Phil 11.12.18

7:00 – 7:00 ASRC PhD

Call Tim Ellis – done
Tags – done
Bills – nope, including MD EV paperwork -done
Get oil change kit from Bob’s – closed
Fika – done
Finish Similar neural responses predict friendship – Done!
Discrete hierarchical organization of social group sizes
- The ‘social brain hypothesis’ for the evolution of large brains in primates has led to evidence for the coevolution of neocortical size and social group sizes, suggesting that there is a cognitive constraint on group size that depends, in some way, on the volume of neural material available for processing and synthesizing information on social relationships. More recently, work on both human and non-human primates has suggested that social groups are often hierarchically structured. We combine data on human grouping patterns in a comprehensive and systematic study. Using fractal analysis, we identify, with high statistical confidence, a discrete hierarchy of group sizes with a preferred scaling ratio close to three: rather than a single or a continuous spectrum of group sizes, humans spontaneously form groups of preferred sizes organized in a geometrical series approximating 3–5, 9–15, 30–45, etc. Such discrete scale invariance could be related to that identified in signatures of herding behaviour in financial markets and might reflect a hierarchical processing of social nearness by human brains.
Work on Antonio’s paper – good progress
Aaron added a lot of content to Belief Spaces, and we got together to discuss. Probably the best thing to come out of the discussion was an approach to the dungeons that at one end is an acyclic, directed, linear graph of connected nodes. The map will be a line, with any dilemma discussions connected with the particular nodes. At the other end is an open environment. In between are various open and closed graphs that we can classify with some level of complexity.
One of the things that might be interesting to examine is the distance between nodes, and how that affects behavior
Need to mention that D&D are among the oldest “digital residents” of the internet, with decades-old artifacts.

