Archive for linguistics
mentalité de petite instit’ bornée [bienvenue à l’Académie!]
Posted in Books, Kids with tags Académie française, Alain Fournier, Albert Camus, France Inter, hussards de la République, interview, Libé, linguistics, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Pagnol, misogyny, primary school, sexism, tribune on December 23, 2025 by xi'an
mostly MCMC and definitely April¹¹
Posted in pictures, Statistics, University life with tags Bayesian neural networks, history of languages, interweaving, Issy-les-Moulineaux, linguistics, MCMC, Mostly MCMC seminar, Ocean, Paris, PariSanté campus, phylogeny, Porte de Versailles, seminar, Toy Model of Superposition on April 6, 2025 by xi'an
The next mostly MCMC seminar is coming. It will take place at 3PM (CEST) on Friday 11th April 2025 at the PariSanté Campus (in Room 08). The talks are
- Susan Wei (Monash University) “Dynamical versus Bayesian Transitions in a Toy Model of Superposition”
- Emma Kopp (Université Paris Dauphine, PSL), “Contrasting modes of cultural evolution: Kra-Dai languages and weaving technologies”
Stories of your life and Others [book review]
Posted in Books, Kids, University life with tags 1950's, AI, alien intelligence, alternative reality, Amazing Stories, Babel tower, book review, calliagnosia, CHANCE, cover, eugenism, evolutionary biology, Genetics, golem, Kurt Gödel, linguistics, Nature, Pascal's wager, Philosophy of religions, steampunk, Ted Chiang, Victorian society on March 18, 2025 by xi'an
Just finished the book Stories of your life and Others by Ted Chiang, which like the later Exhalation I deeply enjoyed. The book was published in 2001, with some of its stories appearing as early as 1990, hence this book review is of little relevance when many reviews and commentaries have been published, including academic reviews. (No chance for CHANCE, then!)
“Perhaps you have not noticed that the lower classes are reproducing at a rate exceeding that of the nobility and gentry (…) Consequently, our nation would eventually drown in coarse dullards.” (p.186)
While the original cover seems to cater to old-fashion science-fictions books and magazine of the 1950’s, like Amazing Stories, the contents are much more philosophical than science-fiction-al, even when the universe (or the physical laws that) Chiang creates relies on elaborate construction based on science. (Same thing happens with Exhalation.) With a take on religions and their logical loopholes that I particularly enjoy, like Hell is the Absence of God, where the central character is no given the choice of Pascal’s wager. And the nonsense of attributing handicaps and hardships to dog’s testing impacted individuals, as well as the involuntary humour in the innocent casualties resulting from angels visiting Earth. Some stories I liked less, like Understand, about a superhuman emerging from drug tests since the end cannot keep up with the premises. But others I really appreciated, from Babel, set in a naïve (very medieval) version of the World, with a flat Earth and a solid sky. To Division by Zero, where a Gödelian mathematician pushes the impossibility theorem to ruin all of mathematics, and to the superb Seventy Two Letters, that mixes cybernetics, Kabbalists’ golem, genetics and eugenics, in a Victorian setting that could make it pass for a steampunk story, but I disagree with this label since the novella somewhat runs backwards by returning to a freedom of choice that trumps eugenic goals, while aligned with the Victorian perception of science. The same with Story of Your Life, about constructing communication channels with a perplexing if peaceful alien race, whose purpose for this attempt is never clear, which is not an issue with enjoying the built-up of an understanding, as well as the disrupted time-frame of the narration. Or even the short (Nature) story, The Evolution of Human Science, which reflects the very real concern that AI could take over research, into directions that would escape human understanding (not a good signal for i!). Leaving hermeneutics (of AI research) to humans. And the final Liking what you see, a clever variation on the issues of “lookism”, the “burden” of beauty, and an imagined condition called calliagnosia that makes people insensitive to beauty or lack thereof in a person.
day five at ISBA 22
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags ACDC, antivaxers, Ca' Foscari University, Canada Day, conference practicals, copulas, freedom convoy, harmonic mean estimator, infinite variance estimators, ISBA 2022, J.R. Tolkien, k nearest neightbour, Leonard Cohen, linguistics, machine learning, migrants, mirror workshop, Mont Royal, Montréal, PDMP, Plateau-Mont Royal, PMCABC, raccoon, Syrian civil war, The Lord of the Rings, University of Warwick, Venezia, Westmount, Zig-Zag on July 4, 2022 by xi'an
Woke up even earlier today! Which left me time to work on switching to Leonard Cohen’s song titles for my slide frametitles this afternoon (last talk of the whole conference!), run once again to Mon(t) Royal as all pools are closed (Happy Canada Day!, except to “freedom convoy” antivaxxxers.) Which led to me meeting a raccoon by the side of the path (and moroons feeding wildlife).
Had an exciting time at the morning session, where Giacomo Zanella (formerly Warwick) talked on a mixture approach to leave-one-out predictives, with pseudo-harmonic mean representation, averaging inverse density across all observations. Better than harmonic? Some assumptions allow for finite variance, although I am missing the deep argument (in part due to Giacomo’s machine-gun delivery pace!) Then Alicia Corbella (Warwick) presented a promising entry into PDMP by proposing an automated zig-zag sampler. Pointing out on the side to Joris Bierkens’ webpage on the state-of-the-art PDMP methodology. In this approach, joint with with my other Warwick colleagues Simon Spencer and Gareth Roberts, the zig-zag sampler relies on automatic differentiation and sub-sampling and bound derivation, with “no further information on the target needed”. And finaly Chris Carmona presented a joint work with Geoff Nicholls that is merging merging cut posteriors and variational inference to create a meta posterior. Work and talk were motivated by a nice medieval linguistic problem where the latent variables impact the (convergence of the) MCMC algorithm [as in our k-nearest neighbour experience]. Interestingly using normalising [neural spline] flows. The pseudo-posterior seems to depend very much on their modularization rate η, which penalises how much one module influences the next one.
In the aft, I attended sort of by chance [due to a missing speaker in the copula session] to the end of a session on migration modelling, with a talk by Jason Hilton and Martin Hinsch focussing on the 2015’s mass exodus of Syrians through the Mediterranean, away from the joint evils of al-Hassad and ISIS. As this was a tragedy whose modelling I had vainly tried to contribute to, I was obviously captivated and frustrated (leaning of the IOM missing migrant project!) Fitting the agent-based model was actually using ABC, and most particularly our ABC-PMC!!!
My own and final session had Gareth (Warwick) presenting his recent work with Jun Yang and Kryzs Łatuszyński (Warwick) on the stereoscopic projection improvement over regular MCMC, which involves turning the target into a distribution supported by an hypersphere and hence considering a distribution with compact support and higher efficiency. Kryzs had explained the principle while driving back from Gregynog two months ago. The idea is somewhat similar to our origaMCMC, which I presented at MCqMC 2016 in Stanford (and never completed), except our projection was inside a ball. Looking forward the adaptive version, in the making!
And to conclude this subjective journal from the ISBA conference, borrowing this title by (Westmount born) Leonard Cohen, “Hey, that’s not a way to say goodbye”… To paraphrase Bilbo Baggins, I have not interacted with at least half the participants half as much as I would have liked. But this was still a reunion, albeit in the new Normal. Hopefully, the conference will not have induced a massive COVID cluster on top of numerous scientific and social exchanges! The following days will tell. Congrats to the ISBA 2022 organisers for achieving a most successful event in these times of uncertainty. And looking forward the 2024 next edition in Ca’Foscari, Venezia!!!
