Maggie Makar
@Maggiemakar
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Following
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2,717
Assistant prof @umichcse . Previously @MIT_CSAIL . Machine learning. Causal models. Healthcare. Swimming. @mmakar @mastodon .social Opinions are my own.
Ann Arbor, MI
Joined February 2009
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Pinned Tweet
So excited to make ML models more reliable using causal reasoning. LET'S DO THIS!
Also: *could not* have done this without support from my students,
@UMichCSE
,
@michigan_AI
, and UM eHAIL. I am so grateful
Delighted to congratulate Prof.
@Maggiemakar
for receiving the 🌟NSF CAREER🌟 Award!👏
Title: “From Fragile to Fortified: Harnessing Causal Reasoning for Trustworthy Machine Learning with Unreliable Data”.
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Very excited to announce that I am looking for PhD students to work with
@UMichCSE
. If you're interested in causality + machine learning and would like to spend your PhD years NOT losing half your income on rent, I strongly encourage you to apply to our PhD program
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Happy
#NeurIPS2021
review day! Reminder that in 2016, 3 NeurIPS reviewers were convinced that my work on identifying asymptomatic carriers of infectious diseases “will not be relevant for a wide audience”. Reviews are always imperfect, don’t let it get to you 🙃
#yougotthis
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I'm on the job market! I like to think about making causal inference efficient using ideas from ML, and making ML more robust using ideas from causal inference. Check out my work on and reach out if you're hiring & think I'd be a good fit!
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FINALLY transitioned over to pytorch after years of tensorflow. Just based on a couple of days of playing with pytorch: better distributed learning, better documentation, BETTER HANDLING OF SLICING.
So much better. Ouff.
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[1/n] 11 yrs after moving to the US, my application for permanent residence on the basis of exceptional ability was approved. To the MANY PEOPLE who suggested the only way to do this is through marriage: women can color outside the limited boundaries of your imagination
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@suchenzang
UMich prof here! I've never heard of this, my guess is: it's a scam. I can't find documentation or links to this data.
If it was available, it would have been made available to UMich faculty, which it hasn't. Do you mind DMing me the email of the sender? Can check if legit
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I successfully defended my thesis! So thankful for the mentorship and support of so many. I believe I am now qualified to prescribe antibiotics
#imadoctor
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[1/n] New arXiv paper alert! ML models can take shortcuts, which makes them perform poorly under distribution shift. We used some ideas from causality to get models to use the right signal. W
@davisblalock
,
@packer_ben
, Yoni Halpern, &
@alexdamour
. 🧵
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I feel like some day a student will walk in and be like “oh what are these?” And I’ll be like “long long ago, in a far away land, there were in-person conferences where we stood around posters and wore name tags.”
#covidsucks
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[1/n] This tweet, while likely well intentioned is misleading. Student data was not and has never been for sale by U of M.
The content referenced includes papers and speech recordings that had been voluntarily contributed by student volunteers participating, under signed consent
so i guess this is a thing now
universities running ads to resell students' data
for training llms
💰💰💰
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@zacharylipton
I always always suggest that people start with John Shawe Taylor's MLSS lectures. Incredibly intuitive, step by step, holds your hand through every line of math.
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Stop👏using 👏 anthropomorphic 👏 language 👏 to 👏 describe 👏models 👏.
It can't see --> it can analyze image input
It can't hear --> it can analyze speech signals
It can't speak --> it can produce audible output.
Stop. Please.
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Woohoo :)
🎉 Huge congratulations to
@Maggiemakar
on receiving the
@Google
Research Scholar Award for research on "Reliability through causal alignment: causally motivated models for pain management."
Here's to many more achievements ahead!👏
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It's really cute when undergrads think we get a summer break 🥹
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Happy to announce that I'm looking for PhD candidates to join my lab
@UMichCSE
this year!
If you're interested in working on causality, robustness or healthcare applications apply to our program!
After all, who wouldn't want to join the biggest house party in America? ⬇️
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How to stay hydrated at
#ICML2023
:
1- Keep a bottle of water handy at all times
2- take a swig of water every time someone says LLM
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Extra happy that my
#NSF
proposal officially got approved!
