CS 373 Fall 2023: John R. Smith
What did you do this past week?
I worked on my Operating Systems project to try to get it to a good state of completion before Thanksgiving break. I spent more time with my friends to usher in this holiday season. We wanted to show each other how thankful we were for our friendship.
What’s in your way?
For OS, we discovered that we implemented code in the wrong place. After revising our design, we were both frustrated to find that we were debugging issues we fixed a week ago. Hopefully taking a short break from the project will allow us to more clearly see where the issues are.
What will you do next week?
I am going to enjoy Thanksgiving with my family. I have some work to do to prepare for the last week of classes, but I have worked very hard this past semester and will use this break to recuperate and reflect on those things I am most thankful for.
What did you think of Paper #13. What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You.
This was a difficult but necessary read. It was heartbreaking to hear how women are mistreated and abused in a field that I am so excited to join. I hope that moving forward, we will continue to make progress towards diversity and equal treatment in the field. I was more shocked to hear that a similar form of discrimination occurred in another CS class against some of our hardworking TAs.. We all have the same passion, and that passion isn’t determined by our gender or ethnicity.
What did you think of the ethics presentation?
It was an enlightening presentation by two very knowledgeable and engaging speakers. With the rise of large language models and other artificial intelligence models, it is more important than ever to consider the impact this technology will have on society. Moreover, we need to be more careful with where we gather the data that these models are trained on. Scraping data without careful consideration or permission leads to the stealing of intellectual property and can potentially introduce bias.
What made you happy this week?
We are at the end of a very difficult semester, and the thought of returning home and enjoying Thanksgiving with my parents certainly kept me going. I am glad to take a break and see my parents and dog for the first time in over a month, and to sleep in my own bed for the first time in months!
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Google’s PaLM 2 is the latest iteration of their large-language AI model. This was specifically trained with diversity of data in mind, with texts languages other than English being a key focus. Moreover, it was trained with even more mathematical equations and programming papers in mind. This should hopefully result in a less-biased model that can better speak to non-Western cultures.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/palm-2-googles-secret-weapon-200421541.html