USC professor Allison Marsh writes this delightful short article for IEEE Spectrum about Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert's British counterparts in Cambridge and how, in their case, a document (the Lighthill Report) precipitated cuts in British AI research funding in ways similar to how funding was temporarily cut in the U.S. following MIT's publishing of Minsky and Papert's "Perceptrons" in 1969.
"Freddy the Robot Was the Fall Guy for British AI"
Building on the 90s, statistical n-gram language models, trained on vast text collections, became the backbone of NLP research. They fueled advancements in nearly all NLP techniques of the era, laying the groundwork for today's AI.
F. Jelinek (1997), Statistical Methods for Speech Recognition, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
#NLP
Understanding the Error Sensitivity of Privacy-Aware Computing
Mat\'ias Mazzanti (University of Buenos Aires), Esteban Mocskos (University of Buenos Aires), Augusto Vega (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center), Pradip Bose (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07957
New around here, hi!
For those who'd like a big old dose of "yes we can" energy,
please check out
"Words to Win By "
where every episode details a campaign we've won somewhere
and delves into the research, messaging & strategies used to do it.
https://wordstowinby-pod.com/
This https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21398 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…
Schaden durch Bürgergeldmissbrauch:
000 260 Mio. €
Sicherstellungen durch Steuerfahndungen:
002 500 Mio. €
Schätzung des Schadens aus #Steuerhinterziehung
0XX 000 Mio. € (zweistelliger Milliardenbetrag, Bundesrechnungshof)
200 000 Mio. € (Deutschen Steuer-Gewerkschaft)
"Der erwartete Personalabbau um ein Drittel bis 2030 trage zur Verschärf…
For Zotero users, the Android app is finally out of closed beta. It supports saving papers directly from the browser or other apps, which takes several steps out of my workflow for increasing my TBR pile.
https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-for-android/
Oh dear -- within a day of hearing about this from another professor, I got my first LLM-generated email from an aspiring grad student. It mischaracterized my research (apparently I write lots of mathematical formulas, ha!) and ascribed papers to me that I never wrote, which are basically remixes of common words in my paper titles. If you do this, you will insult the people you want to impress.
'Failure Imminent': When LLMs In a Long-Running Vending Business Simulation Went Berserk
https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/2112240/failure-imminent-when-llms-in-a-long-running-vending-business-simulati…