HOW TO STAY YOUNG:

Starve-destroy-recycle-eat-build-eat-build-starve...

The human ecosystem (our internal environment) has the same processes as the environmental ecosystem. Destruction & Reconstruction is a universal process. This is how we stay young.

A Thread about Famous Armenian Inventors and what we have contributed to the world. So the next time someone wants to say we are unimportant, you can rest easy knowing Armenians have contributed some of the greatest inventions to mankind. Here is a handful but there's more.

Raymond Damadian: Armenian-American Physician and inventor of the first MRI machine. MRI is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to form pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes of the body. Raymond created the first MRI in 1977.

Artem Mikoyan: One of the most famous engineers in aviation. Mikoyan along with Gurevich created one of the most famous Jet lines in history, the MiG. MiG jets directly competed with American Lockheed Martin F Series planes and were among the first to surpass the speed of sound.

Hovannes Adamian: Most notably laid the foundations of color television with his Tri-Color Principle. His work would go on to become the framework that is used to create Color-TV that we see today. He is recognized as one of the founders of color television.

Emik Avakian: An inventor who unfortunately was disabled, but that didn't stop him from contributing work that would help people similar to his condition. Notable contributions are the automatic wheelchair which dismiss the action of hand rolling and a breath operated typewriter.

Announcing the 2021 Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science. #SICSS is for grad students, post-docs & beginning faculty. Free for participants. @chris_bail and I are happy to tell you about all 20 locations. https://t.co/wolhtZIMc5 [thread]

SICSS brings together social scientists & data scientists interested in computational social science for 1-2 week events with intensive study & collaborative research.

Topics covered include automated text analysis, web scraping, non-probability sampling, digital experiments, ethics & much more.

All education materials created for SICSS are available open-source so that people who are unable to participate can still learn. You can also use them in your teaching. Here are materials from previous years:

Because of COVID, all SICSS locations will be online only in 2021.

Next up at #enigma2021, Sanghyun Hong will be speaking about "A SOUND MIND IN A VULNERABLE BODY: PRACTICAL HARDWARE ATTACKS ON DEEP LEARNING"

(Hint: speaker is on the

In recent years ML models have worked from research labs to production, which makes ML security important. Adversarial ML research studies how to mess with ML

For example by messing with the training data (c.f. Tay which became super-racist super-fast) or by foiling ML models by changing inputs in ways humans can't see.

Prior work considers ML models in a standalone, mathematical way
* looks at the robustness in an isolated manner
* doesn't look at the whole ecosystem and how the model is used -- ML models are running in real hardware with real software which has real vulns!

This talk focuses on hardware-level vulnerabilities. This is particularly interesting because these can break cryptographic guarantees (because those are outside of their threat models)
e.g. fault injection attacks, side-channel attacks

The Nature versus Nurture is a debate about scientific doctrine. It is a debate about the correct way of explanation for cognition.

The Representation versus Non-Representation shares the same debate. It is also about the correct way of explanation for cognition.

It is also the difference between thinking in nouns versus thinking in verbs. Nature and Representation have deep roots in Western thinking. It is a functionalist and reductionist way of thinking that meets its limits when analyzing complex adaptive systems.

It is perhaps due to this Western bias that concepts from the study of complex systems have had little traction in modern society. It is of course, more than a Western bias, but a human bias to seek out simple causal explanations of this world.

But the world is complex and messy. Spiral dynamics which is an evolutionary model of individuals and society explains how models of the world shape ourselves and our civilization.