Anastasia Toynbee from the Royal Society of Chemistry gave a great presentation a few weeks ago on how RSC are using machine translation to help authors who have English as a second language. There is a huge language burden for ESL authors, and she covered some of the stark data in her talk. Remember, talent is evenly distributed in th...

This week our data and technology department had a workshop looking at how to be more decisive, led by the fantastic Claire Holmes. Going away from the meeting we have asked each team to pick two techniques to apply over the next 12 weeks, and then to report back on whether they were effective. It will be interesting to see where we la...

Episode link https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001qdx1 Episode rating B+/A- I was fairly familiar with Einstein’s life, having had a fascination with the birth of modern physics for some time, but even still I learnt a few new things about him from this episode. I’d forgotten quite how long he had worked in obscurity as a parent attorn...

Episode link https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001jst2 My recollected rating: A I really enjoyed this episode, and basically learnt all about the epic, but I have now mostly forgotten the details. I Got GPT to summarise the work again for me, and what I recall from the episode is a good analysis of the role and tribulations of Sita in ...

Episode link - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hx7n My rating - A- The chartists were a social movement in England that ran from around the 1830s to the late 1860s. It was a mass movement in search of political reform that would rebalance power in favour of the masses. As such it can be described as a social movement. Gatherings o...

Episode link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001jc68 My rating: B- I learnt hardly anything new in this episode. The book - the man who loved only numbers - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Man-Who-Loved-Only-Numbers/dp/1857028295 is a much much better guide to the man. Having read that book I was excited about this episode, and was saving ...

I asked for a summary of the following paper: https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embr.201949472 ( The troubles with peer review for allocating research funding ) The command I used was: llm -m gpt-4-turbo -s "write an abstract for this paper, and give me the key findings in 10 bullet points" < funding-revew.txt With this comma...

Earlier this week I gave a talk about some of my current thinking about generative AI. One of the points I made is that while these tools have tremendous power, we are still scrambling around looking for the best ways to invoke that power. This reminded me of the command line. With the command line, you need to know the right incantati...

OpenAI made a ton of announcements earlier this week. As Benedict Evans pointed out, they are driving hard for the platform play. As expected, their models are becoming faster, more capable, and cheaper, with much longer context windows to boot. I fully expect this drive to continue for quite a while, as there remains a ton of headroom...

This article in The Verge is a good overview of responses from large tech companies to the US copyright office on questions around what the future of copyright should be in terms of regulation of AIs use of copyrighted material. The responses are very predictable. Mostly they argue that there should be no limits on what these AIs shoul...

I attended FuturePub last night, actually, I also spoke at it too. I love these events, I've attended a ton of them over the years, and last night's was in association with AI fringe, so there was a nice ad-mixture of different communities, and I got to chat to some folk that I wouldn't otherwise have met. A really good event, many tha...

On Monday the 30th of October I’m taking part in a FuturePub - AI and Research event. I’m going to be leading an open discussion on the topic of implementing AI Governance. EventBrite page with some more details. I put in the proposal when I saw the event pop up for a few reasons, the most direct one being that at BMJ we have implement...

I follow a monthly roundup of Machine Learning papers by Davis Blalock. https://dblalock.github.io/about/. It's a fantastic way to keep up with where the focus of the research community is, even at a very high level. You can catch it here: https://dblalock.substack.com/ I'd say the trends I've been seeing tend to be around areas such a...

Last week I took part in an internal discussion with the CIO Carolyn Brown from the BMA where we talked all things AI, and how we think about its possible impact on the workplace. I think we had about 120 folk listen in, and we recorded the session in case anyone wants to catchup. The discussion was nicely moderated by Gordon Fletcher,...

Gary Marcus writes persuasively that markets are massively over pricing LLMs, and this could lead to some very bad decision making in the near term - https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/what-if-generative-ai-turned-out. He writes that if the US gets into an AI “war” with China things could get hairy, But what has me worried right now is ...

