Emily Fox

@abstractcow@transfem.social
770 Followers
110 Following
314 Posts
Trans girl. Teaching and researching computer algorithms at UT Dallas. Soon to be teaching faculty at UIUC. Married to an amazing wife. Mother to two boys who call me Moogie. Huge math and programming languages nerd. I play RPGs, metroidvanias, and puzzle games mostly. #ADHD. Probably #ActuallyAutistic.

Formerly
@abstractcow@tech.lgbt.

Profile picture is a selfie of me taken in my house. Banner is a container with the best sugar cookies in the world, coincidentally iced with light pink and blue frosting.
Pronounsshe/they
Websitehttps://personal.utdallas.edu/~emily.fox/
GitHubhttps://github.com/emilykfox
Age3x
"America has been vaccinating people for fifty years. If vaccines caused autism, America would have trains, okay? We would have so many trains." - Jon Allen

It may be minor, but something that saddens me in all that LLM craze is how scientifically and intellectually poor and dry it is.

When I started getting interested in AI for robotics, nearly 20 years ago (yeah, I'm ancient), I and my colleagues were after some big questions. We were studying intelligent life - people and animals, mostly - or working with people who do (neuroscientists and other physiologists, psychologists, ethologists, ...), trying to understand behavior, cognition, decision, perception, action, and then to model it, and draw inspiration and insight from it to design artificial intelligent systems (with a very wide definition of "intelligent"). It was something huge, and as with most huge scientific problems and big questions, the usual way to do it is to break them into smaller problems, and to try to approach them one at a time while keeping some understanding of how they connect to the bigger picture. It was trying to explore a huge ocean, deeper and deeper, one small dive at a time. And as for most fundamental research, it was mostly done for its own sake and useful outcomes were an occasional byproduct.

This research goes on as it can, but most people who speak about AI (and get the limelight and the funding and the political interest etc.) now aren't doing that. They are not doing science. What they have done, mostly, is take one of those occasionally useful byproducts and develop and iterate over it to create something simultaneously impressive, unethical, dangerous, and of questionable real utility to anyone but their (rich, powerful) promoters.

- How do Rust developers find out if a New York neighborhood is safe?
- They use a borough checker.

What? They programmed it by doing what???

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bally_Astrocade

@faithisleaping Could have sworn your message said, "purple-haired chick," but now I don't see it. I guess the purple heart is to blame.

Still, maybe that's a sign to consider it.

leans into your right ear

whisper

Low battery.

@quephird I’m still very concerned about the size of the fire you’re building.
@justinfrank I was at a workshop when somebody asked me how to do a thing with graphs. I made up a quick solution on the spot based on intuition I’d built up over my PhD. Then asked around because obviously the other experts here know how to do this, right?

Ended up writing a STOC paper.
@eleanor @erl Lately, my wife has been accidentally saying “Yes, ma’am’,” to confirm things for my son.

Sorry I broke your brain!
@mjdxp@labyrinth.zone wait oh no. I thought I did good 😭