When seeing that Jorge Bergoglio’s autobiography, Hope, was part of the weekly book review in Nature, I was at the end of my Latin [customary French expression for it’s all Greek to me] as I could not get the point since the brief stint of his as a chemical technician did not sound like a convincing argument. Despite his more benevolent approach to Science than the one enforced by his predecessor Maffeo Barberini (aka Urban VIII) who banned Galileo’s book, and declared him into an heretic, the Church cannot but balk at scientific research that imperils its irrational beliefs, to wit Angelo Roncalli (aka John XXIII) statement that “no real disagreement can exist between the theologian and the scientist provided each keeps within his own limits.”
Archive for philosophy of sciences
what the hell..?!
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures with tags book reviews, Catholic Church, Francis, Galileo, Huawei, irrational beliefs, John XXIII, Jorge Bergoglio, Nature Communications, not a book review, philosophy of sciences, popes, science v. religion, Urban VIII on June 28, 2025 by xi'anClaire Voisin interviewed in Nature
Posted in Books, University life with tags Alexander Grothendieck, algebraic geometry, base, Claire Voisin, CNRS, Crafoord Prize, Hodge conjecture, Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu, interview, Jussieu, Kodaira problem, Millennium Prize Problems, Nature, Paris Sorbonne Université, philosophy of sciences, René Descartes, set theory on April 8, 2024 by xi'an
Mathematics gets rarely featured in Nature, as this is not the most obvious outlet for mathematical discoveries, hence it is exceptional to see Claire Voisin interviewed in the 08 Feb issue, following her receiving the 2024 Crafoord Prize in Mathematics and Astronomy “for outstanding contributions to complex and algebraic geometry, including Hodge theory, algebraic cycles, and hyperkähler geometry”. She is actually the very first female mathematician to received this prize, although she states this has no particular significance for her.
“In French schools at the time, there was the fashion of ‘modern mathematics’, which was an attempt to teach abstract mathematics, such as set theory. We had to do completely crazy things, like compute the development of numbers in base 2.”
The above statement puzzled me as, given that I am the same age as Claire Voisin, I do not remember doing `modern mathematics’ in high school but rather in primary school, with exposure to sets theory and functions, incl. injectivity and surjectivity, and indeed to different bases, which I found quite fun (rather than crazy) at the time. She also mentioned that, while in preparatory school, she was more interested in philosophy than mathematics, which was almost the case for me as well, in that I would have switched from the maths+physics program there to a program mixing philosophy and maths, had it existed at the time.
Contextual Integrity for Differential Privacy #4 [23w5106]
Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags 100th birthday, Arrowleaf Cellars, Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation, BIRS, British Columbia, Canada, Canadian wines, contextual integrity, covidtracker, data analysis, differential privacy, ethics, full moon, GDPR, information theory, Kelowna, Lake Okanagan, large language models, natural language processing, Okanagan Valley, Okanagan vineyards, philosophy of sciences, replicability, synthetic data, UBCO, winery, workshop on August 5, 2023 by xi'an
Mostly short talks. First talk by Thomas Seinke (Google) on interpreting ε, with a side wondering of mine on the relation between exp(ε) and the uncertainty that comes with Monte Carlo outcome. Which may relate to this 2022 paper by Ruobin Gong. Second talk by Gautam Kamath (U Waterloo) on large language models under privacy with “public” data. Questioning the appropriateness of ML benchmarks in terms of privacy. Third talk by Mark Bun (Boston U) on replicability, privacy and adaptive generalisation in machine learning, with a strange criticism of confidence intervals on the same parameter not intersecting for two independent studies. And proposing high probability replicable algorithms that can be put in duality with differentially private algorithms at the cost of lowering precision and effective sample size. We also had another group discussion on how to reach out about privacy guarantees, which made me realise there were GDPR compliance software available.