Phil 11.9.18

7:00 – ASRC PhD/BD/NASA

Started to write up the study design for Belief Spaces/Places in a Google doc
More Grokking ML – ok progress
- GitHub repo
Riot – a glossy Matrix collaboration client for the web. http://riot.im
Let‘s Chat is a persistent messaging application that runs on Node.js and MongoDB. It’s designed to be easily deployable and fits well with small, intimate teams. (GitHub)
Mattermost is an open source, self-hosted Slack-alternative. As an alternative to proprietary SaaS messaging, Mattermost brings all your team communication into one place, making it searchable and accessible anywhere. It’s written in Golang and React and runs as a production-ready Linux binary under an MIT license with either MySQL or Postgres. (GitHub)
PHPbb is hosted on Dreamhost
Sprint planning
Analysis of visitors’ mobility patterns through random walk in the Louvre museum
- This paper proposes a random walk model to analyze visitors’ mobility patterns in a large museum. Visitors’ available time makes their visiting styles different, resulting in dissimilarity in the order and number of visited places and in path sequence length. We analyze all this by comparing a simulation model and observed data, which provide us the strength of the visitors’ mobility patterns. The obtained results indicate that shorter stay-type visitors exhibit stronger patterns than those with the longer stay-type, confirming that the former are more selective than the latter in terms of their visitation type.
Same Story, Different Story The Neural Representation of Interpretive Frameworks
- Differences in people’s beliefs can substantially impact their interpretation of a series of events. In this functional MRI study, we manipulated subjects’ beliefs, leading two groups of subjects to interpret the same narrative in different ways. We found that responses in higher-order brain areas—including the default-mode network, language areas, and subsets of the mirror neuron system—tended to be similar among people who shared the same interpretation, but different from those of people with an opposing interpretation. Furthermore, the difference in neural responses between the two groups at each moment was correlated with the magnitude of the difference in the interpretation of the narrative. This study demonstrates that brain responses to the same event tend to cluster together among people who share the same views.
Similar neural responses predict friendship
- Computational Social Neuroscience Lab
  - The Computational Social Neuroscience Lab is located in the Department of Psychology at UCLA.We study how our brains allow us to represent and navigate the social world. We take a multidisciplinary approach to research that integrates theory and methods from cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, social network analysis, and social psychology.
- Authors
  - Carolyn Parkinson (Scholar)
  - Adam M. Kleinbaum (Scholar)
  - Thalia Wheatley (Scholar)
- Research has borne out this intuition: social ties are forged at a higher-than expected rate between individuals of the same age, gender, ethnicity, and other demographic categories. This assortativity in friendship networks is referred to as homophily and has been demonstrated across diverse contexts and geographic locations, including online social networks [2, 3, 4, 5] (Page 2)
- When humans do forge ties with individuals who are dissimilar from themselves, these relationships tend to be instrumental, task-oriented (e.g., professional collaborations involving people with complementary skill sets [7]), and short-lived, often dissolving after the individuals involved have achieved their shared goal. Thus, human social networks tend to be overwhelmingly homophilous [8]. (Page 2)
  - This means that groups can be more efficient, but prone to belief stampede
- Remarkably, social network proximity is as important as genetic relatedness and more important than geographic proximity in predicting the similarity of two individuals’ cooperative behavioral tendencies [4] (Page 2)
- how individuals interpret and respond to their environment increases the predictability of one another’s thoughts and actions during social interactions [14], since knowledge about oneself is a more valid source of information about similar others than about dissimilar others. (Page 2)
  - There is a second layer on top of this which may be more important. How individuals respond to social cues (which can have significant survival value in a social animal) may be more important than day-to-day reactions to the physical environment.
- Here we tested the proposition that neural responses to naturalistic audiovisual stimuli are more similar among friends than among individuals who are farther removed from one another in a real-world social network. Measuring neural activity while people view naturalistic stimuli, such as movie clips, offers an unobtrusive window into individuals’ unconstrained thought processes as they unfold [16] (page 2)
- Social network proximity appears to be significantly associated with neural response similarity in brain regions involved in attentional allocation, narrative interpretation, and affective responding (Page 2)
- We first characterized the social network of an entire cohort of students in a graduate program. All students (N = 279) in the graduate program completed an online survey in which they indicated the individuals in the program with whom they were friends (see Methods for further details). Given that a mutually reported tie is a stronger indicator of the presence of a friendship than an unreciprocated tie, a graph consisting only of reciprocal (i.e., mutually reported) social ties was used to estimate social distances between individuals. (Page 2)
  - I wonder if this changes as people age. Are there gender differences?
- The videos presented in the fMRI study covered a range of topics and genres (e.g., comedy clips, documentaries, and debates) that were selected so that they would likely be unfamiliar to subjects, effectively constrain subjects’ thoughts and attention to the experiment (to minimize mind wandering), and evoke meaningful variability in responses across subjects (because different subjects attend to different aspects of them, have different emotional reactions to them, or interpret the content differently, for example). (Page 3)
  - I think this might make the influence more environmental than social. It would be interesting to see how a strongly aligned group would deal with a polarizing topic, even something like sports.
- Mean response time series spanning the course of the entire experiment were extracted from 80 anatomical regions of interest (ROIs) for each of the 42 fMRI study subjects (page 3)
  - 80 possible dimensions. It would be interesting to see this in latent space. That being said, there is no dialog here, so no consensus building, which implies no dimension reduction.
- To test for a relationship between fMRI response similarity and social distance, a dyad-level regression model was used. Models were specified either as ordered logistic regressions with categorical social distance as the dependent variable or as logistic regression with a binary indicator of reciprocated friendship as the dependent variable. We account for the dependence structure of the dyadic data (i.e., the fact that each fMRI subject is involved in multiple dyads), which would otherwise underestimate the standard errors and increase the risk of type 1 error [20], by clustering simultaneously on both members of each dyad [21, 22].
- For the purpose of testing the general hypothesis that social network proximity is associated with more similar neural responses to naturalistic stimuli, our main predictor variable of interest, neural response similarity within each student dyad, was summarized as a single variable. Specifically, for each dyad, a weighted average of normalized neural response similarities was computed, with the contribution of each brain region weighted by its average volume in our sample of fMRI subjects. (Page 3)
- To account for demographic differences that might impact social network structure, our model also included binary predictor variables indicating whether subjects in each dyad were of the same or different nationalities, ethnicities, and genders, as well as a variable indicating the age difference between members of each dyad. In addition, a binary variable was included indicating whether subjects were the same or different in terms of handedness, given that this may be related to differences in brain functional organization [23]. (page 3)
- Logistic regressions that combined all non-friends into a single category, regardless of social distance, yielded similar results, such that neural similarity was associated with a dramatically increased likelihood of friendship, even after accounting for similarities in observed demographic variables. More specifically, a one SD increase in overall neural similarity was associated with a 47% increase in the likelihood of friendship (logistic regression: ß = 0.388; SE = 0.109; p = 0.0004; N = 861 dyads). Again, neural similarity improved the model’s predictive power above and beyond observed demographic similarities, χ2(1) = 7.36, p = 0.006. (Page 4)
- To gain insight into what brain regions may be driving the relationship between social distance and overall neural similarity, we performed ordered logistic regression analyses analogous to those described above independently for each of the 80 ROIs, again using cluster-robust standard errors to account for dyadic dependencies in the data. This approach is analogous to common fMRI analysis approaches in which regressions are carried out independently at each voxel in the brain, followed by correction for multiple comparisons across voxels. We employed false discovery rate (FDR) correction to correct for multiple comparisons across brain regions. This analysis indicated that neural similarity was associated with social network proximity in regions of the ventral and dorsal striatum … Regression coefficients for each ROI are shown in Fig. 6, and further details for ROIs that met the significance threshold of p < 0.05, FDR-corrected (two tailed) are provided in Table 2. (Page 4)
  - So the latent space that matters involves something on the order of 7 – 9 regions? I wonder if the actions across regions are similar enough to reduce further. I need to look up what each region does.
- Results indicated that average overall (weighted average) neural similarities were significantly higher among distance 1 dyads than dyads belonging to other social distance categories … distance 4 dyads were not significantly different in overall neural response similarity from dyads in the other social distance categories. All reported p-values are two-tailed. (Page 4)
- Within the training data set for each data fold, a grid search procedure [24] was used to select the C parameter of a linear support vector machine (SVM) learning algorithm that would best separate dyads according to social distance. (Page 5)
- As shown in Fig. 8, the classifier tended to predict the correct social distances for dyads in all distance categories at rates above the accuracy level that would be expected based on chance alone (i.e., 25% correct), with an overall classification accuracy of 41.25%. Classification accuracies for distance 1, 2, 3, and 4 dyads were 48%, 39%, 31%, and 47% correct, respectively. (Page 6)
- where the classifier assigned the incorrect social distance label to a dyad, it tended to be only one level of social distance away from the correct answer: when friends were misclassified, they were misclassified most often as distance 2 dyads; when distance 2 dyads were misclassified, they were misclassified most often as distance 1 or 3 dyads, and so on. (Page 6)
- The results reported here are consistent with neural homophily: people tend to be friends with individuals who see the world in a similar way. (Page 7)
- Brain areas where response similarity was associated with social network proximity included subcortical areas implicated in motivation, learning, affective processing, and integrating information into memory, such as the nucleus accumbens, amygdala, putamen, and caudate nucleus [27, 28, 29]. Social network proximity was also associated with neural response similarity within areas involved in attentional allocation, such as the right superior parietal cortex [30,31], and regions in the inferior parietal lobe, such as the bilateral supramarginal gyri and left inferior parietal cortex (which includes the angular gyrus in the parcellation scheme used [32]), that have been implicated in bottom-up attentional control, discerning others’ mental states, processing language and the narrative content of stories, and sense-making more generally [33, 34, 35]. (Page 7)
- However, the current results suggest that social network proximity may be associated with similarities in how individuals attend to, interpret, and emotionally react to the world around them. (Page 7)
  - Both the environmental and social world
- A second, not mutually exclusive, possibility pertains to the “three degrees of influence rule” that governs the spread of a wide range of phenomena in human social networks [43]. Data from large-scale observational studies as well as lab-based experiments suggest that wide-ranging phenomena (e.g., obesity, cooperation, smoking, and depression) spread only up to three degrees of geodesic distance in social networks, perhaps due to social influence effects decaying with social distance to the extent that the they are undetectable at social distances exceeding three, or to the relative instability of long chains of social ties [43]. Although we make no claims regarding the causal mechanisms behind our findings, our results show a similar pattern. (Page 8)
  - Does this change with the level of similarity in the group?
- pre-existing similarities in how individuals tend to perceive, interpret, and respond to their environment can enhance social interactions and increase the probability of developing a friendship via positive affective processes and by increasing the ease and clarity of communication [14, 15]. (Page 8)

Phil 11.8.18

7:30 – 4:00 ASRC PhD/BD/NASA

Continuing Similar neural responses predict friendship
Worked on Machine Learning a bit
NASA presentation planning
Really good discussion on using a post-based RPG framework for building maps

Phil 11.7.18

Let the House Subcommittee investigations begin! Also, better redistricting?

