Author Archives: pgfeldman

Phil 2.10.20

7:00 – 5:30 ASRC GOES

  • Defense
    • Slides and walkthrough
    • First pass is thirty minutes too long!
  • Trying to get back admin – maybe? Need to get the machine unlocked (again) tomorrow)

Phil 2.9.20

In Data Voids: Where Missing Data Can Easily Be ExploitedGolebiewski teams up with danah boyd (Microsoft Research; Data & Society) to demonstrate how data voids are exploited by manipulators eager to expose people to problematic content including falsehoods, misinformation, and disinformation.

Data voids are often difficult to detect. Most can be harmless until something happens that causes lots of people to search for the same term, such as a breaking news event, or a reporter using an unfamiliar phrase. In some cases, manipulators work quickly to produce conspiratorial content to fill a void, whereas other data voids, such as those from outdated terms, are filled slowly over time. Data voids are compounded by the fraught pathways of search-adjacent recommendation systems such as auto-play, auto-fill, and trending topics; each of which are vulnerable to manipulation.

Persuading Algorithms With an AI Nudge Fact-Checking Can Reduce the Spread of Unreliable News. It Can Also Do the Opposite.

Tesla Autopilot Duped By ‘Phantom’ Images: Researchers were able to fool popular autopilot systems into perceiving projected images as real – causing the cars to brake or veer into oncoming traffic lanes.

Phil 2.7.20

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC GOES

tacj

  •  Dissertation
    • Fixed some math
  •  Defense
    • Added a math slide for agent calculations – done
    • Need to add the sim justification slide, based on Aaron’s comments last night – done
    • Drop off signed papers at graduate school this morning – done
    • Working on the abstract – done and submitted!

Phil 2.6.20

7:00 – 4:00  ASRC GOES

Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks

  • Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes to learn how to perceive and act upon the world? Recent advances in artificial neural networks have exposed the power of optimizing millions of synaptic weights over millions of observations to operate robustly in real-world contexts. These models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of the world; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over task-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space. Counterintuitively, similar to evolutionary processes, over-parameterized models can be simple and parsimonious, as they provide a versatile, robust solution for learning a diverse set of functions. This new family of direct-fit models present a radical challenge to many of the theoretical assumptions in psychology and neuroscience. At the same time, this shift in perspective establishes unexpected links with developmental and ecological psychology.

 

  •  Defense
    • Discussion slides
      • contributions – done
      • designing for populations 1 & 2- done
      • Diversity and resilience- done
      • Non-human agents- done
      • Reflection and reflex- done
      • Ethical considerations- done
      • Ethics of diversity injection
      • Ethics of belief space cartography
  • GOES
    • Status report
  • Get signature from Aaron at 7:30

Phil 2.5.20

7:00 – 5:30 ASRC GOES

  • Social network proximity predicts similar trajectories of psychological states: Evidence from multi-voxel spatiotemporal dynamics put this in the lit review!
    • Temporal trajectories of multivoxel patterns capture meaningful individual differences.

    • Inter-subject similarity in pattern trajectories predicts social network proximity.

    • Friends may be exceptionally similar in how attentional states evolve over time.

    • There are distinct behavioral effects of neural response pattern and magnitude trajectories.

  • Irrational Politics, Unreasonable Culture: Justin Smith and Jessica Riskin held on January 29, 2020
    • Shouting and shaming, lying and trolling: How did we ever learn to speak to one another the way we do now? In matters political and cultural, public and private, on social media and in major newsrooms, it seems as though over the past few years a bizarre and frightening irrationality has taken hold of our discourse. But what is irrationality, and what is that thing—reason—with which we oppose it? 
    • Jessica Riskin is involved in some cross-cultural project at Stanford that is trying to bring the arts and STEM into closer orbits (techies and fuzzies?)? Send an email
    • Justin Smith is interested on the effects of algorithms on thinking. Can’t find any writing, but he gave a talk: “The Algorithmic Production of Social Kinds,” a lecture-performance at DAU, Paris, February 12, 2019.
  • Dissertation
    • Slides
  • Mission drive meeting
    • Send status report to Erik
    • 3/31/20 milestones
      • Evaluate GOES 16 and 17 high-fidelity simulators as training sources for multivariate anomaly detection
        • Evaluate transfer learning from GOES 16 <-> GOES 17
      • Evaluate reaction wheel scenarios on lofi model as training source for multivariate anomaly detection for GOES 17 and GOES 17
        • Evaluate transfer learning between models trained using hifi simulator data

Phil 1.31.20

7:00 – 4:00 PhD

  • Dissertation. Here’s how to do a timeline (support.office.com/en-us/article/create-a-timeline). Nope – this is horrible
  • Let’s try Python. Woohoo! It’s overkill, but looks great: Timeline
  • Here’s the code:
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    import numpy as np
    from datetime import datetime
    
    
    names = ['Le Bon', 'Arendt', 'Martindale', 'Moscovici & Doise', 'Grunbaum',
             'Kauffman', 'Card & Pirolli', 'Bacharach', 'Olfati-Saber', 'Munson & Resnick', 'Stephens',
             'Galotti', 'Bastos']
    
    dates = ['1895', '1951', '1991', '1994', '1998', '1993', '1999', '2006', '2007', '2010', '2011', '2017', '2019']
    
    namedates = []
    for i in range(len(names)):
        namedates.append("{} ({})".format(names[i], dates[i]))
    
    
    # Convert date strings (e.g. 2014-10-18) to datetime
    dates = [datetime.strptime(d, "%Y") for d in dates]
    
    # Choose some nice levels
    levels = np.tile([-5, 5, -4, 4, -3, 3, -2, 2, -1, 1],
                     int(np.ceil(len(dates)/6)))[:len(dates)]
    
