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Cynthia Rudin wins the 2021 AAAI Squirrel AI Award

pratt.duke.edu

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Re: Cynthia Rudin wins the 2021 AAAI Squirrel AI Award

#21

Congratulations! I think Interpretable AI mentioned in the article is what is commonly called explainable AI.

Cynthia has a great paper where she distinguishes between "interpretable" and "explainable" https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.10154.pdf

Oh thanks for the pointers

Re: Cynthia Rudin wins the 2021 AAAI Squirrel AI Award

#22

I wish one day I'll read that Computer Scientist _earns_ $1 Million. Most engineers here get like £60k salary (£3600 a month after PAYE tax), while companies they work for make billions out of their work. Not only that, but they also don't contribute back into the local communities, because they use aggressive tax avoidance strategies. Corporations need to start sharing their profits with the workers and pay taxes ot…

It is quite common for engineers with Cynthia Rudin’s ability to earn > 1 million. If you have that level of ML skill you can lead teams at many companies for over that amount.

Re: Cynthia Rudin wins the 2021 AAAI Squirrel AI Award

#23

I wish one day I'll read that Computer Scientist _earns_ $1 Million. Most engineers here get like £60k salary (£3600 a month after PAYE tax), while companies they work for make billions out of their work. Not only that, but they also don't contribute back into the local communities, because they use aggressive tax avoidance strategies. Corporations need to start sharing their profits with the workers and pay taxes ot…

IMO, the salaries are (ballpark) fine for the effort and risk involved, flexibility of working hours, stress levels, etc. I don’t see a good reason why engineers should make more than, say, teachers or nurses, just because the company they work for makes billions.

What’s wrong is that these companies make billions, most of it because they happened to get to the top of the food chain.

Re: Cynthia Rudin wins the 2021 AAAI Squirrel AI Award

#24

Interesting article, but I think this sentence was unfair to other AI scholars, who also want AI to help society. "While many scholars in the developing field of machine learning were focused on improving algorithms, Rudin instead wanted to use AI’s power to help society."

Most AI papers I see aren't directly focused on using AI to help society. It's unclear how a small performance increase on ImageNet helps society, for instance.

Re: Cynthia Rudin wins the 2021 AAAI Squirrel AI Award

#27

I wish one day I'll read that Computer Scientist _earns_ $1 Million. Most engineers here get like £60k salary (£3600 a month after PAYE tax), while companies they work for make billions out of their work. Not only that, but they also don't contribute back into the local communities, because they use aggressive tax avoidance strategies. Corporations need to start sharing their profits with the workers and pay taxes ot…

> I wish one day I'll read that Computer Scientist _earns_ $1 Million.

They do.

Not that I personally believe they deserve it. For the exact same reasons I don't think a CEO is not "worth" thousands of engineers, I don't think that just because you happened to graduate in ML you are worth tens/hundred times more that the others.

Or more accurately maybe they are worth that much, but the general population is severely underpaid.

Re: Cynthia Rudin wins the 2021 AAAI Squirrel AI Award

#28

Interesting article, but I think this sentence was unfair to other AI scholars, who also want AI to help society. "While many scholars in the developing field of machine learning were focused on improving algorithms, Rudin instead wanted to use AI’s power to help society."

Many AI researchers do focus on algorithms, no?

Plenty focus on theory.

Re: Cynthia Rudin wins the 2021 AAAI Squirrel AI Award

#29

Interesting article, but I think this sentence was unfair to other AI scholars, who also want AI to help society. "While many scholars in the developing field of machine learning were focused on improving algorithms, Rudin instead wanted to use AI’s power to help society."

A Peter Norvig quote from yesterday's article about his transition to Stanford...

"In the past, the interesting questions were around what algorithm is best for doing this optimization. Now that we have a great set of algorithms and tools, the more pressing questions are human-centered: Exactly what do you want to optimize? Whose interests are you serving? Are you being fair to everyone? Is anyone being left out? Is the data you collected inclusive, or is it biased?"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28833933

Re: Cynthia Rudin wins the 2021 AAAI Squirrel AI Award

#30
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is $1 Million respectable?

Can money buy respectability? If I awarded $1 Million to a random person every year, receiving that award wouldn't make that person more accomplished, and the award wouldn't be mentioned outside the local newspaper. On the other hand an award that gives no money but consistently awards the best researcher in the field can be very noteworthy. What the $1 million does accomplish is make people pay attention, so everyon…

> Can money buy respectability?

Definitely!

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