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC PhD/BD

Rather than Deep Learning with Keras, I’m starting on Grokking Deep Learning. I need better grounding
- Installed Jupyter
After lunch, send follow-up emails to the technical POCs. This will be the basis for the white paper: Tentative findings/implications for design. Modify it on the blog page first and then use to create the LaTex doc. Make that one project, with different mains that share overlapping content.
Characterizing Online Public Discussions through Patterns of Participant Interactions
- Public discussions on social media platforms are an intrinsic part of online information consumption. Characterizing the diverse range of discussions that can arise is crucial for these platforms, as they may seek to organize and curate them. This paper introduces a computational framework to characterize public discussions, relying on a representation that captures a broad set of social patterns which emerge from the interactions between interlocutors, comments and audience reactions. We apply our framework to study public discussions on Facebook at two complementary scales. First, we use it to predict the eventual trajectory of individual discussions, anticipating future antisocial actions (such as participants blocking each other) and forecasting a discussion’s growth. Second, we systematically analyze the variation of discussions across thousands of Facebook sub-communities, revealing subtle differences (and unexpected similarities) in how people interact when discussing online content. We further show that this variation is driven more by participant tendencies than by the content triggering these discussions.
More latent space flocking from Innovation Hub
- You Share Everything With Your Bestie. Even Brain Waves.
  - Scientists have found that the brains of close friends respond in remarkably similar ways as they view a series of short videos: the same ebbs and swells of attention and distraction, the same peaking of reward processing here, boredom alerts there. The neural response patterns evoked by the videos — on subjects as diverse as the dangers of college football, the behavior of water in outer space, and Liam Neeson trying his hand at improv comedy — proved so congruent among friends, compared to patterns seen among people who were not friends, that the researchers could predict the strength of two people’s social bond based on their brain scans alone.
- Similar neural responses predict friendship
  - Human social networks are overwhelmingly homophilous: individuals tend to befriend others who are similar to them in terms of a range of physical attributes (e.g., age, gender). Do similarities among friends reflect deeper similarities in how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the world? To test whether friendship, and more generally, social network proximity, is associated with increased similarity of real-time mental responding, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan subjects’ brains during free viewing of naturalistic movies. Here we show evidence for neural homophily: neural responses when viewing audiovisual movies are exceptionally similar among friends, and that similarity decreases with increasing distance in a real-world social network. These results suggest that we are exceptionally similar to our friends in how we perceive and respond to the world around us, which has implications for interpersonal influence and attraction.
- Brain-to-Brain coupling: A mechanism for creating and sharing a social world
  - Cognition materializes in an interpersonal space. The emergence of complex behaviors requires the coordination of actions among individuals according to a shared set of rules. Despite the central role of other individuals in shaping our minds, most cognitive studies focus on processes that occur within a single individual. We call for a shift from a single-brain to a multi-brain frame of reference. We argue that in many cases the neural processes in one brain are coupled to the neural processes in another brain via the transmission of a signal through the environment. Brain-to-brain coupling constrains and simplifies the actions of each individual in a social network, leading to complex joint behaviors that could not have emerged in isolation.
Started reading Similar neural responses predict friendship

Phil 11.6.18

7:00 – 2:00 ASRC PhD/BD

Today’s big though: Maps are going top be easier than I thought. We’ve been doing them for thousands of years with board games.
Worked with Aaron on slides, including finding fault detection using our technologies. There is quite a bit, with pioneering work from NASA
Uploaded documents – done
Called and left messages for Dr. Wilkins and Dr. Palazzolo. Need to send a follow-up email to Dr. Palazzolo and start on the short white papers
Leaving early to vote
The following two papers seem to be addressing edge stiffness
Model of the Information Shock Waves in Social Network Based on the Special Continuum Neural Network
- The article proposes a special class of continuum neural network with varying activation thresholds and a specific neuronal interaction mechanism as a model of message distribution in social networks. Activation function for every neuron is fired as a decision of the specific systems of differential equations which describe the information distribution in the chain of the network graph. This class of models allows to take into account the specific mechanisms for transmitting messages, where individuals who, receiving a message, initially form their attitude towards it, and then decide on the further transmission of this message, provided that the corresponding potential of the interaction of two individuals exceeds a certain threshold level. The authors developed the original algorithm for calculating the time moments of message distribution in the corresponding chain, which comes to the solution of a series of Cauchy problems for systems of ordinary nonlinear differential equations.
A cost-effective algorithm for inferring the trust between two individuals in social networks
- The popularity of social networks has significantly promoted online individual interaction in the society. In online individual interaction, trust plays a critical role. It is very important to infer the trust among individuals, especially for those who have not had direct contact previously in social networks. In this paper, a restricted traversal method is defined to identify the strong trust paths from the truster and the trustee. Then, these paths are aggregated to predict the trust rate between them. During the traversal on a social network, interest topics and topology features are comprehensively considered, where weighted interest topics are used to measure the semantic similarity between users. In addition, trust propagation ability of users is calculated to indicate micro topology information of the social network. In order to find the – most trusted neighbors, two combination strategies for the above two factors are proposed in this paper. During trust inference, the traversal depth is constrained according to the heuristic rule based on the “small world” theory. Three versions of the trust rate inference algorithm are presented. The first algorithm merges interest topics and topology features into a hybrid measure for trusted neighbor selection. The other two algorithms consider these two factors in two different orders. For the purpose of performance analysis, experiments are conducted on a public and widely-used data set. The results show that our algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms in effectiveness. In the meantime, the efficiency of our algorithms is better than or comparable to those algorithms.
Back to LSTMs. Made a numeric version of “all work and no play in the jack_torrance generator
Reading in and writing out weight files. The predictions seems to be working well, but I have no insight into the arguments that go into the LSTM model. Going to revisit the Deep Learning with Keras book

