Future Represented™

™ Tegan Maharaj
  
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Utopia of the Planes

October 8, 2021

Last year I began writing a short story, which is in the universe of a sci-fi quadrilogy I've been writing for a decade. I finished it in the spring and distributed it as a zine at FAccT in Rio (where the first copies were printed!) and MUTEK in Montreal. Today, I did a reading from it at the Mila Talent show, and finally make it available online under a non-commercial CC license.

Here is the screen-readable pdf,
the booklet-format pdf (in case you wanted to print it out, fold in half, and staple it, i.e. zine/book format).
and the epub and mobi (thanks Calibre).

I also recorded a full take of me reading the book, if you're into audiobooks or want to feel like you were at the talent show you might like it.
Here is the m4a.

I will be at MAIS with some physical copies; find me if you would like one :).

Coming home to Montreal

September 15, 2024

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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I plan to have a more sophisticated search once I have enough content here that it's needed. For now, it's all here; just press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on mac).


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!)