Archive for book review
De pierre et d’os
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel with tags aquarelle, Arctic, book adaptation, book review, chamanism, ethnography, Far North, First Nations, graphical novel, Greenland, husky dogs, Inuits, inukshuk, Lille, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Northern lights, Paul-Émile Victor, qimuttoq, sledge dogs, supersition, tupilak on June 30, 2025 by xi'an
AI Narratives [book review]
Posted in Books with tags Ada Lovelace, AI, Alan Turing, Ann Leckie, anthropomorphisation, Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle Adam, automation, Blade Runner, book review, CHANCE, Charles Dickens, cybernetics, cyberpunk, dehumanization, difference engine, E.M. Forster, Emile Zola, golem, Homer, Iain Banks, Illiad, immortality, Isaac Asimov, Karel Čapek, Kempelen's chess player, Lille, literary criticism, Neuromancer, Prague, robotics, robots, science fiction, slavery, tea, technophobia, The Black Swan, Trollope, USSR, William Gibson, zen buddhism on June 13, 2025 by xi'an
AI Narratives: A history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines is a 2020 collective book edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, with about twenty contributing authors, through a series of 16 chapters on the relation between culture (literature, films) and our societal approach to AI, with varying perspectives, some overlap between chapters, a wide range of extrapolation, especially in relation with the oldest books (like Homer’s) and quotes from both books I enjoyed and books I had not heard of, to add to my to-red pile, like Roderick. Predominant place of Blade Runner, of Ĉapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots, not only for introducing the term, and of Asimov, but also a detailed analysis of the great, thought-provoking, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. With a realization that Gibson’s Neuromancer had aged quite a lot… For the modern times, very little outside the US-UK realm, as for instance no mention made of Jules Verne or René Barjavel, although Zola makes an appearance when describing workers as automats, neither of the Germanic literature (from the Grimm Brothers onwards), nor of the non-negligible USSR science fiction production, nor yet of the Chinese input, like The three body problem. Other books that could have made it: the Murderbot diaries, and The Alchemy Wars trilogy, for digging into the blurry border between humans and AIs; A Memory Called Empire, for a clever approach to mind uploading, as well as the masterly Never let me go by Ishiguro, both dealing with a future where copies of humans The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay for the golem, the highly original take on the legal rights of humanoid robots, A Psalm for the Wild-Built because of… tea and Zen monk, obviously!
Among things I learned from AI Narratives, the story of Alan Turing (figuratively) mansplaining Ada Lovelace on her pronouncement that machines cannot be intelligent since they deliver what they are coded for. The mention of automatos in the Illiad. A mention of 1625 Gabriel Naudé Apologie &tc. that excludes magic as irrational, as well as introducing the term androide. The trivia that the creator of the (fraudulent) automaton chess player, Kempelen, also produced in 1791 an authentic if brainless speaking machine. The realisation that E.M Forster also wrote a futuristic novel, The Machine Stops (as well as the precursor of the symbolists, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, with L’Ève Future). Another trivia that cyberpunk first appeared in a 1983 short story by Bruce Bethke. A discussion of the elaborate Culture constructed by Iain Banks, albeit through volumes in the series I hade not read, along with the concept of OCP for outside context problem, akin to Taleb’s Black Swan. The least interesting (and final) chapter in the book is paradoxically the closest to data analysis, when Recchia runs a rather low-tech assessment of a subtitle dataset in relation with AI, if referring to Tufte’s rule of the baselin in the notes (p405).
Definitely enjoyable book, then, even though I mostly skimmed through the chapters during a day-trip to Lille on a Bank (!) holiday. Reading through it made me muse rather belatedly of a parallel between AI scare or adoration, and the non-AI societies, where individuals are (also) part of a structure large enough to miss the larger picture. From building pyramids to being part of the global economy. (This followed mostly from my surprise in seeing Dickens, Trollope, and Zola included in the discussion.)