Phil 11.5.18

7:00- 4:30 ASRC PhD

Make integer generator by scaling and shifting the floating point generator to the desired values and then truncating. It would be fun to read in a token list and have the waveform be words

Done with the int waveform. This is an integer waveform of the function
```
math.sin(xx)*math.sin(xx/2.0)*math.cos(xx/4.0)
```
set on a range from 0 – 100:
And here’s the unmodified floating-point version of the same function:

Here’s the same function as words:

#confg: {"function":math.sin(xx)*math.sin(xx/2.0)*math.cos(xx/4.0), "rows":100, "sequence_length":20, "step":1, "delta":0.4, "type":"floating_point"}
routed, traps, thrashing, fifteen, ultimately, dealt, anyway, apprehensions, boats, job, descended, tongue, dripping, adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, 
traps, thrashing, fifteen, ultimately, dealt, anyway, apprehensions, boats, job, descended, tongue, dripping, adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, 
thrashing, fifteen, ultimately, dealt, anyway, apprehensions, boats, job, descended, tongue, dripping, adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, 
fifteen, ultimately, dealt, anyway, apprehensions, boats, job, descended, tongue, dripping, adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, 
ultimately, dealt, anyway, apprehensions, boats, job, descended, tongue, dripping, adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, 
dealt, anyway, apprehensions, boats, job, descended, tongue, dripping, adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, 
anyway, apprehensions, boats, job, descended, tongue, dripping, adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', 
apprehensions, boats, job, descended, tongue, dripping, adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, 
boats, job, descended, tongue, dripping, adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, 
job, descended, tongue, dripping, adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, 
descended, tongue, dripping, adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, descended, 
tongue, dripping, adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, descended, assortment, 
dripping, adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, descended, assortment, flashed, 
adoration, boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, descended, assortment, flashed, reputation, 
boats, routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, descended, assortment, flashed, reputation, guarded, 
routed, routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, descended, assortment, flashed, reputation, guarded, tempers, 
routed, strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, descended, assortment, flashed, reputation, guarded, tempers, partnership, 
strokes, cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, descended, assortment, flashed, reputation, guarded, tempers, partnership, bare, 
cheerful, charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, descended, assortment, flashed, reputation, guarded, tempers, partnership, bare, count, 
charleses, travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, descended, assortment, flashed, reputation, guarded, tempers, partnership, bare, count, descended, 
travellers, unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, descended, assortment, flashed, reputation, guarded, tempers, partnership, bare, count, descended, dashed, 
unsuspected, malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, descended, assortment, flashed, reputation, guarded, tempers, partnership, bare, count, descended, dashed, ears, 
malingerer, respect, aback, vair', wraith, bare, creek, descended, assortment, flashed, reputation, guarded, tempers, partnership, bare, count, descended, dashed, ears, q,

Started LSTMs again, using this example using Alice in Wonderland
Aaron and T in all day discussions with Kevin about NASA/NOAA. Dropped in a few times. NASA is airgapped, but you can bring code in and out. Bringing code in requires a review.
Call the Army BAA people. We need white paper templates and a response for Dr. Palazzolo.
Finish and submit 810 reviews tonight. Done.
This is important for the DARPA and Army BAAs: The geographic embedding of online echo chambers: Evidence from the Brexit campaign
- This study explores the geographic dependencies of echo-chamber communication on Twitter during the Brexit campaign. We review the evidence positing that online interactions lead to filter bubbles to test whether echo chambers are restricted to online patterns of interaction or are associated with physical, in-person interaction. We identify the location of users, estimate their partisan affiliation, and finally calculate the distance between sender and receiver of @-mentions and retweets. We show that polarized online echo-chambers map onto geographically situated social networks. More specifically, our results reveal that echo chambers in the Leave campaign are associated with geographic proximity and that the reverse relationship holds true for the Remain campaign. The study concludes with a discussion of primary and secondary effects arising from the interaction between existing physical ties and online interactions and argues that the collapsing of distances brought by internet technologies may foreground the role of geography within one’s social network.
Also important:
- How to Write a Successful Level I DHAG Proposal
  - The idea behind a Level I project is that it can be “high risk/high reward.” Put another way, we are looking for interesting, innovative, experimental, new ideas, even if they have a high potential to fail. It’s an opportunity to figure things out so you are better prepared to tackle a big project. Because of the relatively low dollar amount (no more than $50K), we are willing to take on more risk for an idea with lots of potential. By contrast, at the Level II and especially at the Level III, there is a much lower risk tolerance; the peer reviewers expect that you’ve already completed an earlier start-up or prototyping phase and will want you to convince them your project is ready to succeed.
Tracing a Meme From the Internet’s Fringe to a Republican Slogan
- This feedback loop is how #JobsNotMobs came to be. In less than two weeks, the three-word phrase expanded from corners of the right-wing internet onto some of the most prominent political stages in the country, days before the midterm elections.
Effectiveness of gaming for communicating and teaching climate change
- Games are increasingly proposed as an innovative way to convey scientific insights on the climate-economic system to students, non-experts, and the wider public. Yet, it is not clear if games can meet such expectations. We present quantitative evidence on the effectiveness of a simulation game for communicating and teaching international climate politics. We use a sample of over 200 students from Germany playing the simulation game KEEP COOL. We combine pre- and postgame surveys on climate politics with data on individual in-game decisions. Our key findings are that gaming increases the sense of personal responsibility, the confidence in politics for climate change mitigation, and makes more optimistic about international cooperation in climate politics. Furthermore, players that do cooperate less in the game become more optimistic about international cooperation but less confident about politics. These results are relevant for the design of future games, showing that effective climate games do not require climate-friendly in-game behavior as a winning condition. We conclude that simulation games can facilitate experiential learning about the difficulties of international climate politics and thereby complement both conventional communication and teaching methods.
- This reinforces the my recent thinking that games may be a fourth, distinct form of human sociocultural communication

