Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Sep 7

Special thanks to the organizers, incl. @eringrant.me @stefsm.bsky.social and @saxelab.bsky.social !

Great lectures and a fun interdisciplinary group 🙂

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Sep 7

Just spent two wonderful weeks in London for the Analytical Connectionism Summer School (hosted at Gatsby/UCL this year). Met lots of wonderful scientists at the intersection of cog neuro and machine learning. Learned a lot and can’t recommend more highly! Small meetings rule

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Reposted by Joey Rudoler

Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · Aug 14

I wanted to provide more color on this because its a bigger deal than the main Ai2 account is hyping it as. For example, the entire annual budget of the NSF for AI in 2026 is $655M dollars. To commit to a training models on single line item of about 20% of that is a huge deal.

Ai2 @ai2.bsky.social · Aug 14

With fresh support of $75M from NSF and $77M from NVIDIA, we’re set to scale our open model ecosystem, bolster the infrastructure behind it, and fast‑track reproducible AI research to unlock the next wave of scientific discovery. 💡

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Reposted by Joey Rudoler

Jamie Cummins @jamiecummins.bsky.social · Jun 23

Social scientists should not use chat interfaces when using LLMs in their research: they are impressively inefficient, and obscure/impose important methodological decisions that require thought.

THREAD🧵

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Jul 31

Wrote a new, modern stats curriculum.

Teach about probability and sampling via computational examples / simulations with real data. It's unbelievably helpful for intuition. Everything else follows.

Online and open-source: jrudoler-teaching.github.io/understandin...

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Jul 16

Check out my (open source) short course on introductory statistics and data science!

It covers fundamentals of programming and probability, and then uses those to build up an intuition for hypothesis testing through sampling and simulation

jrudoler-teaching.github.io/understandin...

understanding-uncertainty – Understanding Uncertainty

jrudoler-teaching.github.io

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · May 21

I'm building a course from scratch this summer. Premise is that sampling / simulation are key for building intuition and statistical thinking. Students should learn permutation tests before they learn t-tests. Do folks agree?

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · May 21

What's something you wish you learned in your first stats/data science course that would have helped you down the line?
Like some key intuition or insight that crops up all the time in diverse problems? Something better than learning the formula for a t-test

#MLSky #StatsSky

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Reposted by Joey Rudoler

Community for Rigor @comm4rigor.bsky.social · Apr 15

Have you played with our Confirmation Bias Unit, yet? Head out to buff.ly/sa8UIeY and give it a try, share with your colleagues and students, and give us your feedback.

Community for Rigor | Units

We made a network of essential units to help you better understand the principles and practices of scientific rigor.

c4r.io

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Mar 3

There are two kinds of statisticians: those who like telling other people they're wrong, and those who don't talk at all

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Reposted by Joey Rudoler

Yoshua Bengio @yoshuabengio.bsky.social · Jan 29

Today, we are publishing the first-ever International AI Safety Report, backed by 30 countries and the OECD, UN, and EU.

It summarises the state of the science on AI capabilities and risks, and how to mitigate those risks. 🧵

Full Report: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/679a0c...

1/21

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Reposted by Joey Rudoler

Konrad Kording @kordinglab.bsky.social · Jan 21

Announcing a new week-long program for young computational neuroscience/ behavior professors to talk about rigorous science, mentoring, lab management, and networking in a stunning retreat setting. Do great science as a community and have fun doing so.

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Jan 20

newly converted @weightsbiases.bsky.social fan here! honestly did not realize how much better it could be than tensorboard. just way more organized, pretty, intuitive, and feature-rich.
shoutout once again to the awesome engineers building various MLOps tools for the rest of us to use <3

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Jan 15

And the company sells a pendant you can wear to bring the companion with you wherever you go... honestly feels dystopian.
Does anyone have a more positive take on this? I feel like this has to be regulated...

Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Jan 15

I have no chat history, no account, no data -- and this is the first message the bot sends!! Who does this help? Seems obviously like farming for engagement from users who want to commiserate and encouraging them to engage in negative thought patterns.

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Jan 15

I don't understand the product appeal of AI companions... and honestly the companies producing them sometimes feel predatory (though I believe some people have good intentions to reduce loneliness etc.)
When I open friend.com the bot immediately turns on the anxiety / depression / alcoholism

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Jan 13

At Penn you can get a certificate for going to some extra training, but it seems pretty divorced from your effort/performance in the classroom.
Departments could give teaching awards to the most highly rated TAs?
Teaching *well* could be part of PhD degree-granting requirements?

Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Jan 13

The reality is that this is what most researchers want — teaching is a chore and distracts from research. But it feels like a disservice to everyone and super out of whack with a university’s educational values.

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Jan 13

Not a new topic but what are effective ways to incentivize grad students to be better TAs?

I really enjoy teaching but it seems there’s zero incentive to do a good job (beyond personal fulfillment and an altruistic desire to help students). We’re evaluated solely on research!

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Jan 9

Couldn’t agree more! I got on it ~2 weeks into grad school when I realized how fundamental those challenges are to the PhD experience. Wanted to invest preemptively. Also not true for every school, but student health insurance is pretty generous - my in-network copay is $10 per session. No brainer.

Reposted by Joey Rudoler

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · Jan 9

If you’re in grad school, finding a therapist can be really helpful. The thing you’re doing is hard and it’s harder if you don’t have help managing imposter syndrome, stress, self esteem, and a whole bunch of other things.

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Reposted by Joey Rudoler

Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · Jan 7

Key-value memory is an important concept in modern machine learning (e.g., transformers). Ila Fiete, Kazuki Irie, and I have written a paper showing how key-value memory provides a way of thinking about memory organization in the brain:
arxiv.org/abs/2501.02950

Key-value memory in the brain

Classical models of memory in psychology and neuroscience rely on similarity-based retrieval of stored patterns, where similarity is a function of retrieval cues and the stored patterns. While parsimo...

arxiv.org

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Dec 23

yeah exactly

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Dec 23

In the original tree-of-thought paper they just prompt an LLM to rate a candidate thought sequence or vote on the best one. Then they use these heuristics to search the tree with standard algos like BFS and DFS.

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Joey Rudoler @jrudoler.bsky.social · Dec 23

Not clear to me if they're minimizing a different objective function at test time. if the "deliberative alignment" paper is any indication they may use an explicit reward model (there it's about safety compliance) to filter chains of thoughts to use in SFT. So still max joint probability of the seq?

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