Paradigms in Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence includes a number of different strategies for how to make machines more intelligent, and often more human-like, in their ability to learn and solve problems. An ambitious grou...
22 Feb 201617min
Survival Analysis
Survival analysis is all about studying how long until an event occurs--it's used in marketing to study how long a customer stays with a service, in epidemiology to estimate the duration of survival o...
19 Feb 201615min
Gravitational Waves
All aboard the gravitational waves bandwagon--with the first direct observation of gravitational waves announced this week, Katie's dusting off her physics PhD for a very special gravity-related episo...
15 Feb 201620min
The Turing Test
Let's imagine a future in which a truly intelligent computer program exists. How would it convince us (humanity) that it was intelligent? Alan Turing's answer to this question, proposed over 60 year...
12 Feb 201615min
Item Response Theory: how smart ARE you?
Psychometrics is all about measuring the psychological characteristics of people; for example, scholastic aptitude. How is this done? Tests, of course! But there's a chicken-and-egg problem here: y...
8 Feb 201611min
Go!
As you may have heard, a computer beat a world-class human player in Go last week. As recently as a year ago the prediction was that it would take a decade to get to this point, yet here we are, in 2...
5 Feb 201619min
Great Social Networks in History
The Medici were one of the great ruling families of Europe during the Renaissance. How did they come to rule? Not power, or money, or armies, but through the strength of their social network. And s...
1 Feb 201612min
How Much to Pay a Spy (and a lil' more auctions)
A few small encores on auction theory, and then--how can you value a piece of information before you know what it is? Decision theory has some pointers. Some highly relevant information if you are t...
29 Jan 201616min