Phil 11.4.18

The Center for Midnight

Inspiration came from his most recent experiments on human/computer collaborative writing. Sloan is developing a sort of cyborg text editor, an algorithmic cure for writer’s block, a machine that reads what you’ve written so far and offers a few words that might come next. It does so by reaching into its model of language, a recurrent neural network trained on whatever collection of text seems appropriate, and trying to find sensible endings to the sentence you began.
rnn-writer
- This is a package for the Atom text editor that works with torch-rnn-server to provide responsive, inline “autocomplete” powered by a recurrent neural network trained on a corpus of sci-fi stories, or another corpus of your choosing.
- Writing with the machine
  - I had to offer an extravagant analogy (and I do) I’d say it’s like writing with a deranged but very well-read parrot on your shoulder. Anytime you feel brave enough to ask for a suggestion, you press tab, and…

Phil 11.2.18

7:00 – 2:30 ASRC PhD (feeling burned out – went home early for a nap)

Continuing with my 810 assignment. Just found out about finite semiotics, which could be useful for trustworthiness detection (variance in terms and speed of adoption)
I like this! Creating a Perceptron From Scratch
- In order to gain more insight as to how Neural Networks (NNs) are created and used, we must first understand how they work. It is important to always create a solid foundation as to why you are doing something, instead of navigating blindly. With the ubiquity of Tensorflow or Keras, sometimes it is easy to forget what you are actually building and how to best develop your NN. For this project I will be using Python to create a simple Perceptron that will implement the basics of Back-Propagation to Optimize our Synapse Weighting. I’ll be sure to explain everything along the way and always encourage you to reach out if you have any questions! I will assume no prior knowledge in NNs, but you will instead need to know some fundamentals of Python programming, low-level calculus, and a bit of linear algebra. If you aren’t quite sure what a NN is and how they are used in the field of AI, I encourage you to first read my article covering that topic before tackling this project. So let’s get to it!
And this is very interesting:
- SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) is a unified approach to explain the output of any machine learning model. SHAP connects game theory with local explanations, uniting several previous methods [1-7] and representing the only possible consistent and locally accurate additive feature attribution method based on expectations (see the SHAP NIPS paper for details).

Ok, back to generators. Here are several versions of Call of the Wild

Tokens

index, token
0, quivering
1, scraped
2, introspective
3, confines
4, restlessness
5, pug
6, mandate
7, twisted
8, part
9, error
10, thong
11, resolved
12, daunted
13, spray
14, trees
15, caught
16, fearlessly
17, quite
18, soft
19, sounds
20, slaying

Text sequences

#confg: {"sequence_length":10, "step":1, "type":"words"}
buck, did, not, read, the, newspapers, or, he, would, have
did, not, read, the, newspapers, or, he, would, have, known
not, read, the, newspapers, or, he, would, have, known, that
read, the, newspapers, or, he, would, have, known, that, trouble
the, newspapers, or, he, would, have, known, that, trouble, was
newspapers, or, he, would, have, known, that, trouble, was, brewing
or, he, would, have, known, that, trouble, was, brewing, not
he, would, have, known, that, trouble, was, brewing, not, alone
would, have, known, that, trouble, was, brewing, not, alone, for
have, known, that, trouble, was, brewing, not, alone, for, himself
known, that, trouble, was, brewing, not, alone, for, himself, but
that, trouble, was, brewing, not, alone, for, himself, but, for
trouble, was, brewing, not, alone, for, himself, but, for, every
was, brewing, not, alone, for, himself, but, for, every, tidewater
brewing, not, alone, for, himself, but, for, every, tidewater, dog
not, alone, for, himself, but, for, every, tidewater, dog, strong
alone, for, himself, but, for, every, tidewater, dog, strong, of
for, himself, but, for, every, tidewater, dog, strong, of, muscle
himself, but, for, every, tidewater, dog, strong, of, muscle, and

Index sequences

#confg: {"sequence_length":10, "step":1, "type":"integer"}
4686, 1720, 283, 1432, 1828, 1112, 4859, 3409, 3396, 379
1720, 283, 1432, 1828, 1112, 4859, 3409, 3396, 379, 4004
283, 1432, 1828, 1112, 4859, 3409, 3396, 379, 4004, 3954
1432, 1828, 1112, 4859, 3409, 3396, 379, 4004, 3954, 4572
1828, 1112, 4859, 3409, 3396, 379, 4004, 3954, 4572, 4083
1112, 4859, 3409, 3396, 379, 4004, 3954, 4572, 4083, 3287
4859, 3409, 3396, 379, 4004, 3954, 4572, 4083, 3287, 283
3409, 3396, 379, 4004, 3954, 4572, 4083, 3287, 283, 1808
3396, 379, 4004, 3954, 4572, 4083, 3287, 283, 1808, 975
379, 4004, 3954, 4572, 4083, 3287, 283, 1808, 975, 532
4004, 3954, 4572, 4083, 3287, 283, 1808, 975, 532, 973
3954, 4572, 4083, 3287, 283, 1808, 975, 532, 973, 975
4572, 4083, 3287, 283, 1808, 975, 532, 973, 975, 4678
4083, 3287, 283, 1808, 975, 532, 973, 975, 4678, 3017
3287, 283, 1808, 975, 532, 973, 975, 4678, 3017, 2108
283, 1808, 975, 532, 973, 975, 4678, 3017, 2108, 984
1808, 975, 532, 973, 975, 4678, 3017, 2108, 984, 1868
975, 532, 973, 975, 4678, 3017, 2108, 984, 1868, 3407

Phil 11.1.18

7:00 – 4:30 ASRC PhD

Quick thought. Stampedes may be recognized not just from low variance (density of connections), but also the speed that a new term moves into the lexicon (stiffness)
The Junk News Aggregator, the Visual Junk News Aggregator and the Top 10 Junk News Aggregator are research projects of the Computational Propaganda group (COMPROP) of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII)at the University of Oxford.These aggregators are intended as tools to help researchers, journalists, and the public see what English language junk news stories are being shared and engaged with on Facebook, ahead of the 2018 US midterm elections on November 6, 2018.The aggregators show junk news posts along with how many reactions they received, for all eight types of post reactions available on Facebook, namely: Likes, Comments, Shares, and the five emoji reactions: Love, Haha, Wow, Angry, and Sad.
Reading Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents. Riveting. All about dense, tightly connected networks with hidden information
- From The Montreal Review
  - Normal Accident drew attention to two different forms of organizational structure that Herbert Simon had pointed to years before, vertical integration, and what we now call modularity. Examining risky systems in the Accident book, I focused upon the unexpected interactions of different parts of the system that no designer could have expected and no operator comprehend or be able to interdict. Reading Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents. Riveting. All about dense, tightly connected networks with hidden information

Building generators.

