PhD studentships in AI and Data Science, at the University of Warwick

A (rather urgent) call for candidates for PhD studentships in AI and Data Science at Warwick. These are part of Warwick’s MRC-Funded Doctoral Training Program in Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research. Selected students would start in Autumn 2018. The deadline is on June 3.

weapons of math destruction [book review]

As I had read many comments and reviews about this book, including one by Arthur Charpentier, on Freakonometrics, I eventually decided to buy it from my Amazon Associate savings (!). With a strong a priori bias, I am afraid, gathered from reading some excerpts, comments, and the overall advertising about it. And also because the book reminded me of another quantic swan. Not to mention the title. After reading it, I am afraid I cannot tell my ascertainment has changed much.

“Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.” (p.21)

The core message of this book is that the use of algorithms and AI methods to evaluate and rank people is unsatisfactory and unfair. From predicting recidivism to fire high school teachers, from rejecting loan applications to enticing the most challenged categories to enlist for for-profit colleges. Which is indeed unsatisfactory and unfair. Just like using the h index and citation ranking for promotion or hiring. (The book mentions the controversial hiring of many adjunct faculty by KAU to boost its ranking.) But this conclusion is not enough of an argument to write a whole book. Or even to blame mathematics for the unfairness: as far as I can tell, mathematics has nothing to do with unfairness. Some analysts crunch numbers, produce a score, and then managers make poor decisions. The use of mathematics throughout the book is thus completely inappropriate, when the author means statistics, machine learning, data mining, predictive algorithms, neural networks, &tc. (OK, there is a small section on Operations Research on p.127, but I figure deep learning can bypass the maths.)

AISTATS 2016 [programme]

The full programme for AISTATS 2016 in Cádiz is now on-line, including the posters (except for the additional posters by MLSS participants). Richard Samworth is scheduled to talk on Monday morning, May 9, Kamalika Chaudhuri on Tuesday morning, May 10, and Adam Tauman Kalai  on Wednesday morning, May 11. As at the previous AISTATS meeting, poster sessions are central to the day, while evenings are free (which shows this is not a Bayesian meeting!!!). See you in Cádiz, hopefully! (Registration is still open, just in case.)

conference deadlines

Just to remind participants to AISTATS 2016 and to ISBA 2016 that the deadlines for early registration are January 31 and February 10, getting close. Since both fees are quite high, it certainly makes sense to take advantage of those deadlines (and to make all travel reservations). (While I did try to see the fees of AISTATS 2016 set to a lower value, half of the fees are paying for coffee breaks and the banquet and the welcome party and were not negotiable. As my suggestion of cancelling the banquet was not accepted either! At least, the offer of accommodations in Cadiz is reasonable, from the list of hotels on the website, to a large collection of airbnb listings [minus the one I just reserved!]. And both Spain and Italy set an heavy 20% tax on conferences… Warning: the AISTATS 2016 do not cover the shuttle bus transfer from Sevilla, the major airport in the vicinity.)

AISTATS 2016 [post-decisions]

Now that the (extended) deadline for AISTATS 2016 decisions is gone, I can gladly report that out of 594 submissions, we accepted 165 papers, including 35 oral presentations. As reported in the previous blog post, I remain amazed at the gruesome efficiency of the processing machinery and at the overwhelmingly intense involvement of the various actors who handled those submissions. And at the help brought by the Toronto Paper Matching System, developed by Laurent Charlin and Richard Zemel. I clearly was not as active and responsive as many of those actors and definitely not [and by far] as my co-program-chair, Arthur Gretton, who deserves all the praise for achieving a final decision by the end of the year. We have already received a few complaints from rejected authors, but this is to be expected with a rejection rate of 73%. (More annoying were the emails asking for our decisions in the very final days…) An amazing and humbling experience for me, truly! See you in Cadiz, hopefully.