Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Mar 31

This unique partnership is driven by a shared passion for excellence and sustainability. Fun fact: 25% of repainting costs were saved due to logo commonality. And flights will be operated by 100% SAF created at a @fraunhoferise.bsky.social pilot plant as part of a scientific feasibility study

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Mar 31

Just in. Modern #FijiAirways A350 on its inaugural flight into NUE with special @fau.de livery #MovingKnowledge. Daily direct flights from Nuremberg to #Fiji start today, April 1, and #FAU members will receive a special 17.43% discount in homage to our university’s year of birth #1innovator

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Jan 12

Happy to have presented our work on a cross-platform smartphone auscultation SDK and optimized filters for severe aortic stenosis detection at this year's #HICSS58. Check out the full paper at hdl.handle.net/10125/109271

The author, Thomas Altstidl, presenting a slide showing two audio spectrograms

Sunrise painting a cloudy sky orange behind two palm trees at the ocean

The sun peeking through the clouds on a black sand beach with some cliffs in the distance

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 16

Leaving #NeurIPS after two workshops on tabular and time series models, plus short visits to Lynn Canyon and the Vancouver Christmas Market. Shout-out to the @neuripsconf.bsky.social organizers for such a wonderful conference! Who knows, maybe I'll see some of you again in San Diego next year.

Waterfall seen looking down into Lynn Canyon, flanked by steep rocks and trees on both sides

Grove of trees with the sun peeking through

Vancouver Christmas Market with the Christmas pyramid selling mulled wine to the left and two lighted Christmas trees to the right

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 14

In other news: the test of time award went to two papers this year, "Generative Adversarial Nets" and "Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks." Both of them well deserved 🥳 That's a wrap for the main conference. Now looking forward to some engaging workshops.

Test of Time Award being presented for work first published in NIPS 2014

Test of Time Award presentation by David Warde-Farley for their paper "Generative Adversarial Nets"

Test of Time Award presentation by Ilya Sutskever for their paper "Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks"

Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 14

At #NeurIPS yesterday we had an invited talk by Danica Kragic illustrating the progress we have made in robotics. And Rosalind Picard reminded us to keep focusing on the human element of our research - in more than one way.

Danica Kragic presenting a slide with a robotic hand mimicking the motion made by a real hand

Rosalind Picard presenting a slide containing a sketch of the human head and brain with the words visual cortex, perception, and audition next to it

Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 14

Yes, neural networks can encode information! Since seeing NeRF for the first time I'm always on the lookout for creative ways to use this capability. Here, a #NeurIPS paper using MLPs as signed distance fields for rigid-body collisions: sites.google.com/view/sdf-sim. What else could we use this for?

A graphic showing two objects, a cow and a knot, being represented as signed distance functions encoded in a multi-layer perceptron

Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 13

Yesterday's #NeurIPS invited talk by Lidong Zhou perfectly illustrated how hardware/software co-design has evolved in the age of AI to enable both more efficient and more powerful models. This was followed by a detailed technical review of diffusion models and beyond by Arnaud Doucet.

Lidong Zhou presenting a slide with the three key elements driving AI and systems: efficiency, trust, and infusion

Arnaud Doucet presenting a slide on generalizing diffusion models, with key mathematical equations and illustrative figures

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 12

Stop by East Exhibit Hall A-C #2109 if you're interested in certified robustness at #NeurIPS. I'll be stuck there for three hours so I'm always happy to chat, whether about my work or otherwise 😉

Thomas Altstidl standing next to the poster "On the Scalability of Certified Adversarial Robustness with Generated Data."

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 12

Besides some oral talks and gazillions of posters, yesterday's schedule at #NeurIPS also included invited talks by Sepp Hochreiter, who developed LSTM in his diploma, and Fei-Fei Li, who established the influential ImageNet. Last item on the agenda was the "After Dark" event.

