this project was that I was going to see a lot of hate for math.
The importance of probabilistic thinking when faced with uncertainty
Why probabilistic thinking can be an extraordinarily powerful and practical tool to approach the unknown and uncontrollable Photo by Loic Leray on Unsplash In a video published in November 2020, physician and philosopher of science Etienne Klein called for engineers to express their opinions and participate in a public debate. As a result, I decided to take the plunge and offer a different point of view on a topic close to my heart, which is that of decision making and uncertainty.
Progressives Beware: Why a Vote for Neoliberals is a Vote for the Fascists and the Far Right
Decades of voting for the corporate-controlled neoliberal elite has led to perpetual wars, the complete disintegration of several nations, resulting in millions of dead and millions of refugees on a scale not seen since WWII, to Al Qaeda-turned ISIS, to a situation on the brink of a catastrophic war between NATO and Russia, and to a nearly complete demise of the once vibrant middle class in most advanced economies.
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