Archive for European Commission

The 7th Annual PrivaCI Symposium, 19-20 May, Brussels

Posted in pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 24, 2025 by xi'an

Nature tidbits

Posted in Books, pictures, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 9, 2025 by xi'an

From the 12 December issue, lots of AI entries in Nature (soon moving to NAIture??), from the arrival of AGI, artificial general intelligence, and the usual barren call for companies to take responsibility (!) and equally repeated pious wishes for (better) controlling the incoming “human intelligent” AIs, to the two year anniversary of ChatGPT, which came as a significant support to non-native English speakers, if raising concern about the privacy losses in delivering unprotected data to the model,  to the incoming dearth of data to feed AIs (duh? why would new data be necessary for new AI systems?), with the danger that using AI generated data to train new AIs is not good being repeated anew, to the poor performances of LLMs on African languages, and the correlated dearth of funding in Africa, to DeepMind doing better than weather agency supercomputers to predict weather on a 15 day window, including extreme weather events (not much of a surprise, as climate change does not mean that history of past weather patterns cannot be exploited) albeit the probabilistic nature of the forecast seems to derive from the randomness of the starting conditions, hence depends on the choice of that distribution, to the (unsurprising) 50% productivity boost in design in a material science company afforded by seconding (or supplanting!) researchers with AI tools, to the poor design of bar plots (inc. Nature) that induce misunderstandings. A fair degree of double entries when considering the earlier 5 December issue, also read in the plane, with again fossilized poo, AI soon reaching human intelligence level (??),  and the AI computing gap between academy and industry. Beside this AI frenzy, a news article reporting on the EU trying to create an applied research council equivalent to what the ERC succeeded for academic research. (And I will not mention the digestive track article further than pointing out it added bromalite, cololite, and regurgitalite, to my digestive vocabulary!)

2024 ERC Starting Grants announced

Posted in Kids, pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 22, 2024 by xi'an

Today the European Research Council (ERC) has made public which Starting Grants proposals were selected this year, for a total amount of €780m. Congrats to all recipients!These include 14 grants for the PE1 panel in which I sat earlier this year for the fourth and final time. (The PE1 panel stands within the Physical Sciences and Engineering domain and covers pure maths, applied maths, mathematical foundations of computer science, mathematical physics, and statistics.) I have found the whole experience highly interesting, from getting a snapshot of on-going directions in the broad field (for topics I could understand) to interacting constructively with colleagues from different fields and cultures, to appreciating the clear protocols and instructions provided by the ERC and its highly efficient officers, if representing a significant time investment over these years.
This round of selections saw the return of UK applications, following the long-delayed agreement between the EU and the UK, with Warwick Thomas Berrett’s proposal among the winners. (Whose evaluation I obviously took no part whatsoever, following ERC rules governing conflicts of interest. Ditto for applications from PSL.)

repower EU!

Posted in Kids, pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on June 7, 2024 by xi'an

EUropean media freedom act

Posted in Books, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 19, 2024 by xi'an