"The One That Didn't Work Out." Startup founders, you know what I mean: We spend years on a product - starting it from scratch, recruiting friends, getting it off the ground. We think we'll spend years on this. This is the one. We tell that to ourselves, investors, and friends
10 years ago today, I had the idea for an app I thought was interesting. I called it Bump, and sent this email to Andy Huibers.
— David Lieb (@dflieb) October 13, 2018
Here\u2019s a thread with some memories and lessons learned in the last 10 years. pic.twitter.com/jjfOrOlOVj
Btw, Groupon is a public co worth ~$2B. Obv it's not Google but @andrewmason still made it a huge success. This interview is compelling and honest, though ignore the headline. "The Quick Rise and Even Faster Fall of Groupon, Through the Eyes of Its CEO" https://t.co/7aE945ngLG
— Andrew Chen (@andrewchen) October 14, 2018
More from All
https://t.co/6cRR2B3jBE
Viruses and other pathogens are often studied as stand-alone entities, despite that, in nature, they mostly live in multispecies associations called biofilms—both externally and within the host.
https://t.co/FBfXhUrH5d
Microorganisms in biofilms are enclosed by an extracellular matrix that confers protection and improves survival. Previous studies have shown that viruses can secondarily colonize preexisting biofilms, and viral biofilms have also been described.
...we raise the perspective that CoVs can persistently infect bats due to their association with biofilm structures. This phenomenon potentially provides an optimal environment for nonpathogenic & well-adapted viruses to interact with the host, as well as for viral recombination.
Biofilms can also enhance virion viability in extracellular environments, such as on fomites and in aquatic sediments, allowing viral persistence and dissemination.
Viruses and other pathogens are often studied as stand-alone entities, despite that, in nature, they mostly live in multispecies associations called biofilms—both externally and within the host.
https://t.co/FBfXhUrH5d

Microorganisms in biofilms are enclosed by an extracellular matrix that confers protection and improves survival. Previous studies have shown that viruses can secondarily colonize preexisting biofilms, and viral biofilms have also been described.

...we raise the perspective that CoVs can persistently infect bats due to their association with biofilm structures. This phenomenon potentially provides an optimal environment for nonpathogenic & well-adapted viruses to interact with the host, as well as for viral recombination.

Biofilms can also enhance virion viability in extracellular environments, such as on fomites and in aquatic sediments, allowing viral persistence and dissemination.

How can we use language supervision to learn better visual representations for robotics?
Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!
Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z
🧵👇(1 / 12)
Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.
Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)
The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).
The secret is *balance* (3/12)
Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:
1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.
2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)
By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.
Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)
Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!
Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z
🧵👇(1 / 12)

Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.
Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)
The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).
The secret is *balance* (3/12)
Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:
1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.
2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)
By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.
Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)