Missed a post last week due to the Thanksgiving long weekend :-). We had gone to San Francisco to see the city and try out a couple of hikes). Just FYI – strolling around SF is also as much a hike as any of the real trails at Mt Sutro – with all the uphill & downhill roads! As for Robotics, I am currently on Week 3 of the Mobility course, which is more of physics than ‘computer […]
A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was reading Stephen Ambrose’s account of the Lewis & Clark expedition and wrote a post about their astronomical measurements. James Campbell left a comment recommending Edwin Danson’s book [1] on the history of the Mason-Dixon line. I ordered the book, and now that work has slowed down for Christmas I have had the time to open it. In addition to determining their eponymous line, surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon […]
Let’s be honest, code testing is everything but a joyful task. However, a good unit testing framework makes this process as smooth as possible. Eventually, testing becomes a regular and continuous process, accompanied by the assurance that our code will operate just as exact and seamlessly as a Swiss clockwork.
arXiv:2601.10926v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Currently, there are thousands of large pretrained language models (LLMs) available to social scientists. How do we select among them? Using validity, reliability, reproducibility, and replicability as guides, we explore the significance of: (1) model openness, (2) model footprint, (3) training data, and (4) model architectures and fine-tuning. While ex-ante tests of validity (i.e., benchmarks) are often privileged in these discussions, we argue that social scientists cannot altogether avoid validating computational measures (ex-post). […]
More than 13,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a more-than-70-ton machine trundled like a tank on its caterpillar tracks for a tenth of a mile—sucking up potato-sized nodules of rock packed with copper, manganese, cobalt, and nickel. It was 2022, and that pilot run of a subsea harvester by a Canadian business, The Metals Company, was pronounced a success. The company is working to get a green light to deploy similar machines for commercial harvesting […]
Climbing is a multifaceted sport that combines physical demands and emotional and cognitive challenges. Ascent styles differ in fall distance with lead climbing involving larger falls than top rope climbing, which may result in different perceived risk and fear. In this study, we investigated the psychophysiological relationship between perceived fear and muscle activity in climbers using a combination of statistical modeling and deep learning techniques. We conducted an experiment with 19 climbers, collecting electromyography (EMG), electrocardiography (ECG) and […]
In this work, we propose a notion of practical learnability grounded in finite sample settings, and develop a conjugate learning theoretical framework based on convex conjugate duality to characterize this learnability property. Building on this foundation, we demonstrate that training deep neural networks (DNNs) with mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) achieves global optima of empirical risk by jointly controlling the extreme eigenvalues of a structure matrix and the gradient energy, and we establish a corresponding convergence theorem. We […]
arXiv:2603.02219v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed in streaming scenarios, rendering conventional post-hoc safeguards ineffective as they fail to interdict unsafe content in real-time. While streaming safeguards based on token-level supervised training could address this, they necessitate expensive annotations and suffer from severe overfitting. In this work, we challenge the paradigm that streaming safety must rely on token-level supervised training. Instead, it is an inherent capability of well-trained post-hoc safeguards, as they already encode […]
Businesses have always had a level of uncertainty to contend with, but 2026 is looking to bring additional challenges that need to be prepared for. Although a lot of businesses already have risk management strategies in place, many are still struggling to deal with any unforeseen issues that arise. Over the next two years, 36% of organizations say they plan to increase their investment in risk management, but what exactly needs to be done to prepare for the […]
arXiv:2602.06215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes a quantum framework for the design of communication topologies in consensus-based multi-agent systems. The communication graph is selected online by solving a mixed-integer quadratic program (MIQP) that minimizes a cost combining communication and distance penalties with degree-regularization terms, while enforcing exact connectivity through a flow-based formulation. To cope with the combinatorial complexity of this NP-hard problem, we develop a three-block ADMM scheme that decomposes the MIQP into a convex quadratic […]