## Data science for social good fellowships [DSSGx UK 2023]

Posted in Kids, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 9, 2022 by xi'an

Warwick is (again) running a 12-week summer programme bringing together some of the top student talents from data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, all over the World, to work on real-world data science challenges and deliver positive social impact. Applications for DSSG 2023 are now OPEN! Click here for the application form (please read the information carefully) and click here for the FAQs for 2023. (The application also works for a similar programme in Kaiserslauten, Germany.

DSSG helps not-for-profit organisations and government bodies to achieve more with their data by enhancing their services, interventions and outreach, helping fulfil their mission of improving the world and people’s lives.

The programme gives not-for-profit organisations and government bodies unprecedented access to inspiring, top-tier data science talent. This helps build their capacity to use cutting-edge quantitative methods to address societal challenges in areas such as education, health, energy, public safety, transportation and economic development.

At the same time, it provides intensive case-based and supported training to students to create industry-standard data science products in collaboration with government agencies and NGOs, to deliver positive social impact. And it builds a world-wide community of data scientists who care about the social good.

In 2019, the University of Warwick together with the Alan Turing Institute brought DSSG to the UK. The University of Warwick has run it each year since and now preparation is well underway for DSSGx UK 2023, which will be held at the University of Warwick, UK, from 5 June to 25 August.

## Ada L. at the ATI [6 October 2022]

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , on September 29, 2022 by xi'an

## Klara and the Sun [book review]

Posted in Books, Kids with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 22, 2022 by xi'an

Klara and the Sun is the latest book of Kazuo Ishiguro. I am a big admirer of Ishiguro’s books and always moved by their bittersweet exploration of humanity (or humanness?!). The remains of the day is one of my favourite books, competing with Graham Greene’s The end of the affair,  and I deeply enjoyed When we were orphans, Never let me go, and The buried giant. While this latest book exhibits the same craftsmanship in depicting human feelings and incomplete (in the sense of unsatisfactory) relations, I feel like I missed some component of the book, too many hints, the overall message… Not that I rushed through it, contrary to my habit, reading a few chapters at a time during lunch breaks. But I cannot set the separation between the subjective perception of Klara [the robotic friend], which is very clearly limited, both by her robotic sensors [lacking a sense of smell for instance] and her learning algorithm, furthermore aggravated by her wasting (?) some material to sabotage a machine, and the real world [within the novel, a vague two-tiered USA]. Because the perspective is always Klara’s. This confusion may be completely intentional and is in that sense brilliant. But I remained perplexed by the Sun central episode in the novel, which I fear reveals a side of the story I did not get. Like Джозі в якийсь момент перетворилася на робота? [Using Ukrainian to avoid spoilers for most readers!]  (In a way, Klara and the Sun is a variation on Never let me go, both dealing with a future where copies of humans could be available, for those who could afford it.)

## Prairie/MIAI Artificial Intelligence summer school [5-9 July 2021]

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , on June 16, 2021 by xi'an

## the Ramanujan machine

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on February 18, 2021 by xi'an

Nature of 4 Feb. 2021 offers a rather long (Nature-like) paper on creating Ramanujan-like expressions using an automated process. Associated with a cover in the first pages. The purpose of the AI is to generate conjectures of Ramanujan-like formulas linking famous constants like π or e and algebraic formulas like the novel polynomial continued fraction of 8/π²:

$\frac{8}{{{\rm{\pi }}}^{2}}=1-\frac{2\times {1}^{4}-{1}^{3}}{7-\frac{2\times {2}^{4}-{2}^{3}}{19-\frac{2\times {3}^{4}-{3}^{3}}{37-\frac{2\times {4}^{4}-{4}^{3}}{\ldots }}}}$

which currently remains unproven. The authors of the “machine” provide Python code that one can run to try uncover new conjectures, possibly named after the discoverer! The article is spending a large proportion of its contents to justify the appeal of generating such conjectures, with several unsuspected formulas later proven for real, but I remain unconvinced of the deeper appeal of the machine (as well as unhappy about the association of Ramanujan and machine, since S. Ramanujan had a mystical and unexplained relation to numbers, defeating Hardy’s logic,  “a mathematician of the highest quality, a man of altogether exceptional originality and power”). The difficulty is in separating worthwhile from anecdotal (true) conjectures, not to mention wrng conjectures. This is certainly of much deeper interest than separating chihuahua faces from blueberry muffins, but does it really “help to create mathematical knowledge”?