The other day a group of Gatsby PhD students were debating whether machine learning existed before the mid 90’s. Clearly it did, even if you want to take a restricted view of what belongs to this category. Nevertheless, the fact that this was being discussed at all, and by people who spend the [...]
It’s long been thought that brain oscillations play a key role in short term memory, though there hasn’t been much empirical evidence to support this. That now seems to have changed with the publication of Phase-dependent neuronal coding of objects in short-term memory by Siegal, Warden and Miller. There is the paper as well as [...]
This short film, The Third & The Seventh, by Alex Roman, is a great example of cutting edge computer graphics. The airy elegant style reminds me a bit of Kubrick. I’m not sure what impressed me the most: the wonderful cinematography, the fact that it’s entirely computer generated, or that one guy did it alone [...]
I’ve decided to christen the next decade the teenies. Firstly, I’ve still heard no other suggestions; secondly, it’s phonetically consistent with the noughties and the twenties; and thirdly, the name is so downright awfully bad it’s almost quite good. So the teenies it is.
I’ve been scratching my head about these predictions for the last few days. [...]
The start of the Noughties for me was Y2K. It was a non-event, thanks, I might add, to people like me making ourselves mentally unwell fixing endless date issues in crappy database code. Next was the massive dot com crash — our wonderful future of super internet everything was an illusion… except, well, [...]
On Saturday the 31st of October, I’m going to be the speaker at Extrobritannia here in London. I went along to their last meeting and it was totally packed out, nearly a hundred people I believe. Having both Dr. Aubrey de Grey and Dr. Anders Sandberg speaking explains why!
I’ll be covering topics from [...]
I got scammed online. I guess it was just a matter of time, but I’d thought that I was smart enough to avoid such things. It’s a pretty slick scam, here’s how it works:
To visit the US from many countries one must now apply online to something called ESTA in order to obtain [...]
It was just a matter of time before somebody started working on something like this. Amusement aside, I’m impressed that Prof. Bringsjord managed to make a magazine as serious as Scientific American with this topic. In order to make a “classically evil” AGI, as opposed to a merely “indifferently evil” AGI, I guess you [...]
I just read this article on the scale of time by Mike Treder. Part the way through it has an interesting question: What would surprise a person from the year 2000 most about the year 2010? As I don’t know what will happen in the next year, I prefer the 1999 vs. [...]
A month or so ago I became a “twit”, in internet speak. I didn’t really see the point in Twitter, but given that it’s the new big thing in internet land I figured that the only way to understand it was to try it… I got myself a Twitter account. I soon realised that it’s [...]