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Blog postUpdate Oct 30, 2020: NumFOCUS has apologized to me. I accept their apology. I do not accept their assertion that “At the time of the interview, the committee had not determined that there was a violation of the code of conduct, only that there were two complaints filed and being examined.” The email to set up the call said “We would like to schedule a meeting so that we can discuss the results of our investigation with you” - nothing further. During the call, the committee stated the list of
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Blog postIf you’re in western USA (like us) at the moment, you might be finding it hard to breath. Breathing air that contains the fallout from fires can make you feel pretty awful, and it can be bad for long-term health as well. Wildfire smoke contains fine particulate matter, known as “PM2.5”, which can be inhaled deep into the lungs. The “2.5” here refers to the size of the particles — they are 2.5 microns or smaller. To see the air quality in your area, check out this AirNow map. Once it’s orange,
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Blog postfast.ai is a self-funded research, software development, and teaching lab, focused on making deep learning more accessible. We make all of our software, research papers, and courses freely available with no ads. We pay all of our costs out of our own pockets, and take no grants or donations, so you can be sure we’re truly independent.
Today is fast.ai’s biggest day in our four year history. We are releasing:
fastai v2: A complete rewrite of fastai which is faster, easier, and more -
Blog postTo celebrate the release of fast.ai’s new course, book, and software libraries, we’re making available the foreword that Soumith Chintala (the co-creator of PyTorch) wrote for the book. To learn more, see the release announcement.
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In a very short time, deep learning has become a widely useful technique, solving and automating problems in computer vision, robotics, healthcare, physics, biology, and beyond. One of the delightful t -
Blog postToday we are releasing a free, online course on Applied Data Ethics, which contains essential knowledge for anyone working in data science or impacted by technology. The course focus is on topics that are both urgent and practical, causing real harm right now. In keeping with the fast.ai teaching philosophy, we will begin with two active, real-world areas (disinformation and bias) to provide context and motivation, before stepping back in Lesson 3 to dig into foundations of data ethics and pr
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Blog postYou weren’t expecting to spend 2020 working from home. You can’t afford a fancy standing desk. You don’t have a home office, or even much spare space, in your apartment. Your neck is getting a permanent crick from hunching over your laptop on the couch. While those of us who are able to work from home are privileged to have this option, we still don’t want to permanently damage our backs, necks, or arms from a bad ergonomic setup.
This is not a post for ergonomic aficionados (the setu -
Blog postAs we all know now, the science shows that DIY masks are particularly good at protecting those around you, in case you’re infected with COVID-19. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do a lot to protect yourself too.
Unfortunately, many public health bodies still incorrectly claim that there is no evidence that DIY masks are useful at protecting the wearer. There’s actually plenty of evidence they can. Effective protection for the wearer of a mask depends on three critical things: -
Blog postSummary: SARS-CoV-2 particles do not float freely in the air. They are expelled as relatively large droplets, which research shows are easily caught by a simple cloth or paper mask. If an infected person doesn’t wear a mask, their droplets quickly evaporate into smaller droplet nuclei, which are harder to filter with a cloth mask. However there are some cloth mask designs which can do a very good job of this too.
I’ve seen a lot of confusion about the efficacy of mask filtration, and -
Blog postThe University of San Francisco is welcoming three Data Ethics research fellows (one started in January, and the other two are beginning this month) for year-long, full-time fellowships. We are so excited to have them join our community. They bring expertise in an interdisciplinary range of fields, inlcuding bioethics, public policy, anthropology, computer science, data privacy, and political philosophy. We had many fantastic applicants for the program, and we wish we had been able to offer a
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Blog postA bit of skepticism is healthy, and it’s especially reasonable given how much the official guidance on masks has varied over time and across regions. But of course, a good skeptic reads the evidence, and makes an informed decision based on that. So here’s some frequently asked questions I’ve been seeing from curious skeptics, and answers (with citations).