Clinical data often reflects biases in access to & quality of healthcare. I'm excited to build causal & predictive models that ameliorate the effect of these data inequalities
#letsdothis
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@suchenzang
This is helpful. Thanks Susan! I'll try to figure out what's going on here. Will share any insight..
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Fellow introverts: WE MADE IT.
Time to rest.
Nobody talk to me for the next 3 months. At least.
#ICML2023
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Me: let me see if the department has guidelines for a good defense.
MIT:
Me:...ok. thanks.
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To everybody who's ever told me that it's a great thing that I have an expressive face: I continue to prove that you are wrong. It's strictly bad to have an expressive face. Below is a compilation of me at poster sessions making faces.
#Neurips2022
pic credit
@shengpu_tang
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For some reason, every year leading up to the NeurIPS deadline, my imagination runs wild with all the other careers I could have picked.
This year, in my head (obviously), I'm a DJ. I'm all about that Ibiza life.
Happy NeurIPSing everybody.
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3 NeurIPS accepts :)
My favorite part --> they were all led by students who worked really really hard.
So incredibly proud of Jiayun Zheng,
@shengpu_tang
,
@SarahJabbour_
and Jiaxuan Wang
More paper details coming at you soon
#NeurIPS2022
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I can't be the only person who spends like a solid 30 minutes admiring her own rebuttals after submitting them...
Like dang Maggie, that's such a valid point, I bet it will convince all of them
#whosgoingtotellher
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Added another one to the collection! May we never forget the blessing of in person gatherings :)
Now time to get work done
#NeurIPS2022
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True story: you can get 2 accepts & 1 weak accept from 3 reviewers & get your paper rejected because a meta-reviewer decides to act unilaterally. I'm disappointed as an author & a reviewer who spends time writing reviews thinking they matter
#Faact
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@BedoyaFTC
@FTC
I feel this, all of it! I still have the napkin I was given on the plane 11 years ago when I came to the US, it's one of my post prized possessions :)
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Shout out to all of us living through our worst FOMO as we miss out on
#NeurIPS
. We're cool too, and we know it.
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I'll be presenting our work on Causally motivated shortcut removal at
#NeurIPS2022
poster session 2 at 4pm in Hall J, poster
#323
. Stop by if you'd like to learn more about the work OR if you're planning to apply for PhD programs. I am looking for motivated students to work with!
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[4/n] last thing: Immigration is HARD even for people with privilege like me. I couldn't go home to hug my mom when her parents died, or care for my parents when they got COVID, or dance with my family at my cousin's wedding. So please be kind to immigrants. They carry a lot.
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[1/n] Haven't heard anybody talking about this, so I'll swallow my disdain for mass tweets & do it myself: the pandemic has wrung us out for very real reasons. Today I am particularly sad about losing the awesome communal feel that comes with physically going to
#ICML2020
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Holy smokes! I am scheduling my thesis defense. WHERE DID THE TIME GO? WHAT IS THIS JOKE?
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Attending
#ICML2022
in person was a TRULY incredible. Shout out to this group of
#SCIS
workshop organizers & others who made the virtual component go smoothly. Until next year!!
@aahladpuli
@wald_yoav
@marikgoldstein
@angelamczhou
@ShalitUri
@gultchin
@victorveitch
@suchisaria
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I am being told I will not be meeting with my advisor on a weekly basis anymore.
So, like, I have to pay for therapy now? I don't like this one bit
#doctorstrugglesarereal
#didimentioniwasadoctor
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[2/n] I don't know how we are going to manage misinformation going forward. It'll continue getting more difficult. But maybe the answer here is to lead with kindness: before hitting the post/share button maybe we can all stop for a second to think about who gets hurt when we do.
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"Being a woman in CS can be challenging because you don’t see a lot of women in CS right now.... But having a woman as an advisor is always a reminder that women do have a place here. At CSE, the Michigan AI Lab has a faculty that is 50% women"
@SarahJabbour_
Interested in grad studies at U-M CSE?
We sat down with PhD candidate Sarah Jabbour to discuss how collaboration and connection are centered in her experience as a graduate student.
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If you stop by my office after 5pm, yes I will have dim lighting and I will be playing soft jazz music. Because I am old now...
