AI Diary — #1 — The AI Community, Academic AI, Opinions, PyTorch Developer Conference, NLP Newsletter Status,…

Hi, it’s Elvis here 👋.

I have been busier than usual these days and I find it very challenging to keep up with the weekly NLP Newsletter. So I have decided to start a very informal series which I will be calling “AI Diary”. This will be released more regularly than the NLP newsletter (I am hoping every 2–3 days), and it aims at sharing of opinions, interviews, best practices, new research directions, cool resources, among other things related to artificial intelligence (AI).

The idea is simple:

In the AI diary I will be reporting about all the cool and important AI stuff and discussions I come across online and offline, similar to what I do in the NLP Newsletter but in a more informal way. By informal, it means that I will minimize jargon and increase the informality of how I curate and present AI-related content and news. This way it serves both AI experts and enthusiasts all over the world as well.

But the main reason why I want to start the AI Diary is that here I will get to freely and quickly share my opinions on subjects of personal interest like ethics and bias in artificial intelligence (AI). These topics are by nature provocative and controversial, so I feel that they may be more suitable in the format I am proposing through the AI Diary. In addition, I will also be sharing my machine learning and NLP ideas, academic and industry experiences, best practices, interviews, writing tips, coding tips, other useful resources (e.g., datasets and demonstrations), interesting papers, and so forth.

I will even be sharing with you my thoughts and discoveries on some of the more important questions and research topics revolving the field of AI. I will discuss things like AI democratization, AI governance, AI politics, advances in reinforcement learning, machine learning for healthcare, among others topics. That is why I would prefer the diary format so that I can just share my thoughts, like a pod-caster would do, and don’t have to worry about being too formal or too precise when I share the entries for the first time, since I can always go back and edit any mistakes or blunders. That’s the point of a diary: something you can look back later in life, laugh at and appreciate as well. The point being that we need to have open discussions about the pressing issues in AI and I believe this format is the most suitable, fastest and easiest way for me to reach out to the community without getting hooked into too much editing. When things are facts they will be highlighted as such and when things are my own opinions they will also be labeled as such.

You can also think of this diary as a sort of transcript where I get to share with you all the cool and exciting stuff I get to do on a daily basis as an editor, writer, researcher, teacher, and student of AI. I could easily start a YouTube vlog or share threads on Twitter like other great researchers and content creators do. To be honest, I prefer writing and curating things in a blog format because it can be properly documented and archived, and that is why I will start things small and just focus on this format for now… and we will see where things head in the future. Plus this format will allow me to move and write quicker — we need this in such a fast-paced field like AI.

I don’t really have a standard format for the AI Diary but I am hoping that I can get feedback from you in the future on how to improve it. I also don’t have a timeline for the AI Diary so that’s also subject to change in the future. The entries of the AI Diary will live in the “OPINION” section of the dair.ai publication page for now. But don’t worry, it is not just about my opinions, it is also about your opinions and the opinions of other great students/teachers of AI. I will actually be sharing a lot of fun and useful resources for you as well so you definitely don’t want to miss out on that.

Thanks for reading the first entry of the AI Diary, and I hope to keep sharing more awesome experiences with this amazing and inspiring AI community. I am excited for the journey ahead!

By the way, the next entry for this diary will more than likely be about my participation in the first PyTorch Developer conference, where I will presenting (this upcoming week) a cool NLP project I have been working on. I will be in San Francisco in a few days and I am super excited to engage with PyTorch developers and researchers from all over the world so that I can later share the important parts of the conference with you.

One last thing: any sort of engagement (like follows, shares, 👏👏, and feedback) will make a huge difference for the future and sustainability of the dair.ai publication. So I will appreciate any of that in advance.

Cheers,

Elvis