Contents Why should most people wear masks? Shouldn’t only sick people wear masks? Shouldn’t we just follow WHO’s guidelines? Is th -
Blog postUpdate: Jeremy has now written an article about masks in The Conversation lengthy FAQ. Trisha and Jeremy are two of over hundred of the world’s top academics who released an open letter to all U.S. governors asking that “officials require cloth masks to be worn in all public places, such as stores, transportation systems, and public buildings.”
Confused about mask wearing? Sure, it’s complicated. But not as complicated as some people imply. We’ve been looking at the science (see our p -
Blog postThe remaining 6 videos from the the University of San Francisco Center for Applied Data Ethics Tech Policy Workshop are now available. This workshop was held in November 2019, which seems like a lifetime ago, yet the themes of tech ethics and responsible government use of technology remain incredibly relevant, particularly as governments are considering controversial new uses of technology for tracking or addressing the pandemic.
You can go straight to the videos here, or read more be -
Blog postA message from Jeremy: This is a very special guest post from Sarada Lee (李文華), a Visiting Scholar at the Data Institute (University of San Francisco) and Conjoint Fellow at the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Newcastle. She’s also one of our most inspirational and impactful fast.ai alumni. Here, Sarada brings to us some potentially life-saving expertise that has been developed over the last 20 years in places that have already tackled respitatory pandemics: how to c
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Blog postWe are data scientists—that is, our job is to understand how to analyze and interpret data. When we analyze the data around covid-19, we are very concerned. The most vulnerable parts of society, the elderly and the poor, are most at risk, but controlling the spread and impact of the disease requires us all to change our behavior. Wash your hands thoroughly and regularly, avoid groups and crowds, cancel events, and don’t touch your face. In this post, we explain why we are concerned, and you s
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Blog postThe next two videos from the the University of San Francisco Center for Applied Data Ethics Tech Policy Workshop are available! Read more below, or watch them now:
(Dis)Information & Regulation The Toxic Potential of YouTube’s Feedback Loop Renee DiResta and Guillaume Chaslot are experts on disinformation who spoke at the CADE Tech Policy Workshop (Dis)Information & Regulation Renee DiResta shares a framework for evaluating disinformation campaigns, explains the dynamics o -
Blog postThis paper is about fastai v2. There is a PDF version of this paper available on arXiv; it has been peer reviewed and will be appearing in the open access journal Information. fastai v2 is currently in pre-release; we expect to release it officially around July 2020. The pre-release is feature complete, although the documentation isn't complete. There is a dedicated forum available for discussing fastai v2. Jeremy will be teaching a course about deep learning with fastai v2 in San Francisco star
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Blog postThe first two videos from the CADE Tech Policy Workshop are available. Read more below, or watch them now:
A filter and a spotlight: Technology and Mass Atrocity Building Empathy in Tech: A Critical Component for an Ethical Industry In November, a group of tech industry employees, concerned citizens, non-profit workers, activists, graduate students, and others gathered at the University of San Francisco for the Center for Applied Data Ethics Tech Policy Workshop to discuss issues rela -
Blog postAs governments consider new uses of technology, whether that be sensors on taxi cabs, police body cameras, or gunshot detectors in public places, this raises issues around surveillance of vulnerable populations, unintended consequences, and potential misuse. There are several principles to keep in mind in how these decisions can be made in a healthier and more responsible manner. It can be tempting to reduce debates about government adoption of technology into binary for/against narratives, b
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Blog postIf you’re considering starting a blog, then you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of options to choose from! But it seems like every option requires some serious compromises. For instance, Medium is a great way to get started really easily, but it is not at all flexible, and you hand over control of your posts to a company, rather than maintaining control yourself (and Medium has a history of changing its mind about how it monetizes its users, sometimes resulting in angry customers!) Or you
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Blog postJupyter Notebooks is a great environment for creating “code heavy” blog posts. Maybe you didn’t even plan to write a blog post, but you’ve done some interesting experiments in a notebook and you realize afterwards that you have results worth sharing. Either way, you’ll want some way to get your notebook onto your blog.