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My advisor gives the best tips for being on the academic job market...
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[1/n] I'll be at
#NeurIPS2022
Nov 28 - Dec 1. Happy to chat if you're considering applying to
@UMichCSE
/
@michigan_AI
. If you're an international student who was unable to come due to visa issues also please reach out. I'm going to make time during the week of Dec 5 for zoom chats
Very excited to announce that I am looking for PhD students to work with
@UMichCSE
. If you're interested in causality + machine learning and would like to spend your PhD years NOT losing half your income on rent, I strongly encourage you to apply to our PhD program
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Woohoo!
Read about the amazing journey of Dr.
@Maggiemakar
in the latest Michigan AI Blog post.
More about her research:
👉
#WomenInSTEM
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[3/n] It's also hard to overstate the importance of my privilege: My parents were able to financially support me during my very-expensive-by-egyptian-standards undergrad education. I will work hard to make this opportunity available for international women with less resources
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Excited to be looking at faces, not a tiny green light on my laptop for the first time in a long while...
Learn more about building efficient, reliable models for decision-making during today's AI Seminar.
@Maggiemakar
talks about "Machine Learning and Causality" TODAY @ 4pm.
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Am I misreading this? There were no representatives from academia in the president's conversation about the dangers of AI? If true, we should all be worried about this. Industry entities represent a very specific, biased group of the actors in the AI field
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Can academics have work-life-balance? What's it like to advise PhD students? How much grant writing do you need to do as a professor?
Come. Ask us your questions!
📢Students, join us for an ask-all-your-questions panel with
@UMichCSE
faculty on what it means and what it takes to be a professor!
🗓️ FEB. 22 @ 4:30-6:00 pm ET in Beyster
#1690
With
@radamihalcea
, Kim Diaz, Ron Dreslinksi,
@Maggiemakar
, and
@AlansonSample
.
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There is nothing more stupid than convincing yourself to start a major code refactor on a Saturday at 11pm. Why did I do this to myself? Why am I like this?
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~6 years ago I was a TA for the first time and I met my very first favorite student*
Today
@RaghuAniruddh
successfully defended his thesis and I could not be more excited for whatever he's going to do next.
They grow up so fast :')
* yes I have favorites. everybody does.
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[1/n] ICML paper alert! When an infectious diseases is frequently propagated by asymptomatic carriers, labeled data for that disease are typically biased: they capture symptomatic infections more than asymptomatic carriage.
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What if a decision maker only needs bounds on potential outcomes under different interventions rather than the most precise estimates? Does that make the learning task easier? Stop by our poster session at 9am or 8pm EST to learn more!
Poster details
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My toxic trait is that if I'm super intrigued by one question in one of the projects I'm working on, I cannot for the life of me focus on anything else till it's resolved...
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Come join us at the
#SCIS
at
#ICML2022
! Our schedule is packed with great speakers and posters about spurious correlations, invariance and stability. Room 340–be there :)
@aahladpuli
@marikgoldstein
@wald_yoav
@ShalitUri
@angelamczhou
@gultchin
@victorveitch
@suchisaria
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Today, remember the wise words of Lizzo, the patron saint of those who wait for
#NeurIPS2022
reviews:
"In a minute, Imma need a sentimental man or woman to pump me up".
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It's an awesome day when work in causal inference is recognized. Super exciting news :)
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2021 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded with one half to David Card and the other half jointly to Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens.
#NobelPrize
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It's not that I don't appreciate a robust conversation about the implications of large language models. It's just that i might literally combust into flames if someone says AGI one more time 😱
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This was probably the most fun I've had in a while.
Listen to this for a good dose of ML + causality, infectious diseases and *most* importantly: laughter.
Thanks
@EpiEllie
and
@LucyStats
for being fantastic hosts.
🎙 This week
@EpiEllie
and
@LucyStats
chat with
@Maggiemakar
about:
🤖 Machine learning
🏔 Causal bounds
💡 Efficiency
and more!
