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Visual Information Theory (2015)

colah.github.io

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Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#31
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working research for a big tech means you are much less subject to the “publish or perish” req of a university. It often isn’t a must have resume point, but it actually gives you a different kind of freedom.

Given that he was awarded a Thiel fellowship, this gives him more freedom to research what he wants and make an impact than big tech and can literally go anywhere. But obviously chose Google.

Hello! The Thiel Fellowship was a wonderful period for me, and gave me a lot of freedom to work on different topics. I'm very grateful for it.

Unfortunately, the Fellowship only lasts for two years. Towards the end, it was actually super stressful. How could I support myself while continuing to work on what I thought was important? And if I wanted to live in the Bay Area, how could I event get immigration status to work and live there?

Getting to work at Google Brain at this point let me continue to do what I was doing before -- many of my blog posts, including the one being discussed here, were written while I was at Brain.

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#32
Nice article. For those who are more interested in mosaic plots, statisticians have already done a lot of work on this issue. For R there are many nice solutions, e.g. the strucplot framework which allows to visualize complicated relationships between multiple qualitative variables (https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v017i03).

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#33
post #2

This guy seems to have peaked in terms of creative output while he was on the thiel fellowship, and then abruptly stop once he was sucked up by google.

Hello! Thanks for pointing out that my CV is out of date. You're right that none of my work over the last two years is listed there, and I should probably fix that.

It feels a bit awkward to chime in, but it feels a bit important because I think there's a way in which the narrative is a little off (although I'm very grateful for everyone's kind comments):

Working at Google wasn't a trade off where I got financial support in exchange for not publishing. Rather, working at Google was amazing enabler, which supported me doing work I believed advanced important public interests for five years. That actually includes the blog posts being discussed here, which I wrote while an intern on Brain and received feedback from many researchers there.

To be concrete, some of the things I did while at Google included:

* Writing expository blog posts explaining important ideas in machine learning (eg. this blog post).

* A five year thread of research on neural network interpretability. How humans can understand how neural networks make decisions? (eg. DeepDream, Feature Vis, Lucid, Building Blocks)

* Cofoudning a scientific journal for machine learning that values exposition and allows interactive diagrams.

* Working on early TensorFlow and writing some of the initial tutorials on it.

* Articulating concrete safety concerns about modern machine learning systems, organizing a cross-instutional paper on it, and later representing Google on the Partnership on AI's Safety-Critical AI working group.

* Designing and teaching the introductory course for the Google Brain/AI Residency.

* Miscellaneous ML research, all published in open access venues.

That's basically the majority of what I did at Google. I always felt empowered to work on things that I thought were important for the world, and in many cases felt like had leverage I wouldn't have had individually. I think that was exceptionally generous of Google, and also speaks a lot to the environment Jeff created for those of us on Brain. (I realize Google is a large company, and other people's experience may be very different.)

I do think you're right that the number of short expository blog posts I wrote declined, especially after my first two years at Google. A big part of that is that I focused more on a small number of more ambitious projects (eg. Distill, Building Blocks). Another big part is that I started doing more non-individual work: teaching, mentoring, editing, debugging social issues.

To be clear, I actually left Google last fall. I now work at OpenAI where I lead the new Clarity team, which works neural network interpretability -- basically, can we take a trained neural network and turn it into something like code that a human can understand? Leading a team means that I do even less individual research and writing. Sometimes I miss being an individual contributor, but I think it's the right call. I get to build an environment where others can focus on a kind of research I think is really important for the world and teach and support them.

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish more people were interested in research distillation. Recently I've been searching for intuitive explanations of different areas of math, and while there are some great blogs that do so, the lack of such materials is indeed obvious. I don't think academia is going to contribute to this mission as it's mostly governed by a make-it-look-ridiculously-difficult-so-people-won't-find-it-approachable-and-thus-give-yo…

Your hostile attitude to the people putting the work in is disrespectful and inappropriate. It's like the people who make entitled demands of open source software authors. Academics don't get rewarded for confusing each other, they have to create research that their peers appreciate, understand, and value.

That's naive. Academia isn't some perfect system with perfect incentives.

There's plenty of incentive to dress something up as more complex and impressive and using more high powered machinary than needed, e.g. impressing reviewers, qualifying for a particular conference, convincing the funding body that your pet technique can actually be useful etc

I don't think you'd find many academics that dispute this, though hopefully they'd think a lot of people are trying to do good research.

It'd be like open source software if it was done as a hobby; a lot of academics get public funding.

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#35
post #22

Nice post: author has good communication / teaching style, and firm grasp of the material. The visuals help make some of the concepts more intuitive. Bookmarked.

On an unrelated tangent, the way the page formats when printing is one of the best I've seen. No weird navigation cruft, and it seems there's even a style defined that sets book-style margins, such that the left and right margins alternate in length.

Thanks! This particular article went through pretty extensive feedback with colleagues where I'd print the article out, share it, and get hand written feedback. This necessitated investing in print formatting. :)

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#36
post #33
post #2

This guy seems to have peaked in terms of creative output while he was on the thiel fellowship, and then abruptly stop once he was sucked up by google.

Hello! Thanks for pointing out that my CV is out of date. You're right that none of my work over the last two years is listed there, and I should probably fix that. It feels a bit awkward to chime in, but it feels a bit important because I think there's a way in which the narrative is a little off (although I'm very grateful for everyone's kind comments): Working at Google wasn't a trade off where I got financial sup…

Any interesting work coming out of "Olah Team"? I tried googling but found nothing specific just Distill articles and your twitter feed...

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#37
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello! Thanks for pointing out that my CV is out of date. You're right that none of my work over the last two years is listed there, and I should probably fix that. It feels a bit awkward to chime in, but it feels a bit important because I think there's a way in which the narrative is a little off (although I'm very grateful for everyone's kind comments): Working at Google wasn't a trade off where I got financial sup…

Any interesting work coming out of "Olah Team"? I tried googling but found nothing specific just Distill articles and your twitter feed...

We're still ramping up. So far, our only publication has been co-authoring Activation Atlases with our wonderful colleagues at Google (https://distill.pub/2019/activation-atlas/).

One thing we're thinking a lot about how you can transition from "what" a neural network represents to "how does it mechanistically do that"? I hope we'll publish on that in the next couple of months.

By the way, while I'm flattered by the esteem it implies, I'd generally rather people not refer to us as the "Olah Team", just as you wouldn't refer Google Brain as "Jeff Dean Research" or MILA as "Yoshua Bengio Institute" or OpenAI as "Sutskever AI", etc. I think academic culture of branding groups after the PI is kind of unhealthy.

My teammates are doing the hard work and I see my position as a team lead as just to serve and support them. :)

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#40
Love this blog post!

One minor nitpick: the event that it rains next week is probably rather correlated with the event that it rains this week (in particular it's correlated with the season), so I don't think this is a great example of independent variables. Maybe you can separate by distance: the event that you wear t-shirt vs the event that it rains in city Y vs the event that it rains in city Z.

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