fast_template and nbdev are set up to handle Jupyter Notebooks nicely. Jupyter Notebooks and GitHub Pages already have some support for exporting notebooks to markdown; -
Blog postThe joy of screenshots One of the most useful tools for blogging is screenshots. You can use a screenshot for all kinds of things. I find it particularly useful for including stuff that I find on the Internet. For instance, did you know that the NY Times reported in 1969 that there were folks who thought the moon landing was faked? A screenshot of the NY Times website tells the story:
Generally, the most useful kind of screenshot is where you select a region of your screen which you -
Blog postYou’ve already seen how to create your own hosted blog, the easy, free, open way, with the help of fast_template. Now I’ll show you how to make life even easier, by syncing your blog with your computer, and writing posts with MS Word or Google Docs (especially useful if you’re including lots of images in your posts).
Synchronizing GitHub and your computer There’s lots of reasons you might want to copy your blog content from GitHub to your computer. Perhaps you want to read or edit you -
Blog postThis post introduces fast_template, the easiest way to create your own hosted blog. There’s no ads or paywall, and you have your own hosted blog using open standards and data that you own. It requires no coding, no use of the command line, and supports custom themes and even your custom domain (which is entirely optional). Behind the scenes, you’ll be using powerful foundations like git and Jekyll. But you won’t have to learn anything about these underlying technologies; instead, I’ll show yo
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Blog postUpdate: Jan 20th, 2020: Thanks to Yann LeCun for suggesting two papers from Facebook AI, Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations and Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning. I’ve added a section “consistency loss” that discusses the approach used in these works (and similar ideas). Thanks for Phillip Isola for finding early uses of the term “self-supervised learning”, which I’ve added to the post.
Introduction to self-supervised learning -
Blog postThis post is licensed under: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
As we discussed in Designing Great Data Products, there’s a lot more to creating useful data projects than just training an accurate model! When I used to do consulting, I’d always seek to understand an organization’s context for developing data projects, based on these considerations:
Strategy: What is the organization trying to do (objective) and what can it change to do it better (levers)? D -
Blog post“I really do think [nbdev] is a huge step forward for programming environments”: Chris Lattner, inventor of Swift, LLVM, and Swift Playgrounds.
My fast.ai colleague Sylvain Gugger and I have been working on a labor of love for the last couple of years. It is a Python programming environment called nbdev, which allows you to create complete python packages, including tests and a rich documentation system, all in Jupyter Notebooks. We’ve already written a large programming library (fast -
Blog postAn algorithm applied to over 200 million patients is more likely to recommend extra health care for relatively healthy white patients over sicker black patients (paper in Science and news coverage). Russia was found to be running influence operations in 6 African countries via 73 Facebook pages, many of which purported to be local news sources, and which also spanned WhatsApp and Telegram (paper from Stanfod Internet Observatory and news coverage). An Indigenous elder revealed that the Indige
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Blog postUpdate: This post was expanded into a paper, The Problem with Metrics is a Fundamental Problem for AI, by Rachel Thomas and David Uminsky, which was accepted to the Ethics of Data Science Conference 2020. The paper version includes more grounding in previous academic work and a framework towards mitigating these harms.
Goodhart’s Law states that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” At their heart, what most current AI approaches do is to optimize metrics. -
Blog postOver 225 police departments have partnered with Amazon to have access to Amazon’s video footage obtained as part of the “smart” doorbell product Ring, and in many cases these partnerships are heavily subsidized with taxpayer money. Police departments are allowing Amazon to stream 911 call information directly in real-time, and Amazon requires police departments to read pre-approved scripts when talking about the program. If a homeowner doesn’t want to share data from their video camera doorbe
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Blog postThe Delegation Problem Let’s look at a problem that all coders have faced; something that I call the delegation problem. To explain, I’ll use an example. Here’s an example class you might see in a content management system:
class WebPage: def __init__(self, title, category="General", date=None, author="Jeremy"): self.title,self.category,self.author = title,category,author self.date = date or datetime.now() ... Then, you want to add a subclass for
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Blog postUpdate: The first year of the USF Center for Applied Data Ethics will be funded with a generous gift from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the organization of craigslist founder Craig Newmark. Read the official press release for more details.
