Four Short Links

Companies That Work With ICE — interesting to see technology platforms in the conversation about ethical business. I wonder who contracts to RJ Reynolds, or Shell, and whether we’ll see lists of those companies too. Matrix Methods in Data Analysis, Signal Processing, and Machine Learning — videos of lectures. (via Mat Kelcey) Sound Dataset for […]

The Cloud and Open Source (Tim Bray) — (language warning) There is plenty of evidence that you can be a white-hot flaming a**wipe and still ship great software. But (going out on a limb) I don’t think you can be an a**hole and be good at operations. Espresso: A Fast End-to-end Neural Speech Recognition Toolkit

Boring Technology Behind a One-Person Startup — Just dead simple things that actually work. YouTube’s Procella Database — a new query processing engine built on top of various primitives proprietary to Google. This paper stood out to me for a number of reasons: this is the SQL query engine that runs YouTube, and it has

100,000 Free Royalty-Free Faces — “generated by AI.” Beyond WEIRD Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance — since psychological data is dominated by samples drawn from the United States or other WEIRD nations, this tool provides a “WEIRD scale” to assist researchers in systematically extending the existing database of psychological phenomena

Extracting Insights from the Shape of Complex Data using Topology (Nature) — three properties of topology that make it useful: coordinate-free, so you can work on data with different coordinate systems; “small” deformation invariance, so it’s resistant to some forms of noise; and it works on the compressed representations of shapes so you can use

Mirroring to Build Trust in Digital Assistants — these experiments are designed to measure whether users prefer and trust an assistant whose conversational style matches their own. To this end, we conducted a user study where subjects interacted with a digital assistant that responded in a way that either matched their conversational style, or did

Universal Adversarial Triggers for Attacking and Analyzing NLP — WARNING: This paper contains model outputs which are offensive in nature. How to make small changes to the input text used to build a model, causing large downstream changes in its accuracy. (via Nasty Language Processing: Textual Triggers Transform Bots Into Bigots) AP Data Kit —

Waltz: A Distributed Write-Ahead Log — Waltz is similar to existing log systems like Kafka in that it accepts/persists/propagates transaction data produced/consumed by many services. However, unlike other systems, Waltz provides a machinery that facilitates a serializable consistency in distributed applications. It detects conflicting transactions before they are committed to the log. Waltz is regarded