So here’s a lovely paper from from David Budtz Pedersen and Rolf Hvidtfeldt that starts deals with real world causality head-on. They tell us that if we’re serious about impact, we need to start taking the micro foundations of impact seriously. What I most like is the attention to absorptive capacity and dispostions. That is, … Read More
– things I’ve read this week Attention is all you need “In deep learning, nothing is ever just about the equations. It is how you . . . put them on the hardware, it’s a giant bag of black magic tricks that only very few people have truly mastered,” Uszkoreit says. Once these were applied, primarily by Shazeer whom … Read More
Most years between Christmas and New Year I make a mix-tape for friends. Here’s this year’s effort on Mixcloud. Tracklisting:clipping. – The Deep; The Revolutionaries – Kunta Kintae Dub; MC Yallah – Ndi Mukazi; Sarathy Korwar – Birthright (feat. Zia Ahmed, Mirande & Swadesi); Moor Mother and Yatta – Dial Up; Fort Romeau – Fantasia; … Read More
A snippet of research that I’ve just been expunged from a working paper on how care and accountability are imagined in the UK’s social care infrastructures. An interview with Mike Padgham, managing director of the Saint Cecilia’s care home group in Scarborough reveals to the Financial Times the choice [care home operators like him] faced … Read More
My friend O overheard (oversaw?!?) this gem at one of those big summer conferences academics go to, the kind that migrated to Zoom in 2020. She knew I’d like it. I did. Skip forward a few months and I’m desparately hacking at a piece of writing that is far too shrub-like for its own good. … Read More
Backstage at the 2019 SciRoc Smart Cities robotics competition at the Centre:MK shopping mall in Milton Keynes, UK. What was inside this box was inevitably less intriguing than the possibilities of its exterior. But maybe that was the point of hosting a four day competition for robot developers inside of a shopping centre. Using a … Read More
Some ongoing data research on how innovation and technology projects funded by UK research councils consider understand social care. I wanted to know two things: How research about innovation in social care such as assistive living robotics, advanced data tech like AI and machine learning applications and tele-health conceptualised and imagined what exactly social care … Read More
From a Twitter thread A question for @NHSX: Can you assure us of accountability, recourse and fairness all the way down the application stack? The NHS contact tracing app is using a tonne of technologies, platforms and infrastructures from private and public orgs to get this done. @NHSX tell us our data is safe, our … Read More
“This time is different” is a common refrain from AI’s more passionate advocates. Here’s Maggie Boden on the history of ideas in AI, from her incredible 1,000+ page history of cognitive science. If today’s AI researchers aren’t deliberately stealing and renaming old ideas, as Father Hacker advises, they are sometimes reinventing the wheel—and lack of … Read More
From Twitter FT.com headline: Johnson plans to shift civil servants out of London. PM said to be keen to locate new government agencies outside capitalLink: https://www.ft.com/content/56230938-27d7-11ea-9305-4234e74b0ef3 Does UK science and technology need an MIT in the North? Wrong question. Rather, do we need an MIT model at all? Almost certainly not. Here are a few … Read More