While the widespread adoption of data science and machine learning techniques has led to many positive discoveries, it also poses risks and is causing harm. Facial recognition technology sold by Amazon, IBM, and other companies has been found to hav -
Blog postOur newest course is a code-first introduction to NLP, following the fast.ai teaching philosophy of sharing practical code implementations and giving students a sense of the “whole game” before delving into lower-level details. Applications covered include topic modeling, classfication (identifying whether the sentiment of a review is postive or negative), language modeling, and translation. The course teaches a blend of traditional NLP topics (including regex, SVD, naive bayes, tokenization)
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Blog postToday we are releasing a new course (taught by me), Deep Learning from the Foundations, which shows how to build a state of the art deep learning model from scratch. It takes you all the way from the foundations of implementing matrix multiplication and back-propogation, through to high performance mixed-precision training, to the latest neural network architectures and learning techniques, and everything in between. It covers many of the most important academic papers that form the foundatio
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Blog postFor creating presentations there’s a lot of features in PowerPoint that are hard to beat. So it’s not surprising that it’s a very popular tool—I see a lot of folks presenting PowerPoint presentations at machine learning talks that I attend. However, for equation-heavy academic publishing, many scientists prefer LaTeX. There are many reasons for this, but one key one is that LaTeX provides great support for creating equations. Whilst PowerPoint has an equation editor of its own, it is not a gr
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Blog postYouTube has played a significant role in radicalizing people into conspiracy theories that promote white supremacy, anti-vaxxing, denial of mass shootings, climate change denial, and distrust of mainstream media, by aggressively recommending (and autoplaying) videos on these topics to people who weren’t even looking for them. YouTube recommendations account for 70% of time spent on the platform, and these recommendations disproportionately include harmful conspiracy theories. YouTube’s recomm
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Blog postA blog is like a resume, only better. I’ve been invited to give keynote talks based on my posts, and I know of people for whom blog posts have led to job offers. I’ve encouraged people to start blogging in several of my previous posts, and I even required students in my computational linear algebra course to write a blog post (although they weren’t required to publish it), since good technical writing skills are useful in the workplace and in interviews. Also, explaining something you’ve lear
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Blog postWe presented this work at the Facebook f8 conference. You can see this video of our talk here, or read on for more details and examples.
Decrappification, DeOldification, and Super Resolution In this article we will introduce the idea of “decrappification”, a deep learning method implemented in fastai on PyTorch that can do some pretty amazing things, like… colorize classic black and white movies—even ones from back in the days of silent movies, like this:
The same approach ca -
Blog postThis post is part 3 in a series. Please check out part 1 here and part 2 here.
In this series, I want to share actions you can take to have a practical, positive impact on making tech more ethical, and to highlight some real world examples. Some are big; some are small; not all of them will be relevant to your situation. Today’s post covers items 12-16 (see part 1 for 1-5 and part 2 for 6-11).
Checklist for data projects Conduct ethical risks sweeps Resist the tyranny of metrics C -
Blog postThis post is part 2 in a 3-part series. Please check out part 1 and part 3 as well.
We’ve seen the litany of moral failure from tech company executives: paying off tens of millions of dollars to executives accused of sexual harrassment (while sending victims away with nothing); firing women directly after they’ve had cancer treaments, major surgeries, or stillbirths; being told they were contributing to genocide and not responding to mitigate this; allowing top executives to evade res -
Blog postThis post is part 1 in a 3-part series. Please check out part 2 and part 3 as well.
