Fernando Diaz

@841io.bsky.social

1775 Followers 648 Following

Associate Professor, CMU. Researcher, Google. Evaluation and design of information retrieval and recommendation systems, including their societal impacts.

Diagram of the art-making process showing the four main phases, feedback loops, and moderating variables.
scene from "back to school" (1986) where rodney dangerfield hires a group of experts to complete his assignments.
ACORN-i: (Associative Content Retrieval Network) Wired for 40 sentences using 40 index terms. To pose an inquiry, the wires with the clips are attached to the terminals for the index terms and/or sentences deemed to be relevant by the user. As the large knob is turned the voltages on these wires are raised, and the neon bulbs light up in the order of "relevance" of the various sentences. Rel ative voltages on the individual wires are controlled by the other knobs. Association may be set either "free" or "narrow" by varying the setting on the lower right hand knob.
From hence it follows, that Polygamy is Contrary to the Law of Nature and Justice, and to the Propagation of Human Race; for where Males and and Females are in equal number, if one Male takes Twenty Wives, Nineteen Men must live in Celibacy, whith is repugnant to the Design of Nature; nor is it probable that Twenty Women will be so well impreg­nated by one Man as by Twenty.
Regarding the origin of the EM, the ideas behind EM and many examples of EM were kicking around in the literature for at least 25 years before we wrote the paper. One of the earliest references we found from the 1950s was on estimating gene frequencies in randomly mating populations. EM had been used in many different papers, but it hadn’t ever been recognised that all of these separate uses are actually part of the same general problem. And of course, we have it a name.
Megan was educated at the prestigious Amherst Center for Human Agent Interaction. Life at the Center was extraordinarily exciting, if taxing. Classes in the first year included agent psychology, fundamentals of agent design. human-agent social theory, statistics, and experiment design, and, because she was particularly broadminded. she audited a class on agent ethics offered by the philosophy department. In her second year, Megan began to specialize in agent pathology. Megan graduated with honors about five years ago, and took her position with Agent Failure Analysis Associates. Her current assignment is to figure out why a video distribution agent has been sending subtly disturbing movies to the Amherst Rest Home.
Megan works for Agent Failure Analysis Associates, and her job is to figure out why agents fail. Actually,they don't fail all that often. Some Luddites maintain that they are both dangerous and immoral, but most people acknowledge the essential role they play in today's increasingly interdependent world. For example, agents control the freeways, permitting a tenfold increase in capacity. Delays are newsworthy because they are so rare. Not everyone will read this news, o f course, because their personal agents filter it from the newswires. This is a pretty harmless use of filtering but lately there has been concern that the public at large is permitting their agents to filter too much, so the principal of an informed populace that underlies our democracy is in jeopardy. The practice of having one's personal agent vote for one is a common concern among liberal intellectuals, although a recent spot-check found that liberal intellectuals are slightly more likely to engage in this practice than other segments of society (some things never change). Whatever the social costs o f agents, there can be no doubt that energy management, transportation, and information management would be crippled without our sophisticated networks of agents. Which is why Megan's job is a desirable one by any standards.
Megan is an agent engineer, which means, as everybody knows, that she designs and builds agents. Agent engineers are in the news a lot because agents are increasingly responsible for the world infrastructure. As you can imagine, we hear about agents primarily when they fail. Just last week,an air-traffic agent failed and two airplanes collided on the runway. Other agent errors include a crash on the Fijian stock exchange, caused by an unanticipated partnership o f trading agents; a billing problem involving all 19 million subscribers to the Los Angeles public library; and the tragic demise of two hundred BARTpassengers under the San Francisco Bay, caused by the incorrect reaction o f a train-driver agent during an earthquake.
The main pressure that students put upon teachers was to tell them something new. A vivid example was Leonid Vaserstein (then a student) who would declare in the middle of a talk: “All this is trivial.” Taken out of situational context this may seem impolite, but actually this was quite productive. He pressed lecturers for more competence. Soon he had to emigrate. (Now he is a professor at Penn State University.)
A ven diagram showing that the recall and robustness, each of which has many different conceptions, interest when thinking about recall as "totality" and robustness as "worst-case performance". It's in this intersection that lexicographic recall (lexirecall) lives.
In this drawing, equipment is represented by labeled boxes. The drawing of the dog on the tread- mill takes the place of a word box. It explains the procedure more briefly and vividly than words.
Figure from paper of living animals of various sizes and sorts in excrement of frogs.
A figure from the paper of a Galapagos finch probing for insects with a cactus spine.
Diagram from the paper showing the experimental apparatus where one kitten sees the world passively from a box and another sees world while walking.