Need to change the “stepsize” in the Torrance generator to be variable – done. Here’s my little ode to The Shining:

#confg: {"rows":100, "sequence_length":26, "step":26, "type":"words"}
all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes 
jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work 
and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a 
dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no 
play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy 
all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes 
jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work 
and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a 
dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no 
play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy 
all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes 
jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work 
and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a

Need to be able to turn out a numeric equivalent. Done with floating point. This:

#confg: {"function":math.sin(xx)*math.sin(xx/2.0)*math.cos(xx/4.0), "rows":100, "sequence_length":20, "step":1, "delta":0.4, "type":"floating_point"}
0.0,0.07697897630719268,0.27378318599563484,0.5027638400821064,0.6604469814238397,0.6714800165989514,0.519596709539434,0.2524851001382131,-0.04065231596017931,-0.2678812526747579,-0.37181365763470914,-0.34898182120310306,-0.24382057359778858,-0.12182487479311599,-0.035942415169752356,-0.0027892469005274916,0.00019865778200507415,0.016268713740310237,0.07979661440830532,0.19146155036709192,
0.07697897630719312,0.2737831859956355,0.5027638400821071,0.6604469814238401,0.6714800165989512,0.5195967095394334,0.2524851001382121,-0.04065231596018022,-0.26788125267475843,-0.37181365763470925,-0.3489818212031028,-0.24382057359778805,-0.12182487479311552,-0.0359424151697521,-0.0027892469005274395,0.0001986577820050832,0.016268713740310397,0.07979661440830574,0.19146155036709248,0.31158944024296154,
0.2737831859956368,0.502763840082108,0.6604469814238405,0.6714800165989508,0.5195967095394324,0.25248510013821085,-0.04065231596018143,-0.2678812526747592,-0.37181365763470936,-0.34898182120310245,-0.24382057359778747,-0.12182487479311502,-0.03594241516975184,-0.002789246900527388,0.00019865778200509222,0.01626871374031056,0.07979661440830614,0.191461550367093,0.311589440242962,0.3760334615921674,
0.5027638400821092,0.6604469814238411,0.6714800165989505,0.5195967095394312,0.25248510013820913,-0.040652315960182955,-0.26788125267476015,-0.37181365763470964,-0.348981821203102,-0.24382057359778667,-0.12182487479311428,-0.03594241516975145,-0.0027892469005273107,0.00019865778200510578,0.016268713740310803,0.07979661440830675,0.1914615503670939,0.3115894402429629,0.3760334615921675,0.3275646734005755,
0.660446981423842,0.6714800165989498,0.5195967095394289,0.2524851001382062,-0.04065231596018568,-0.2678812526747618,-0.37181365763471,-0.34898182120310123,-0.24382057359778553,-0.1218248747931133,-0.03594241516975093,-0.0027892469005272066,0.00019865778200512388,0.016268713740311122,0.07979661440830756,0.19146155036709495,0.31158944024296387,0.3760334615921676,0.3275646734005745,0.1475692800414062,
0.671480016598949,0.5195967095394267,0.25248510013820324,-0.04065231596018842,-0.2678812526747636,-0.3718136576347104,-0.34898182120310045,-0.24382057359778414,-0.12182487479311209,-0.03594241516975028,-0.002789246900527077,0.0001986577820051465,0.016268713740311528,0.07979661440830856,0.19146155036709636,0.3115894402429648,0.37603346159216783,0.32756467340057344,0.1475692800414041,-0.12805444308254293,
0.5195967095394245,0.2524851001382003,-0.04065231596019116,-0.2678812526747653,-0.3718136576347107,-0.3489818212030998,-0.24382057359778303,-0.12182487479311109,-0.03594241516974975,-0.0027892469005269733,0.00019865778200516457,0.016268713740311847,0.07979661440830936,0.19146155036709747,0.3115894402429657,0.37603346159216794,0.32756467340057244,0.147569280041402,-0.1280544430825456,-0.41793663502550105,
0.2524851001381973,-0.04065231596019389,-0.26788125267476703,-0.3718136576347111,-0.3489818212030989,-0.2438205735977817,-0.12182487479310988,-0.0359424151697491,-0.002789246900526843,0.00019865778200518717,0.01626871374031225,0.07979661440831039,0.1914615503670989,0.3115894402429671,0.3760334615921681,0.3275646734005709,0.14756928004139883,-0.1280544430825496,-0.41793663502550454,-0.6266831461371138,

Gives this:
Need to write a generator that reads in text (words and characters) and produces data tables with stepsizes
Need to write a generator that takes an equation as a waveform

USPTO Meeting. Use NN to produce multiple centrality / laplacians that user interact with
Working on my 810 tasks
- Potentially useful for mapmaking: Learning the Preferences of Ignorant, Inconsistent Agents
  - An important use of machine learning is to learn what people value. What posts or photos should a user be shown? Which jobs or activities would a person find rewarding? In each case, observations of people’s past choices can inform our inferences about their likes and preferences. If we assume that choices are approximately optimal according to some utility function, we can treat preference inference as Bayesian inverse planning. That is, given a prior on utility functions and some observed choices, we invert an optimal decision-making process to infer a posterior distribution on utility functions. However, people often deviate from approximate optimality. They have false beliefs, their planning is sub-optimal, and their choices may be temporally inconsistent due to hyperbolic discounting and other biases. We demonstrate how to incorporate these deviations into algorithms for preference inference by constructing generative models of planning for agents who are subject to false beliefs and time inconsistency. We explore the inferences these models make about preferences, beliefs, and biases. We present a behavioral experiment in which human subjects perform preference inference given the same observations of choices as our model. Results show that human subjects (like our model) explain choices in terms of systematic deviations from optimal behavior and suggest that they take such deviations into account when inferring preferences.
- An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values (Added to normative map making)
  - This article presents an overview of the Schwartz theory of basic human values. It discusses the nature of values and spells out the features that are common to all values and what distinguishes one value from another. The theory identifies ten basic personal values that are recognized across cultures and explains where they come from. At the heart of the theory is the idea that values form a circular structure that reflects the motivations each value expresses. This circular structure, that captures the conflicts and compatibility among the ten values is apparently culturally universal. The article elucidates the psychological principles that give rise to it. Next, it presents the two major methods developed to measure the basic values, the Schwartz Value Survey and the Portrait Values Questionnaire. Findings from 82 countries, based on these and other methods, provide evidence for the validity of the theory across cultures. The findings reveal substantial differences in the value priorities of individuals. Surprisingly, however, the average value priorities of most societal groups exhibit a similar hierarchical order whose existence the article explains. The last section of the article clarifies how values differ from other concepts used to explain behavior—attitudes, beliefs, norms, and traits.