[Disclaimer about potential self-plagiarism: this post or an edited version will eventually appear in my Books Review section in CHANCE.]
Scalable Monte Carlo for Bayesian Learning [not yet a book review]
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags 1⁰ North, Bayesian learning, book review, Cambridge University Press, continuous time MCMC, convergence diagnostics, cup, Gelman-Rubin statistic, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, IMS Monographs, kernel Stein discrepancy descent, Markov chain Monte Carlo, MCMC, Metropolis adjusted Langevin algorithm, non-reversible MCMC, North, PDMP, piecewise deterministic, scalable Bayesian learning, scalable MCMC, stochastic differential equation, stochastic gradient MCMC on May 11, 2025 by xi'an
Data science ethics [book review]
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags accountability, AI, applied mathematics, Belgium, bias, book review, CHANCE, China, Chinese edition, data encryption, data science, differential privacy, discrimination, ethics, EU, European Parliament, explicability, fairness, FAT, federated learning, Google, hashing, homomorphic encryption, OUP, Oxford University Press, preprocessing, quantum computing, record linkage, slides, statistical literacy, statistical modelling, SVM, transparency, University of Antwerp on May 5, 2025 by xi'an
Data science ethics (concepts, techniques and cautionary tales), by David Martens, was published in 2022 by Oxford University Press. The book is inspired by the author’s course on Data Science and ethics he has been teaching at the University of Antwerp. (With a link to his slides.) The 255p book proceeds by decomposing the ethics of data science into its different steps: data gathering (Chap. 2), data preprocessing (Chap. 3), modelling (Chap. 4), evaluation (Chap. 5), and deployment (Chap. 6). Following the `FAT Flow Framework´, where FAT stands for fairness, accountability, and transparency.
Do not expect much maths, stats, or anything quantitative: this book is mostly about concepts, even though some (mostly well-known) illustrations are provided. Chapter 2 includes a description of encryption (with homomorphic encryption treated in Chapter 4). And somewhat improbably quantum computing. Differential privacy gets a few pages with not a single formula (until Chapter 4, again).
Chapter 3 covers k-anonymity, record linkage, reidentification, (through cautionary tales) and discrimination through biases in the (learning) dataset. Chapter 4 is defining ε differential privacy with the Laplace randomization as a possible implementation and with no critical stance on the limitations of the concept. The computation limitations of homomorphic encryption are more clearly pointed out. Federated learning is only quickly mentioned. The section about measuring fairness and reducing bias implies that some prior knowledge is available about whom is potentially discriminated and which covariates to add to the model. The last section on explicability of predictions is worthwhile in signalling the difficulty with most (black box) AI but the example opposing an SVM model to a logistic model is not tremendously convincing in that neither model is true.
Chapter 5 addresses the crucial challenge of ethical evaluation in a rather verbose and vague manner. For instance, with no instruction on how to resist adversarial attacks. Or criticising p-hacking and multiple testing while missing the elephant in the room (p-values!). Drifting from the topic when discussing the misdeeds of Diederik Stapel. Most of the same goes about Chapter 6 and its take on ethical deployment, when going through examples such as Google’s policies in China. Or general musing on the impact of AI on societal inequalities (with mentions of companies and CEOs who have since then back-pedalled on their ethical engagement). These chapters are lacking in tools and (more) practical recommendations.
One interesting aspect of the book is the attention paid to the EU(ropean) aspect of these concerns, through the GDPR (General DAta Protection Regulations) adopted by the European Parliament in 2016. (There is also a brief mention of China’s regulations, but no details beyond a reference. Maybe the Chinese edition differs.)
(almost) everything you need understand about AI [book review]
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics, Uncategorized with tags AI, artificial intelligence, book review, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, ChatGPT, CNRS, French universities, graphic novel, IA, infographics, Paris Sciences et Lettres, popular science, PSL on May 3, 2025 by xi'an
