Ali Tajer

Professor @RPI (past Columbia & Princeton). Information Theory, Machine Learning, Statistical Inference

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

@AlexGDimakis Of course.

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

Great description of what information theory is and what it can do!

[Alex Dimakis @AlexGDimakis]

https://t.co/qqVULIZAWD

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

@SigProcessing @RutgersSGS Congratulations to both of you!

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

@LiHongkang_jntm @sijialiu17 @pinyuchenTW @vidal_rene Congratulations, Hongkang!

[PURANJAY DATTA @puranjay1412]

Hi I along with @pranamyapk will be presenting our work on ROPES: Robotic Pose Estimation via Score-Based Causal Representation Learning (https://t.co/UNHr1mbx4S) at Embodied World Models for Decision Making Workshop #NeurIPS
📍Upper Level Room 30A-E
⏲️ Dec 6

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

And pleasant to see Marton and many other great probability (& information) theorists.

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

LLMs can wait — this setting is the real accelerator for theory research (Rényi Institute of Mathematics)!

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

@Kangwook_Lee @UWMadison @UWMadisonECE Congratulations Kangwook! This was overdue and very well deserved!

[Alex Dimakis @AlexGDimakis]

Many people think high school level math problems means easy problems. Here is one from the recent IMO that current frontier models and almost all humans will find very challenging.

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

Indeed. The more relevant question is who can monetize these models. IBM has significant legacy enterprise products …

[Ahmad Beirami @abeirami]

Actually, don't underestimate IBM!

The race is not just about training the best models. It's also about capturing the value of AI throughout the industry.

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

@MountainOfMoon I highly recommend trying the bouchons, if you’ve done!

[Nima Alidoust @nalidoust]

I am a son of a former political prisoner in Iran and the nephew of an executed dissident and another political refugee in exile. My family has been subjected to more violence than anyone who is attacking Iran, at the hands of this regime.

So it is with zero sympathy for this regime that I say this: You can't claim to care about civilian lives and order the evacuation of 15M people from one of the densest spots on earth.

War kills innocents. Stop cheering for it.

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

@abeirami If somebody’s name appears on a paper they get credit and they’re responsible. Ordering is only a secondary issue.

Not a great message for a young lead author to assume the resp. falls on a senior co-author appearing last. And many senior authors have great tech, contribution.

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

@murat_kocaoglu_ @JHUCompSci Congratulations Murat. Welcome back to the east!

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

@ChiefScientist @Harvard Can you be more specific about what exactly 50% of the voters want?

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

Except that the main role of an advisor is helping with posing the right questions, for which these tools are not too useful!

[Aravind Srinivas @AravSrinivas]

At this point, you can use any AIs (perplexity, chatgpt, etc) as a PhD advisor on whatever topic you're getting deep into. It's pretty good. I have my preference. The core point: Research advice is no longer an elite academic university thing.

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

than to challenge them. So, while science has a significant role in providing ideas and evidence, its most effective role’d be discussing the tradeoffs in policies without prescribing one.

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

This is a great post. Complementing @boazbaraktcs’s rationale, I’m also reminded of the “myside bias” coined by Stanovich in

The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking

arguing that social polarization is driven less by irrationality and more by ⬇️

[Boaz Barak @boazbaraktcs]

Wrote today in the @nytimes about the dangers of blurring scholarship and activism.

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

the tendency to process info in ways that support one’s pre-existing beliefs/identities. Unlike other reasoning errors, myside bias is independent of analytical/cognitives skills, and in fact those more seasoned with it are more likely to use it to defend their views rather ⬇️

[Ali Tajer @satajer]

@ukmlv Biking 🚴 in the 17 mile drive is great!