Hello there, visitor

Here’s my message:

Over the last few years I’ve heard intelligent people say numerous ridiculous things about technology and its future. I was told that robots can literally take over the world by hijacking electrical grids, satellites and tanks or whatever. I’ve heard suggestions of getting rid of the government and putting AI in its place. In general, I noticed people say “Can’t you just apply machine learning?” And I don’t blame them. While I can’t comment much about the scientific community, I’m quite certain that the media is overhyping some of the fields and it can be quite difficult differentiating between what’s quality content and what’s not. And even distinguished authors make misleading claims about the power of AI.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve recently made a bet that I would write a blog post. While I’m certainly not the person to teach members of the scientific community, I think I can contribute a little bit towards bridging the gap between what AI can do and what the rest of the world, or at least my network, thinks it can. Therefore, I am happy to announce the start (and maybe the end) of a new blog. I am not exactly sure what story I am going to be telling there but my current idea is to try and explain some of the machine learning algorithms simply. By simply I don’t mean to just skim over the surface of the theory and tell you how cool they are. My goal is to truly explain how a mathematical mindset is employed to arrive at these concepts and what questions this mindset raises. I am going to try to not use or at least minimize the number of convoluted equations without losing too much complexity, so it’s going to be a challenge. My first blog post is about Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a statistical model that can be used to cluster documents and other things into groups that would share similar topics. You can read it here!

I don’t know what the faith of this blog will be. Maybe, and quite likely, it will turn out that I’m just quite a shit writer. In that case this single dusty blog post will just be a memorial in the depths of the internet of my attempt and failure. However, if people are keen, I might write another one. And then another. And then stop. Or maybe not. The point is that I’m happy to hear your critique and suggestions and what you maybe thought was good. The ways you can do that are unlimited and include commenting below, writing me personally anywhere, or just telling me live the next time you see me. I also accept bets.

Anyway, that’s all I had to say. Thank you for your attention and have a wonderful day.

Written on October 3rd , 2019 by Andy