Even before Google announced the creation of an AI ethics committee that included the anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-immigrant president of the Heritage Foundation (the committee was canceled a week later), we already knew where Google leadership stood on ethics. These are the same people that paid off executives accused of sexual harassment with tens of millions of dollars (and sent victims away wit -
Blog postNote from Jeremy: If you want to join the next deep learning course at the University of San Francisco, discussed below, please apply as soon as possible because it’s under 2 weeks away! You can apply here. At least a year of coding experience, and deep learning experience equivalent to completing Practical Deep Learning for Coders is required.
Today at the TensorFlow Dev Summit we announced that two lessons in our next course will cover Swift for TensorFlow. These lessons will be co- -
Blog postNote from Rachel: Although I’m excited about the positive potential of tech, I’m also scared about the ways that tech is having a negative impact on society, and I’m interested in how we can push tech companies to do better. I was recently in a discussion during which New York Times chief data scientist Chris Wiggins shared a helpful framework for thinking about the different forces we can use to influence tech companies towards responsibility and ethics. I interviewed Chris on the topic and
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Blog postDairy farming, solar panels, and diagnosing Parkinson's disease: what can you do with deep learning?Many people incorrectly assume that AI is only for an elite few– a handful of Silicon Valley computer science prodigies with monthly budgets larger than most people’s lifetime earnings, turning out abstruse academic papers. This couldn’t be more wrong. Deep learning (a powerful type of AI) can, and is, being used by people with varied backgrounds all over the world. A small taste of that variety can be found in the stories shared here: a Canadian dairy farmer trying to identify udder infectio
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Blog postThis is part 2 of a series on fastec2. For an introduction to fastec2, see part 1.
Spot instances are particularly good for long-running tasks, since you can save a lot of money, and you can use more expensive instance types just for the period you’re actually doing heavy computation. fastec2 has some features to make this use case much more convenient. Let’s see an example. Here’s what we’ll be doing:
Use an inexpensive on-demand monitoring instance for collecting results (and op -
Blog postThis is part 1 of a series on fastec2. To learn how to run and monitor long-running tasks with fastec2 check out part 2.
AWS EC2 is a wonderful system; it allows anyone to rent a computer for a few cents an hour, including a fast network connection and plenty of disk space. I’m particularly grateful to AWS, because thanks to their Activate program we’ve got lots of compute credits to use for our research and development at fast.ai.
But if you’ve spent any time working with AWS -
Blog postThere’s been a lot of discussion in the last couple of days about OpenAI’s new language model. OpenAI made the unusual decision to not release their trained model (the AI community is usually extremely open about sharing them). On the whole, the reaction has been one of both amazement and concern, and has been widely discussed in the media, such as this thoughtful and thorough coverage in The Verge. The reaction from the academic NLP community, on the other hand, has been largely (but not exc
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Blog postAI is being increasingly used to make important decisions. Many AI experts (including Jeff Dean, head of AI at Google, and Andrew Ng, founder of Coursera and deeplearning.ai) say that warnings about sentient robots are overblown, but other harms are not getting enough attention. I agree. I am an AI researcher, and I’m worried about some of the societal impacts that we’re already seeing. In particular, these 5 things scare me about AI:
Algorithms are often implemented without ways to addre -
Blog postThis post was originally published on 2018-08-16, but has been updated for the newest, upcoming course.
At fast.ai, we want to do our part to increase diversity in deep learning and to lower the unnecessary barriers to entry for everyone. We are providing diversity scholarships for our updated part-time, in-person Deep Learning for Coders part 2 course presented in partnership with the University of San Francisco Data Institute, to be offered one evening per week for 7 weeks, starting -
Blog postLaunching today, the 2019 edition of Practical Deep Learning for Coders, the third iteration of the course, is 100% new material, including applications that have never been covered by an introductory deep learning course before (with some techniques that haven’t even been published in academic papers yet). There are seven lessons, each around 2 hours long, and you should plan to spend about 10 hours on assignments for each lesson. Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure have integrated all you need
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