Coming home to Montreal
September 15, 2021
Newest news! After a wonderful 3 years at University of Toronto, I'm moving to Montreal to become a core member of Mila, with a tenure-track position at HEC. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal is on unceded Indigenous lands. I recognize the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation as the custodians of the lands and waters in this place I call home. To them I offer my deep thanks, my joy at the beauty and diversity here, and my committment to truth and reconciliation (of which this statement is one small step).
"Mila, awesome, congrats! Uh, isn't HEC like, a business school? Do you..." trails off anyone who knows me in confusion. Do I business? I can't say that I do, but it's one of the best management schools in the world. I had something of an epiphany about the importance of human resources and management science last year, thanks to the scholars at Makerere AI lab I had the fortune to visit and discuss AI deployment with. And, I'm increasingly jaded about the impact Responsible-/ FATE-/ Safe-/ Climate-/ Etc-AI research can have from within the AI community -- we have largely handed over decision-making power w.r.t. AI to business management, so I'm excited about working with other experts at HEC to develop a new program in Responsible AI Management (I'm also excited about ways to transfer power and agency back to communities - reach out if you'd like to talk about that!). Every new generation of students I've been lucky to work with has an increased awareness of the socio-environmental impacts of AI/Business, and our responsibility to each other and to the planet to do better. I see a lot of appetite for a program like this, and I'm excited for graduates of this program to be the leaders of tomorrow.
Of course that's at least a few-year project; in the meantime I'm still primarily running a research lab (see my Research Interests below), which finally has a name and website! ERRATA*™ Lab: Ecological Risk & Responsible AI; Theory & Applications *learning from mistakes. I'm not jazzed about the whole idea of branding, but I *am* jazzed about clearer communication, and I think this achieves that - summarizing my research interests, making it obvious the lab is an entity much larger than me, talking up my awesome students/collaborators and the things we do together. I am recruiting for Fall 2025! see lab website for details/advice/instructions.
I'm restarting my open mentorship hours -- these are flexible/by appointment, with priority given to those currently minoritized in ML. BIPOC, queer, global south, disabled, first-gen scholars, category-averse lovely weirdos, you're all warmly welcomed!
If you have contacted me in the last year or so and did not get a reply/autoresponse, I'm sorry! I had long covid and some other health/personal turmoil, and took a mental health break from all social media (highly recommend, not going back any time soon). Also outlook marks a LOT of valid emails as spam. Please reach out again, using my Mila address :).
A dream come true - I'm a professor!
June 5, 2021
New news! I've accepted a tenure-track position in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, where I'll be an affiliate of both the Schwartz-Reisman and Vector institutes. In the near term, I’ll be recruiting students/RAs to work on deep representation learning & predictive methods in ecological modeling and environmental risk assessment, as well as real-world generalization, learning theory, and practical auditing tools (e.g. unit tests, sandboxes). If you’re interested in those positions, interested in collaborating or chatting about those topics, or know someone who is, please get in touch!
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About
I have a lot of things to say; I plan to say them roughly weekly. For more about me, see my academic homepage. Some of the posts will be more personal e.g. significant life updates, but most will be more like short essays. Occasionally they will be short fiction. I'll also aim to do about 1 per month on clusters of papers I've written and/or find interesting. Here's an incomplete list of topics I'm planning to write about, in very approximate order: (let me know if you would be particularly excited about one of them!)
- Unexpectedly important things I learned in my first years as a professor
- The axiom of choice is ridiculous
- Gift economies & open-source: building a better AI ecosystem
- What the piano can teach us about representation learning
- Generalization in 2024 (papers review)
- Reflections on the pond -- the legacy of Norman conquest in western science
- Agency in a world of AI systems (papers review)
- Busy-person neurodivergent-friendly sustainable habits
- Power Dyanmics for Dummies (aka scientists)
- A Canadian's Guide To Polite And Productive Online Interactions
- Transition design in AI Systems
- Surfing Lessons and Other Ocean-based Metaphors for a Safe and Happy Life On The Web (series on de-corporatizing my online life?)
- My experience as a minority in AI research
- Anticolonialism in AI research & the hypocrisy of western libertarianism
- Modelling chaotic systems (papers review)
- Daylight savings time is wild - an example of a coordination problem we sort of solved - but how did it come about and why does it (not) work?
- The adventures of Monster dog! from the perspective of Monster dog.
- Interior design for academic pursuits
- The myth of the underlying data distribution
- Software I want
- Coral is dying and we don't know what to do about it
- Oversimplified altruism
- Intro to linear algebra for people who hate math (series "for people who hate math"? derivattives, dynamical systems, numbers, equations)
- In defense of rote memorization
- Music is my favourite technology
- If the planet with all life and humanity is a giant AI what is it learning?
- Words that mean too many things (bootstrap, regression, kernel, other...)
- What's a learning rule, and how many are there?
- The problem isn't AI, or Capitalism, it's... (an opinionated taxonomy of things wrong with the world - profit-maximization, nihlism, shame, disconnection, drama, "the scientific method", perfectionism, absolutism, automation)