Guest Essay July 28, 2025 Credit...Matt Furie Listen to this article · 9:15 min Learn more By Ms. Harrington is a journalist based in Britain. Leer en español When I was a kid in the 1980s, my parents sent me to a Waldorf school in England. At the time, the school discouraged parents from allowing…

When Reddit rebranded itself as “the heart of the internet” a couple of years ago, the slogan was meant to evoke the site’s organic character. In an age of social media dominated by algorithms, Reddit took pride in being curated by a community that expressed its feelings in the form of upvotes and…

Artificial intelligence A new multilingual tool aims to make it easier to evaluate AI models for bias in multiple languages. By April 30, 2025 Stephanie Arnett/MIT Technology Review | Public Domain AI models are riddled with culturally specific biases. A new data set, called SHADES, is designed to…

Margaret Mitchell is a pioneer when it comes to testing generative AI tools for bias. She founded the Ethical AI team at Google, alongside another well-known researcher, Timnit Gebru, before they were later both fired from the company. She now works as the AI ethics leader at Hugging Face, a…

Modern Love For about 10 years, I worked full time in prisons as a teacher, logging more than 40 hours a week behind those fences, including a long winter at one facility that had been a cereal factory and stood near the highway in downtown Indianapolis. It was a rock of a building with finger-thick…

Introduction Digital devices are more and more replacing traditional handwriting (; ), and as both writing and reading are becoming increasingly digitized in the classroom, we need to examine the implications of this practice (; ). Using a keyboard is now often recommended for young children as it…

A colleague once lamented about a controversy in their academic department (computer science) involving a potential new hire. The candidate in question was formally trained in physics but had a strong record studying information theory, which was of interest to the department. I asked what the fuss…

Activities like writing, gardening and knitting can improve your cognition and mood. Tapping, typing and scrolling? Less so. Credit...Marine Buffard By March 28, 2024 The human hand is a marvel of nature. No other creature on Earth, not even our closest primate relatives, has hands structured quite…

Let’s play a little game. Imagine that you’re a computer scientist. Your company wants you to design a search engine that will show users a bunch of pictures corresponding to their keywords — something akin to Google Images. On a technical level, that’s a piece of cake. You’re a great computer…

We all live in two worlds: a world outside of ourselves containing things that others can also see and hear and touch, and a world inside consisting of our thoughts and imaginations, which only exist in our own mind. Usually, we effortlessly keep these two worlds apart. But a recent study I ran…

29 June 2021 by Richard Not falling, not ignoring: Odd and even are on one die. Thinking Like a Probability Distribution Hyakujō’s Fox is a classic Zen kōan attested from the year 1036 CE [link]. It is surely much older. It gives the story of a monk who is transformed into a fox, because he denies…

21 June 2021 by Richard I’ll worry about the singularity when AI isn’t confused about cinnamon rolls Thinking Like a Graph The brilliance of artificial intelligence is that it is much better than us, its creators, at tasks that we find challenging. Decades of research have resulted in chess programs…

15 June 2021 by Richard Okay so correlation does not imply causation. What now? Three Disappointing Things It isn’t my job to disappoint people, but I’m good at it. Other researchers are out there writing books about the wonder of science, capturing the imagination of the public, inspiring the…

Online, I use my real name for many things. But sometimes, I prefer to use a pseudonym. Not because I want to anonymously harass people or post incendiary comments unscathed; no, I simply want to manage the impression I make, while still participating in diverse conversations and communities. “Hold…

Photo illustration by Slate Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the…

Academia & Research LaTeX makes writing about writing, not formatting. Published inBlank Page · 5 min read· Jan 31, 2021 -- Photo by Randy Laybourne on Unsplash I’ve used Microsoft Word to write for as long as I can remember, and I’m sure you have too. It works well, but I began to yearn for a more…

This blog post started as an email conversation between Dana Turjeman and Meghan Duffy. Dana turned her initial outline into a twitter thread (starting here). We decided it would be fun (and hopefully helpful!) to turn this into a blog post that expands on these ideas. So, here are the perspectives…

I had a different post ready for this week, but in the light of the crisis we are currently living, and with thousands of scientists working from home, I thought about contributing with a more practical topic. I cannot say much about viruses and pandemics, but… I have worked a lot from home (like in…