Phil 10.31.18

7:00 – ASRC PhD

Read this carefully today: Introducing AdaNet: Fast and Flexible AutoML with Learning Guarantees
- Today, we’re excited to share AdaNet, a lightweight TensorFlow-based framework for automatically learning high-quality models with minimal expert intervention. AdaNet builds on our recent reinforcement learning and evolutionary-based AutoML efforts to be fast and flexible while providing learning guarantees. Importantly, AdaNet provides a general framework for not only learning a neural network architecture, but also for learning to ensemble to obtain even better models.
- What about data from simulation?
- Github repo
  - AdaNet is a lightweight and scalable TensorFlow AutoML framework for training and deploying adaptive neural networks using the AdaNet algorithm [Cortes et al. ICML 2017]. AdaNet combines several learned subnetworks in order to mitigate the complexity inherent in designing effective neural networks. This is not an official Google product.
  - Tutorials: for understanding the AdaNet algorithm and learning to use this package
    - Welcome to adanet! For a tour of this python package’s capabilities, please work through the following notebooks:
      - The AdaNet objective
      - Customizing AdaNet
- This looks like it’s based deeply the cloud AI and Machine Learning products, including cloud-based hyperparameter tuning.
- Time series prediction is here as well, though treated in a more BigQuery manner
  - In this blog post we show how to build a forecast-generating model using TensorFlow’s DNNRegressor class. The objective of the model is the following: Given FX rates in the last 10 minutes, predict FX rate one minute later.
- Text generation:
  - Cloud poetry: training and hyperparameter tuning custom text models on Cloud ML Engine
    - Let’s say we want to train a machine learning model to complete poems. Given one line of verse, the model should generate the next line. This is a hard problem—poetry is a sophisticated form of composition and wordplay. It seems harder than translation because there is no one-to-one relationship between the input (first line of a poem) and the output (the second line of the poem). It is somewhat similar to a model that provides answers to questions, except that we’re asking the model to be a lot more creative.
  - Codelab: Google Developers Codelabs provide a guided, tutorial, hands-on coding experience. Most codelabs will step you through the process of building a small application, or adding a new feature to an existing application. They cover a wide range of topics such as Android Wear, Google Compute Engine, Project Tango, and Google APIs on iOS.
    Codelab tools on GitHub
    - Tensorflow labs
Add the Range and Length section in my notes to the DARPA measurement section. Done. I need to start putting together the dissertation using these parts
Read Open Source, Open Science, and the Replication Crisis in HCI. Broadly, it seems true, but trying to piggyback on GitHub seems like a shallow solution that repurposes something for coding – an ephemeral activity, to science, which is archival for a reason. Thought needs to be given to an integrated (collection, raw data, cleaned data, analysis, raw results, paper (with reviews?), slides, and possibly a recording of the talk with questions. What would it take to make this work across all science, from critical ethnographies to particle physics? How will it be accessible in 100 years? 500? 1,000? This is very much an HCI problem. It is about designing a useful socio-cultural interface. Some really good questions would be “how do we use our HCI tools to solve this problem?”, and, “does this point out the need for new/different tools?”.
NASA AIMS meeting. Demo in 2 weeks. AIMS is “time series prediction”, A2P is “unstructured data”. Proove that we can actually do ML, as opposed to saying things.
- How about cross-point correlation? Could show in a sim?
- Meeting on Friday with a package
- We’ve solved A, here’s the vision for B – Z and a roadmap. JPSS is a near-term customer (JPSS Data)
- Getting actionable intelligence from the system logs
- Application portfolios for machine learning
- Umbrella of capabilities for Rich Burns
- New architectural framework for TTNC
- Complete situational awareness. Access to commands and sensor streams
- Software Engineering Division/Code 580
- A2P as a toolbox, but needs to have NASA-relevant analytic capabilities
- GMSEC overview

Phil 10.30.18

7:00 – 3:30 ASRC PhD

Search as embodies in the “Ten Blue Links” meets the requirements of a Parrow “Normal Accident”
- The search results are densely connected. That’s how PageRank works. Even latent connections matter.
- The change in popularity of a page rapidly affects the rank. So the connections are stiff
- The relationships of the returned links both to each other and to the broader information landscape in general is hidden.
- An additional density and stiffness issue is that everyone uses Google, so there is a dense, stiff connection between the search engine and the population of users
Write up something about how
- ML can make maps, which decrease the likelihood of IR contributing to normal accidents
- AI can use these maps to understand the shape of human belief space, and where the positive regions and dangerous sinks are.
Two measures for maps are the concepts or Range and length. Range is the distance that a trajectory can be placed on the map and remain contiguous. Length is the total distance that a trajectory travels, independent of the map its placed on.
Write up the basic algorithm of ML to map production
- Take a set of trajectories that are known to be in the same belief region (why JuryRoom is needed) as the input
- Generate an N-dimensional coordinate frame that best preserves length over the greatest range.
- What is used as the basis for the trajectory may matter. The range (at a minimum), can go from letters to high-level topics. I think any map reconstruction based on letters would be a tangle, with clumps around TH, ER, ON, and AN. At the other end, an all-encompassing meta-topic, like WORDS would be a single, accurate, but useless single point. So the map reconstruction will become possible somewhere between these two extremes.
The Nietzsche text is pretty good. In particular, check out the way the sentences form based on the seed “s when one is being cursed.
- the fact that the spirit of the spirit of the body and still the stands of the world
- the fact that the last is a prostion of the conceal the investion, there is our grust
- the fact them strongests! it is incoke when it is liuderan of human particiay
- the fact that she could as eudop bkems to overcore and dogmofuld
- In this case, the first 2-3 words are the same, and random, semi-structured text. That’s promising, since the compare would be on the seed plus the generated text.

