Randomness in iTunes and a NeurIPS Review

Is iTunes random? Experiments about iTunes randomness

3h of road, 794 songs in my iTunes library, at least 20 songs repeating twice, 3 repeating thrice. Is it normal? Let’s experiment to assess randomness and see if there is a bias in software or in our human perception of randomness. We will also discuss about mathematical paradoxes the birthday problem and the coupons collector’s problem.

Fräntz Miccoli is passionate about software and data science. He is the CTO and COO of Nexvia, he also teaches in business school and engineering school.

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NeurIPS 2019 and Blaise Aguera y Arcas' talk: Social Intelligence

In this talk we give a brief overview on last year's NeurIPS conference which took place beginning of last December in Vancouver, Canada. Afterwards, we stream one of the highlights from the conference Blaise Aguera y Arcas' invited talk “Social intelligence”. Blaise leads an organization at Google AI working on both basic research and new products. Among the team's public contributions are MobileNets, Federated Learning, Coral, and many Android and Pixel AI features. In his talk, he starts by discussing privacy and agency in today's ML landscape, noting how new technologies for efficient on-device inference and federated computation offer ways to scale beneficial applications without incurring many of the downsides of current mainstream methods. He then delve deeper into the limitations of the optimization framework for ML, and explore alternative approaches involving meta-learning, evolution strategies, populations, sociality, and cultural accumulation.