From Ballerina to AI Researcher: Part VII
What love is, our desire for love, and my seventh week as an OpenAI scholar
This week I want to talk to you about love. Several times last week I heard from a couple of friends of different ages and professions saying the same thing: “I just want to be loved!” It made me think — why do we need to be loved? Is this one of the basic needs we’ve developed through evolution?
Let’s just think about it a bit. Well, being loved can guarantee survival and acceptance in a social group — we are social animals who engage in relationships: building and maintaining those relationships takes up most of our intellectual and emotional effort and time.
Developing relationships is one of our core drives to ensure our survival and successful reproduction of ourselves, though this might sound too simplistic without the romance and emotional investment we associate with love.
Our need to love and be loved underpins that basic instinct. That’s why we will always crave love, recognition, acceptance, belonging, and so on.
But let’s look at this statement from another angle: if humans need to be loved, why do we experience so much discord and so many problems? Would it not be simpler if people just loved each other? As I see the situation, we expect to be loved, but how many of us are ready to freely give away love?
Why is it so challenging to shift your mindset from taking to giving love?
You might think, how can I give if I’ve never received anything and only recall negative, traumatizing situations from the past starting with my parents to boyfriends/girlfriends and others who were supposed to love me? But those people also shared similar traumas from their parents and other people. So we end up in a vicious circle where pain and trauma perpetuate from generation to generation.
The questions is: How can we stop this cycle that is carried out in every generation?
So far, I have only one answer: to be more conscious of yourself, try to work through your ‘own stuff’ and develop love and appreciation of yourself.
We should appreciate that we are extraordinary and nurture that fully, knowing that other people are also on a path towards comprehending the truth, and the only thing we all can do is consciously nurture the love inside ourselves. Over time we will gain the capacity to feel compassion for other people once we learn to love ourselves.
I’ve recently come up with a definition about what love is: to me, it’s a mutual healing. I’m healing you; you are healing me. We are maintaining that balance of giving and receiving and in that way create a synergy.
My Seventh Week as an An OpenAI Scholar
This week, I continued my study of deep learning by implementing word2vec embedding on a DBpedia dataset. There are tons of articles dedicated to the technique, so I won’t re-tell you the whole story, but if you are interested in learning more, here are some articles I found useful, and also Stanford’s CS224n class on NLP greatly helped me develop insights on the topic.
I’m sharing with you here the word2vec implementation I conducted last week.
Data pre-processing:
CBOW implementation:
Setting up to run the model in TensorFlow:
Running the model:
Implementing visualization:
Here is the visualization of what our model has learned (click on the photo to see the clusters).
Next goal — train an LSTM model and brainstorm on my final project.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to ping me. You can learn more about me at Twitter.
