Month: October 2019

Interpretable models

Stop explaining black box machine learning models for high stakes decisions and use interpretable models instead

2023-03-01: Math approaches can help with interpretation

Let’s take the set of all cat images and the set of all images that aren’t cats. We’re going to view them as topological shapes, or manifolds. One is the manifold of cats and the other is the manifold of non-cats. These are going to be intertwined in some complicated way. Why? Because there are certain things that look very much like cats that are not a cat. Mountain lions sometimes get mistaken for cats. Replicas. The big thing is, 2 manifolds are intertwined in some very complex manner.
I measure the shape of the manifold as it passes through the layers of a neural network. Ultimately, I can show that it reduces to the simplest possible form. You can view a neural network as a device for simplifying the topology of the manifolds under study.

Food chain

Cross-organelle response

The problem with serial repitching has beer makers and cell biologists scratching their heads. Clearly, something about the fermentation process is making new generations of yeast less able to ferment. But what? Heat shock response is a complex process because cells are capable of making 1000s of different proteins. But only a subset of these proteins are expressed at any one instant, and the subsets differ inside each organelle in the cell. So maintaining the function of these proteins—proteostasis—requires a complex signaling mechanism that switches on the relevant genes in each organelle. This switching process must be coordinated across the cell, since organelles depend on each other. The process of communication and coordination is called cross-organelle response, or CORE, and it is poorly understood. But this is an important emerging area of cell biology: biologists are beginning to realize that CORE plays a crucial role not just in heat shock response but in metabolism in general, and even in processes such as aging.

Asian restaurant Guide

Ali Wong has a guide to tell the difference between good and bad Asian restaurants.

Las Vegas mole people

60K new Mayan sites

In the past, archaeologists had argued that small, disconnected city-states dotted the Maya lowlands, though that conception is falling out of favor. This study shows that the Maya could extensively “exploit and manipulate” their environment and geography. Maya agriculture sustained large populations, who in turn forged relationships across the region.

Mauled Tourist

wolf packs have survived and even thrived in New York’s labyrinthine tunnels, emerging in local parks only on occasion to hunt in the moonlight for live prey. In fact, the NYPD chalks up the majority of missing tourist reports each year to the city’s subterranean canine inhabitants. Today, The Ed Koch Wolf Foundation in partnership with the NYC Fellowship is erecting monuments in city parks to serve as cautionary reminders to out-of-town visitors. When in NYC, visit our many beautiful green districts. Just let these stunning statues remind you as to why we close our parks at night.

Realtime 10 cm Location

Global Differential GPS uses a large ground network of real-time reference receivers, innovative network architecture, and real-time data processing software, the GDGPS System provides sub-10 cm positioning accuracy and sub-nanosecond time transfer accuracy anywhere in the world, on the ground, in the air, and in space, independent of local infrastructure.

Super zoom

The classic short film Powers of 10 (1977) propelled viewers on a journey from a Chicago park into deep space and then back down to the scale of a single proton. In The Super Zoom, the Brazil-based graphic designer Pedro Machado’s visualisation dives even deeper into the realm of the subatomic and theoretical. While the original film by Charles and Ray Eames zoomed in to a scale of 10-16 m at most, Machado’s film draws on 40 years of quantum research – not to mention significant advances in 3D rendering technology – to drill down to the unfathomably small scale of 10-33 m, brushing up against the limits of human knowledge and imagination. The mind bending animation uses a framework of quantum gravity in which a gravitational field exists at these smallest conceivable scales.

Drone detectives

AirCSI is a prototype drone system that scans crime scenes from above, identify possible pieces of evidence, and then collect more detailed images and data of such items of interest.