    # Create figure and plot a stem plot with the date
    fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8.8, 4), constrained_layout=True)
    ax.set(title="Literature")
    
    markerline, stemline, baseline = ax.stem(dates, levels,
                                             linefmt="C3-", basefmt="k-",
                                             use_line_collection=True)
    
    plt.setp(markerline, mec="k", mfc="w", zorder=3)
    
    # Shift the markers to the baseline by replacing the y-data by zeros.
    markerline.set_ydata(np.zeros(len(dates)))
    
    # annotate lines
    vert = np.array(['top', 'bottom'])[(levels > 0).astype(int)]
    for d, l, r, va in zip(dates, levels, namedates, vert):
        ax.annotate(r, xy=(d, l), xytext=(-3, np.sign(l)*3),
                    textcoords="offset points", va=va, ha="right")
    
    # remove y axis and spines
    ax.get_yaxis().set_visible(False)
    for spine in ["left", "top", "right"]:
        ax.spines[spine].set_visible(False)
    
    ax.margins(y=0.1)
    plt.subplots_adjust(left=0.1, right= 0.9)
    plt.show()
  • PhD Day

 

Phil 1.30.20

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC GOES

  • Antonio created an Overleaf project for ACSOS. Fixed the widthg of all the figures. Need to fix the tables and equations
  •  Dissertation
    • Fix the > \pagewidth equations
    • Slides
    • Get the timeline prev work slide updated for Kauffman, Martindale, and Bacharach (how did I do number lines?
  • Add December to status and send to T
  • Finish slide deck and paperwork for GSAW – done, I think
  • Meetings at NSOF
    • 1:30 Isaac
      • More discussion about simulators. We’re going to try running multiple sims this weekend with all even number wheels degraded at 20%, 40%, 60%, and 80% and compare them to 100%
      • In future, set up synchronized tasks so we can run more often and iterate across all wheels
      • Reviewed slides. Making small fixes
    • 2:00 regular status

Phil 1.29.20

7:00 – 8:00 ASRC GOES

  • The Office of Inspector General conducted a review of the Chicago Police Department’s risk models known as the Strategic Subject List and Crime and Victimization Risk Model. CPD received $3.8 million in federal grants to develop these models, which were designed to predict the likelihood an individual would become a “party to violence”, i.e. the victim or offender in a shooting. The results of SSL were know n as “risk scores” while CVRM produced “risk tiers.” In August 2079, CPD informed OIG that it intended to decommission its PTV risk model program and did so on November l, 2079. The purpose of this advisory is to assess lessons learned and provide recommendations for future implementation of PTV risk models.
  • In “Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot”, we present Meena, a 2.6 billion parameter end-to-end trained neural conversational model. We show that Meena can conduct conversations that are more sensible and specific than existing state-of-the-art chatbots. (Google blog post)
  • Defense
    • Slides – started lit review
    • Drop off dissertation with Wayne
  • GSAW
    • Tweak slides – trying to get a good AIMS overview slide so I can
    • Walkthrough with T
    • Paperwork
  • GOES Meetings
    • Influx DB (Influx 2.0) is a high-performance data store written specifically for time series data. It allows for high throughput ingest, compression and real-time querying. InfluxDB is written entirely in Go and compiles into a single binary with no external dependencies. It provides write and query capabilities with a command-line interface, a built-in HTTP API, a set of client libraries (e.g., Go, Java, and JavaScript) and plugins for common data formats such as Telegraf, Graphite, Collectd and OpenTSDB. 
    • The plan is to have the sim place data from the sim into the Influx DB and have the dashboard display the plots
    • This will generate data: file:///D:/GOES/AIMS4_UI_Mock/3satellite-instrument-analysis.html?page=reportpage&channel=5&status=error, once the demo is unzipped into D:/GOES
  • Meeting with Wayne
    • Dropped off the dissertation
    • Got the reader form signed. Just needs Shimei and Aaron
    • Discussed slides. Can skim the parts that would be review from the proposal and status (but put a slide that says this)
    • Feb 10 as walkthrough? 6:00?

Phil 1.28.20

Make appt. to pick up Dad on Friday after PhD day – done

  • 655 West Baltimore St, Baltimore 21201

protest_mapThis Interactive Guide to Protest Campaigns around the World uses data on all violent and nonviolent campaigns around the world with maximalist claims from 1945–2014 and is based on the NAVCO 1.2 database, recently released by Erica Chenoweth and Christopher Wiley Shay. The data extend on the NAVCO data project, which you can read about (and download) at the project’s Dataverse.

Here’s a bird’s eye view of six state-backed information operations on Twitter, and how they evolved over the last decade. This research was funded by the Mozilla Foundation by an Open Source Support Award.

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC GOES

  • Defense
    • More slides
    • Picked up printed versions and dropped off copies with Shimei, Aaron, and Thom
  • GSAW
    • Change intro slide on GSAW to triangle of data, accuracy, and reliability – done
    • Reworked and tweaked. Walkthrough with T tomorrow.

Phil 1.23.2020

7:00 – 6:00 ASRC GOES

Check Copenhagen Wheel serial number for this recall

  • Get comments back to Antonio tonight! – done
  •  Dissertation
    • Writing chapter summaries
      • Research design – done
      • Simulation – done
      • Adversarial herding – done
      • Belief space cartography – done
      • Human study – done
      • Discussion – done
      • Conclusions – done!
      • Sent pdfs to common vision. Need to set the pdfs out with a note tomorrow morning
    • Caught up with Wayne a bit and commented out the “Why this is HCC section” Keep it for a backup slide though
  • Very interesting Invisibilia on AI
  • GSAW prep
    • Registration
  • Told Aaron about OpML 20. It’s only two pages and due on Feb 25. Maybe a quick writeup of Optevolver?