Today, see how fast a “Shining” (All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.) text can be learned and then try each keyword as a start. As we move through the sentence, the probability of the next words should change.

Generate the text set

Train the Nietzsche model on the new text. Done. Here are examples with one epoch and a batch size of 32, with a temperature of 1.0:

----- diversity: 0.2
----- Generating with seed: "es jack a 
dull boy all work and no play"
es jack a 
dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes 

----- diversity: 0.5
----- Generating with seed: "es jack a 
dull boy all work and no play"
es jack a 
dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes 

----- diversity: 1.0
----- Generating with seed: "es jack a 
dull boy all work and no play"
es jack a 
dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy anl wory and no play makes jand no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a 

----- diversity: 1.2
----- Generating with seed: "es jack a 
dull boy all work and no play"
es jack a 
dull boy all work and no play makes jack a pull boy all work and no play makes jack andull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull work and no play makes jack andull

Note that the errors start with a temperature of 1.0 or greater

Rewrite the last part of the code to generate text based on each word in the sentence.

So I tried that and got gobbledygook. The issues is that the prediction only works on waveform-sized chunks. To verify this, I created a seed from the input text, truncating it to maxlen (20 in this case):

sentence = "all work and no play makes jack a dull boy"[:maxlen]

That worked, but it means that the character-based approach isn’t going to work

----- temperature: 0.2
----- Generating with seed: [all work and no play]
all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes 

----- temperature: 0.5
----- Generating with seed: [all work and no play]
all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes 

----- temperature: 1.0
----- Generating with seed: [all work and no play]
all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy pllwwork wnd no play makes 

----- temperature: 1.2
----- Generating with seed: [all work and no play]
all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and no play makes

Based on this result and the ensuing chat with Aaron, we’re going to revisit the whole LSTM with numbers and build out a process that will support words instead of characters.

Looking for CMAC models, I found Self Organizing Feature Maps at NeuPy.com:
Here’s How Much Bots Drive Conversation During News Events
- Late last week, about 60 percent of the conversation was driven by likely bots. Over the weekend, even as the conversation about the caravan was overshadowed by more recent tragedies, bots were still driving nearly 40 percent of the caravan conversation on Twitter. That’s according to an assessment by Robhat Labs, a startup founded by two UC Berkeley students that builds tools to detect bots online. The team’s first product, a Chrome extension called BotCheck.me, allows users to see which accounts in their Twitter timelines are most likely bots. Now it’s launching a new tool aimed at news organizations called FactCheck.me, which allows journalists to see how much bot activity there is across an entire topic or hashtag

Phil 10.29.18

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC PhD

This looks like a Big Deal from Google – Working together to apply AI for social good
- Google.org is issuing an open call to organizations around the world to submit their ideas for how they could use AI to help address societal challenges. Selected organizations will receive support from Google’s AI experts, Google.org grant funding from a $25M pool, credit and consulting from Google Cloud, and more.
- We look forward to receiving your application on or before 11:59 p.m. PT on January 22, 2019, and we encourage you to apply early given that we expect high volume within the last few hours of the application window. Thank you!
- Application Guide
- Application form (can’t save, compose offline using guide, above)
Finished my writeup on Meltdown
Waiting for a response from Antonio
Meeting with Don at 9:00 to discuss BAA partnership.
- Don is comfortable with being PI or co-PI, whichever works best. When we call technical POCs, we speak on his behalf
- We discussed how he could participate with the development of theoretical models based on signed graph Laplacians creating structures that can move in belief space. He thinks the idea has merit, and can put in up to 30% of his time on mathematical models and writing
- ASRC has already partnered with UMBC. ASRC would sub to UMBC
- Ordinarily, IP is distributed proportional to the charged hours
- Don has access to other funding vehicles that can support the Army BAA, but this would make things more complicated. These should be discussed if we can’t make a “clean” agreement that meets our funding needs
Pinged Brian about his defense.
Some weekend thoughts
- Opinion dynamics systems describe how communication within a network occurs, but disregards the motion of the network as a whole. In cases when the opinions converge, the network is stiff.
- Graph laplacians could model “othering” by having negative weights. It looks like these are known as signed laplacians, and useful to denote difference. The trick is to discover the equations of motion. How do you model a “social particle”?
  - Found this course on Collective Intelligence, which included what looks to be a nice chapter on particle swarm optimization
Just discovered the journal Swarm Intelligence
- Swarm Intelligence is the principal peer reviewed publication dedicated to reporting research and new developments in this multidisciplinary field. The journal publishes original research articles and occasional reviews on theoretical, experimental, and practical aspects of swarm intelligence. It offers readers reports on advances in the understanding and utilization of systems that are based on the principles of swarm intelligence. Emphasis is given to such topics as the modeling and analysis of collective biological systems; application of biological swarm intelligence models to real-world problems; and theoretical and empirical research in ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, swarm robotics, and other swarm intelligence algorithms. Articles often combine experimental and theoretical work.
I think it’s time to start ramping up on the text generation!
- - Updated my home box to tensorflow 1.11.0. Testing to see if it still works using the Deep Learning with Keras simple_nueral_net.py example. Hasn’t broken (yet…), but is taking a long time… Worked! And it’s much faster the second time. Don’t know why that is and can’t find anything online that talks to that.
```
Loss: 0.5043802047491074
Accuracy: 0.8782
Time =  211.42629722093085
```
  - Found this keras example for generating Nietsche
- Trying it out. This may be a overnight run… But it is running.
Had a good discussion with Aaron about how mapmaking could be framed as an ML problem. More writeup tomorrow.

Phil 10.28.18

We know from the House Intelligence Committee report that the Russians were pushing a Syrian message among the other more “organic” messages. But this seems to indicate that they did get traction.

Mail bomb suspect made numerous references on Facebook to Russian associates and echoed pro-Kremlin views

The posts showed fixations on certain subjects, including Miami sports teams, youth soccer, Native American themes and businesses Sayoc was seeking to promote. But in April 2016, after several months of not posting on Facebook, the account abruptly changed subjects to link to videos celebrating Syria’s fight against ISIS.
“He just pops up four months later and just relentlessly shares stories about ISIS and terrorists,” said Albright. “The turn is just remarkable… He found ideas that never let go from that point on.”

Phil 10.26.18