I felt this blog post deeply - https://lethain.com/frameworks-decision-making/, as I often find myself making that internal calculation around where I am choosing to direct my energies and how well aligned my current pointer of attention is to company needs. As a manager I have been trying harder over the last few years to listen more,...

I joined in 2007, my then colleague Gavin had returned from SXSW and was talking about this new thing. It has been enormously beneficial for my career, and I’ve learnt and laughed a lot from the interactions I had on that platform. I was fortunate to never see the dark side of the web on that platform, I have a very privileged position...

A few weeks back I sat down for about an hour to be interviewed by Mike Green, whose podcast "Understand Users" is all about UX and user research - https://understandingusers.podbean.com Mike and I go back a few years, and I've seen him flourish in that career over the last few years. It was a real pleasure sharing some thoughts and re...

I’ve been sharing some links around internally at work over the last few months, so I wanted to post them here. Clearly dominated by LLMs Douglas Hofstadter has changed his mind about LLMs, and his perspective is quite sobering. I don’t give much time to folk who are very negative about the future prospects of these tools, but he is so...

https://julian.digital/2023/07/06/multi-layered-calendars/ Is a fantastic post reflecting on the poverty of our calendar applications. The author has sone fantastic suggestions on how to enhance what a calendar can be. I think that the problem with this approach is one of customisation. The product market fit for such an imagined produ...

How likely is it to generate a copyrighted image using a Generative ai tool such a stable diffusion? This question came up in a work context last week and I've been thinking about it. I asked GPT how these tools work, and it came back with "generative image models like Stable Diffusion learn from data to generate new images by applying...

This tweet thread is worth looking at: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1681748271163912194 What this tells us, and what is worth paying attention to, is that when building on top of LLMs that are outside of your control, the fine-tuning, or model, can move underneath you. If you have strategies for making the LLM work for you ...

This is the editorial https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj.p1609, which includes the fantastic line “We are not extracting sunbeams from cucumbers; we are shining a light for the public good.” That’s it, that’s the blog post - the bmj - code sharing. P.s. - if you plug a cucumber into a high voltage source you do get it to glow! https:/...

Dryad has a call out for new members to join our board of directors - https://blog.datadryad.org/2023/07/05/join-us-call-for-nominations-to-the-dryad-board-of-directors/, if you are interested in scholarly infrastructure, and you want to contribute to a community initiative, then this is a great opportunity to get involved. In particul...

Episode link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001jkzg My rating: B- This episode was about megaliths. Overall we know very little about the people’s who built these, and that comes across in the episode. The episode was not terrible, but not great either. I learnt the following: • there are a lot more megaliths around than I had appr...

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/06/what-does-geoffrey-hinton-believe-about-agi-existential-risk.html what does Geoffrey Hinton believe about AGI risk is a short post by Tyler Cowen about an interview with Geoffrey Hinton. The interview is here, but I don’t have access. There is one quote I want to reflect on. The...

Adam day recently posted a very good overview of the role of precision and recall in detecting fake papers. I’m just going to point directly to his post: https://clearskiesadam.medium.com/where-to-draw-the-line-precision-and-recall-3c39a131c14b The main thing for me is that we always need to be clear about what question we are asking w...

Episode link - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001j45h My rating - a solid A rating. I’d not heard of Stevie Smith before, and found this episode truly delightful. The participants of the episode had a clear fondness for the writing, and their enthusiasm shone through. I ordered a copy of the collected works, and I love them. There i...

Episode link - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gx0k In the house that I grew up in we had a book of poetry of Donne, but I payed little account to it, and I had only the vaguest knowledge of who he was. I’d rate this episode B-. This episode did a great job of going over his life and works. I’d not realised when exactly he was wor...

I just noticed that SAGE are continuing to announce the 10 year impact awards - https://group.sagepub.com/press-releases/sages-10-year-impact-awards-recognize-research-with-long-term-influence. The pull quote from Ziyad covers it well “Short-term measures of research impact fail to account for the many ways in which scholarship continu...