🙏 In partnership with
@AmjEpi
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Michigan wolverines won 100% of the games against OSU since I joined the UM faculty
#justsaying
#itsme
#GOBLUE
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Things I learned after finishing my
#PhD
: there are no friendships like the friendships you make at 3am on the night of a deadline over stale pad Thai & the smell of your labmates’ (& your) body odor because you haven’t showered in days. These are the BEST friendships ❤️🥹
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[3/n] Today was tough. It sucks being accused of selling out our students' data, when we truly care about our students & their privacy. Not to mention many of us can be making way more $ working for companies that actually do trade our data and trample our privacy
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I can't be the only one really feeling the weight of the war and covid and all the things this morning. It is probably ok to hit pause for a second. So here is a happy picture for you. Feel free to share happy things with me--dogs, research, food. Mostly dogs though.
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My favorite: Our 2015 (read: pre-pandemic) paper on identifying asymptomatic spreaders of an infectious disease was deemed "too niche, unlikely to have an impact on a wide audience".
(It got into AAAI...)
NeurIPS and others should take the same path as TMLR and significantly downweight the role of estimates of impact. We should be focussing on solid, steady, empirical/theoretical advances. We can give 10% of papers one year later "test of short time" awards if they show impact.
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[2/n] it's impossible to overstate my parents' contribution in this journey. They valued education enough to allow their young unmarried daughter to travel alone to the US (gasp 🙄), which is insanely progressive for average Egyptian parents
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"When people talk about interpretability, they are usually talking about causality, which I think is important and more people should work on it"-Yann Lecun
#NIPS2017
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On one level, these allegations are so disheartening. On another level: it makes sense and not at all shocking. This insane ML rat race of publishing at 2-3 specific conferences encourages perverse incentives to publish incremental work & in this case downright cheat (allegedly)
machine learning researchers learn to optimise their own best paper rate through collusion and other unregulated mechanisms
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My advisor said the same: “Do what makes you satisfied. If it leads to climbing up the promotion ladder, it’s a double win. If it doesn’t, your disappointment will be offset by the fact that you pursued your interests.”
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@english_august
@suchenzang
Here is what I've found
[1/n] This tweet, while likely well intentioned is misleading. Student data was not and has never been for sale by U of M.
The content referenced includes papers and speech recordings that had been voluntarily contributed by student volunteers participating, under signed consent
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Rebranding statistics into "Foundations of machine learning" to increase uptake...
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I had been REALLY excited for the causality panel but technical difficulties are making it impossible to hear the panelist. Super bummed out
#NeurIPS2022
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Excited to announce that our paper on causally-motivated shortcut removal (see thread below!) was accepted for publication in
#AISTATS
! Code is also available here
[1/n] New arXiv paper alert! ML models can take shortcuts, which makes them perform poorly under distribution shift. We used some ideas from causality to get models to use the right signal. W
@davisblalock
,
@packer_ben
, Yoni Halpern, &
@alexdamour
. 🧵
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For computer scientists we have an incredible inability to intelligently distribute ourselves among multiple coffee stations
#neurips2022
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Super excited about co-organizing this ICML workshop on Spurious Correlations, Invariance, and Stability. Submit your work by May 24
We are organizing an ICML 2022 workshop on Spurious Correlations, Invariance, and Stability (SCIS)!
We have a fantastic set of speakers!
Submit your work (by May 24) addressing spurious correlations: discovery, methods, evaluations, and beyond!
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Wouldn't it be super cool to read a paper with a negative result? "Hello world, we tried this and here is why it doesn't and shouldn't work".
#SaturdayNightPondering
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Got a great paper on spurious correlations rejected from
#ICML2022
/
#UAI2022
? Just submitted to
#Neurips2022
& worried about the fact that you're playing roulette with the odds being more like 330 to 1 rather than 37 to 1?
Submit your work to our workshop! Deadline: May 27
Now that we're post-NeurIPS...
Consider submitting work to the ICML 2022 workshop SCIS: Spurious Correlations, Invariance and Stability!