In the afternoon session, Shlomi Hod (Boston U) presented a practical case of designing a privacy preserving protocol for the Israeli birth record. With a strong opposition from stakeholders to use synthetic data, due to a semantic drift from synthetic to manipulated to fake, to lying. Wanrong Zhang did not talk about her stunning recent ICML paper but instead of another practical case connected with mobile based Covid case predictions, by adding minimal noise to mobility data. Nidhi Hegde (U Alberta) gave up talking on Thomson sampling with privacy protection, to focus on an ongoing health application for Alberta as more suited for the workshop. And Ria Safavi-Naini (U Calgary) drew a parallel between information theory and DP versus CI.
While the workshop was scheduled till Friday noon, in usual BIRS habits (!), the morning session was cancelled for most people leaving Kelowna in the morning.
Contextual Integrity for Differential Privacy #3 [23w5106]
Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags Arrowleaf Cellars, Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation, BIRS, British Columbia, Canada, Canadian wines, causal inference, contextual integrity, data analysis, differential privacy, ERC, ethics, Frind Estate winery, GDPR, George Box, John Maynard Keynes, Kelowna, Lake Okanagan, Maréchal Foch, mass spectrometer, Okanagan Valley, Okanagan vineyards, philosophy of sciences, pinot noir, record linkage, Syrah, UBCO, winery, workshop on August 4, 2023 by xi'anMorning of diverse short talks. First talk by Bei Jiang (Edmonton) on locally processed privacy for quantile estimation, which relates very much to our ongoing research with Stan, who is starting his ERC funded PhD on privacy. Randomised response, in having a positive probability of replacing indicators in the empirical cdf by a random or perturbed version whose bias can be corrected. I may have overdone the similarity though in confusing users with agents. Followed by a hacking foray by Joel Reardon (Calgary) into how much information is transmitted by apps on completely unrelated phone activity. (Moral: Never send a bug report.)
The afternoon break saw us visiting the Frind Estate winery on the other side of the lake. Meaning not only wine tasting (great Syrah!), and discovering an hybrid grape called Maréchal Foch, but also entering the lab with its mass spectrometer. (But no glimpse of the winemaking process per se…)
Contextual Integrity for Differential Privacy #2 [23w5106]
Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags Arrowleaf Cellars, Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation, BIRS, British Columbia, Canada, Canadian wines, causal inference, contextual integrity, data analysis, differential privacy, ethics, GDPR, George Box, John Maynard Keynes, Kelowna, Lake Okanagan, Okanagan Valley, Okanagan vineyards, philosophy of sciences, pinot noir, record linkage, UBCO, winery, workshop on August 3, 2023 by xi'anMorning of diverse short talks. First one on What are the chances? Explaining ε towards endusers by presenting odds and illustrating the impact of including one potential user’s data. Then one on re-placing DP within CI in terms of causality. And multi-agent models, illustrated by the Cambridge Analytics scandal. I am still not getting the point of the CI perspective which sounds to me like an impossibility theorem. A bit as if Statistics had stopped at “All models are wrong” (as Keynes did, in a way). And a talk on Uses & misuses of DP inference, with nice drawings explaining that publicly available information (eg, smoking causes cancer) may create breaches of privacy (Alice may have cancer). Last talk of the morning on framing effects as privileging data processors and overly technical? Fundamental law of information privacy? Got me wondering about the lack (?) of dynamic perspective so far, in the (simplistic?) sense that DP does not seem to account for potential breaches were a secondary dataset to become available with shared subjects and record linkage. (A bit of a go at GDPR, for the second time within a week.)
Before, I had a rather nice early morning in woods on top of Okanagan Lake, crossing many white tailed deer, hopefully no ticks!, as well as No trespassing signs. And a quick and c…ool swim in the Lake 20⁰ waters. No sign of the large wildfires raging south in Osoyoos or north in Kalmoops. We had a fantastic lunch break at the nearby Arrowleaf Cellars winery, with a stellar pinot noir, although this rather made the following working session harder to engage with (not mentioning the lingering jetlag)!