Sepp Hochreiter speaking next to a slide titled "Toward Industrial Artificial Intelligence"

Fei-Fei Li speaking next to a slide outlining the three pillars of visual intelligence: understanding, reasoning, and generation

Purple and blue disco lights illuminating the NeurIPS After Dark event

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 11

Impressively smooth convergence achieved by Defazio et al. in their paper "The Road Less Scheduled" at #NeurIPS. And since the code is available at github.com/facebookrese... it's easy to try it out on your own machine learning tasks. Time to get rid of the cosine scheduler?

Convergence graphs of three different schedulers

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 11

Great day of tutorials and expos at yesterday's #NeurIPS. The tutorial on flow matching was especially enlightening to me. And the best thing is that it's fully open source with a library, guide, and code examples: github.com/facebookrese...

GitHub - facebookresearch/flow_matching: A PyTorch library for implementing flow matching algorithms, featuring continuous and discrete flow matching implementations. It includes practical examples fo...

A PyTorch library for implementing flow matching algorithms, featuring continuous and discrete flow matching implementations. It includes practical examples for both text and image modalities. - fa...

github.com

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 11

Of course there's one question that everyone would like to have answered: how many times did you need to regenerate the image to get the text right? 😂

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 10

What better way to meet new friends at #NeurIPS than a hike in the surrounding mountains of Vancouver! Joined a few other conference attendees to see a magnificent waterfall, imposing mountain scenery and a lovely sunset to top it all off.

High and rushing waterfall flanked by trees on both sides

Four persons standing on a rock with a fjord and mountains in the distance

A few towering trees in the foreground with snowy mountains in the background illuminated by a sun peeking through the clouds

Sunset on a landscape with a fjord and partially snow covered mountains on each side

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 9

Flew into Vancouver just in time for a beautiful sunset 🌅 Now looking forward to some sleep and a week of engaging discussions at #NeurIPS

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 8

Great idea! All NeurIPS attendees in one click. Thanks for creating it 🥳

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Dec 7

Hard to believe that #NeurIPS is just around the corner. Time to post a sneak peek of my poster. If you're interested in the scalability of certified robustness when adding more and more data, stop by for a quick chat on Thu, Dec 12 @ 11 am - 2 pm in East Exhibit Hall A-C #2109

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Nov 24

Fair enough. I used "geyser" in the colloquial sense here, not the scientific one. Doesn't take away the fascination I have for these otherworldly phenomena, though, regardless of whether turn out to be geysers in the fullest sense

Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Nov 24

This looks incredibly nice 🤩 if only one day we could see some real images of those extraterrestrial geysers, though... the far-out ones don't really count in my mind.

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Nov 20

I've officially joined the X-odus and moved to where the grass is greener and the skies are bluer. From now on I'll be exclusively posting on BlueSky 🦋 Hoping to see old friends, and make lots of new friends here.

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Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Nov 20

What can human vision tell us about computer vision models? If this question interests you, definitely check out these two posters @eccvconf https://twitter.com/dariozanca/status/1840376961358512139

Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Nov 20

Looks like Friday to Saturday was the best night for the #NorthernLights. Here's a few photos. Not the best, but all I got. It's very rare to see them this far south @erlangen_de and, while faint, it was an amazing experience 🤩

Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Nov 20

Last Saturday, 200+ students at 8 Bavarian locations competed in #TheTensorTournament hackathon organized by @FAU_MaD_Lab. Congrats to the winners Neural Ninjas, IDEK (both @UniFAU), and Drone Drivers (@TU_Muenchen). Thanks to all organizers and sponsors🎉 https://t.co/vOWOj2V3Tb

Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Nov 20

Happy to announce "The Tensor Tournament" 2024 🎉 Join us on May 4th @UniFAU and across Bavaria for an unforgettable day of hacking. You can expect amazing prices, plus free food and drinks. Spots are limited, so build a team and secure your spot now 👉 https://the-tensor-tournament.de

The Tensor Tournament

A machine learning hackathon

the-tensor-tournament.de

Thomas Altstidl @taltstidl.bsky.social · Nov 20

In the spirit of celestral exploration, I wish all of you a Merry Christmas 🎄 (and if you're not celebrating it, a wonderful time off). Composite X-ray, optical and infrared image shows stars in the NGC 2264 "Christmas Tree Cluster" © NASA and partners https://t.co/JpBk6O55CJ