Free Online Drawing Software Tools 2024: Diagrams are effective communication elements that can visualize and make others understand our concepts faster than anything else. There are hundreds of drawing tools available online but choosing the right diagrammatic tool to draw the figures in our thesis…

Borijan Georgievski 15 min read· Apr 14, 2020 -- Mask R-CNN output on this image Choosing an object detection and tracking approach for an application nowadays might become overwhelming. This article is an endeavor to summarize the best methods and trends in these essential topics in computer…

You just got an exciting project where you have to build a program to detect if a door is open or closed using an image. You have collected a few hundred images of open doors and closed doors. Now, yo

Image Data Labelling and Annotation — Everything you need to know Learn about different types of annotations, annotation formats and annotation tools Sabina Pokhrel Mar 11 · 6 min read Labeled bottle

Can artwork be useful, can it be productive, and can it be a work of activism? We can look to Tania Bruguera’s project, Arte Útil, which explores artwork that is wholly utilitarian, or the critical design theory of Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunn, which imagines product design separated from capitalism.…

Brief Overview Of Popular Python Libraries for Natural Language Processing Tasks Pawan Jain Jul 20 · 6 min read In this guide, we’ll be touring the essential stack of Python NLP libraries. These packa

Published inAnalytics Vidhya · 9 min read· Jul 10, 2020 -- With ACL becoming virtual this year, I unfortunately spent less time networking and catching up with colleagues, but as a silver lining I watched many more talks than I usually do. I decided to share the notes I took and discuss some overall…

This post gathers ten ML and NLP research directions that I found exciting and impactful in 2019. For each highlight, I summarise the main advances that took place this year, briefly state why I think

This advice should be most relevant to people studying machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) as that is what I did in my PhD. Having said that, this advice is not just limited to

Author summary Computers are now essential in all branches of science, but most researchers are never taught the equivalent of basic lab skills for research computing. As a result, data can get lost, analyses can take much longer than necessary, and researchers are limited in how effectively they…

Welcome to the Innovation Workspace A single, AI-powered collaboration platform that helps teams move faster from idea to outcome. More than 90M users and 250,000 companies collaborate in the Innovation Workspace. Here's why you'll get from first idea to final outcome faster The Intelligent Canvas™…

By , KDnuggets. comments Python is one of the most widely used languages in data science, and an incredibly popular general programming language on its own. Many prospective data scientists are first faced with the issue of which programming language might be their choice when diving into data…

Overhyped or necessity? Learn everything about dark mode and how to support it to the benefit of your users! Thomas Steiner Introduction Note: I have done a lot of background research on the history and theory of dark mode, if you are only interested in working with dark mode, feel free to . Dark…

Color contrast is an important aspect of accessibility. Good contrast makes it easier for people with visual impairments to use products, and helps in imperfect conditions like low-light environments or older screens. With this in mind, we recently updated the colors in our user interfaces to be…

Bayes Theorem provides a principled way for calculating a conditional probability. It is a deceptively simple calculation, although it can be used to easily calculate the conditional probability of events where intuition often fails. Although it is a powerful tool in the field of probability, Bayes…

Published inPat Inc · 18 min read· Jun 11, 2019 -- Device interactions need conversation, not keywords The inability to accurately recognize human language is a problem with state-of-the-art science. In part 1, we looked at the difference between language understanding in which the systems don’t…

These map and summary are obviously selective/biased by my personal interests and familiarity with the topics discussed, so if you notice anything wrong or mis-represented please (i) go back to the actual tweets and (ii) send me a message 📨 🏎 A crash course on Lexical Meaning & Semantics If you…

New research from UC Berkeley suggests that language acquisition between birth and 18 is a remarkable feat of cognition, rather than something humans are just hardwired to do. (Courtesy image iStock) Learning one’s native language may seem effortless. One minute, we’re babbling babies. The next…

4 min read· Jan 27, 2019 -- I built my first website with Dreamweaver, a WYSIWYG site builder that became popular during my teenage years. I was so proud of my creation. It was ugly, but I made it. Although my silly website didn’t take off as I had dreamed, it was a gateway drug to creating things…

Julia Kho Oct 9, 2018 This article serves as a quick guide on one of the most important theorem that every data scientist should know, the Central Limit Theorem. What is it? When can you not use it? Why is it important? Is it the same thing as the law of large numbers? Central Limit Theorem vs. Law…