We extended the submission deadline to May 27th, all details here:
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That awk moment when you wake up from a dream where computer scientists were all getting infected by some disease that made us throw up matrices. The good news is that it wasn't infectious, we were all ingesting something toxic: num pie
#DontEatNumpy
#CovidDreams
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In my intro to ML class I was asked "how can we ever calculate the bias/variance of an estimator? That's impossible"
Took me a LOT of energy to not go "YES IT IS LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT BOUNDING THE GENERALIZATION ERROR & ALL THE WAYS YOU CAN MEASURE FUNCTION COMPLEXITY"
#SLTisCOOL
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Me recording talks in 2020: impeccable office, 100 different versions of the talk, repeat recording because of minor errors
Me recording talks now: leftover lunch visible in camera, one recording, keep going despite minor errors or occasional sneezing
#imoverthis
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Turns out that even getting a definition of spurious correlation is non trivial. Come to the panel discussion lead by
@alexdamour
@irenetrampoline
@hhexiy
and Rajesh Ranganath
#SCIS
to hear more!
#ICML2022
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Maybe
@DTE_Energy
will listen if I make this rhyme
We haven’t had power for a very long time
Tomorrow is my birthday, I turn thirty two!
If I don’t wake up in my bedroom I will be blue
Give me back my heat
Make my birthday complete
#annarbor
#dte
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I said it before and I'll say it again. The best friendships are the ones forged at 2 am when you're pushing hard for a deadline and haven't seen the inside of the shower in a couple of days.
Congrats to Dr. Suresh :)
feeling lucky that I get to hang around these lab mates a little longer :')
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@MarzyehGhassemi
presenting on biases and harms of spurious correlation in the context of healthcare setting at the
#SCIS
workshop at
#ICML2022
: e.g., your algorithm can tell if the patient is black even if YOU can’t
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Favorite quote from the talk:
"I used to think a prompt engineer is an engineer who showed up on time. Now it's a whole field"-- Prof Mooney
Honored to host Prof. Raymond Mooney's
#AI
Seminar on "Answering Why Questions about Narrative Text."
TOMORROW Sept. 29 at 10:30 am ET:
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Not sure who needs to hear this but ice cream is not breakfast. I'm looking at you Hawaii
#icml2023
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Me: ah it's going to be a nice relaxing hike after
#ICML2023
The hike:
(Video of someone being air lifted off the trail)
Stay safe y'all!
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"The real purpose of NIPS is to exhaust us with talking so that we actually want to go back and work"--a wise woman
#NIPS2017
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@zacharylipton
I was today years old when I learned that people think of this methods as causal in some sense. Woah 🤯
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That's it. I've reached the highest point I can possibly reach in my career (and life in general). I should just retire now.
I agree with Maggie. This language used among CS people is a shortcut since we know what it's actually doing and NOT DOING. But when we use this language facing the public, it is factually misleading to them. I'll add AI doesn't "think" or "know" or "feel" or "learn" in the…
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Yet she persisted :)
#motivationalmonday
“Ten years ago I was kicked out and forced to retire.”
Our new medicine laureate Katalin Karikó (
@kkariko
) told us how much it means to be awarded the Nobel Prize after a scientific career that has been full of challenges.
Ten years ago, Karikó was still doing all her…
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When the pandemic is over, I'm going to visit all my collaborators' houses and demand to see the rest of their office rooms that are outside of the camera shot
#curiositykills
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Word to the wise: link your overleaf project to github and push frequently. I have a feeling this ship is going down
#NeurIPS2023
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We've launched Layer Health
@layerhealth
, a new AI startup solving healthcare's information problem, with large language models. I'm CEO, working with an amazing team and backed by $4 million from Google Ventures
@GVteam
@generalcatalyst
&
@inceptionhealth
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I have got to say: one of the most valuable yet very under-rated skills that I've learned during my PhD is how to create good visualizations using powerpoint. Props to
@frejohk
for the awesome tips.
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"90% of people put on ventilators died.."
Hello sir have you heard of confounding?
Thomas Renz: We have incentivized the murder of patients rather than incentivize treatment...When you get admitted for COVID, they get paid more. When they put you on remdesivir, they get paid more. When you get ventilated, they get paid more. When you die, they get paid more.
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#tbt
2018 when I (1) had to spend a solid 3 minutes explaining what asymptomatic carriers are, (2) tried to make my research in infectious diseases relevant to an ML audience by saying that you can use it to model rumor spread in social networks
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