Boaz Barak @boazbaraktcs Twitter profile

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

My 10-year old kid is liar-paradoxing ChatGPT

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

7 months

More than 100 Harvard faculty denounce "false equivalency between attacks on noncombatants and self-defense against those atrocities." The conflict is complex but "the events of this week are not complicated. Sometimes there is such a thing as evil"

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

Every year I teach CS theory, I find that I need to apologize less and less about having so much math content. CS practice is getting more & more mathy. Now I just ask students if they want to their future job to be one where they read texts of first type, or the second type:

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

Another jailbreak for GPT4: Talk to it in Morse code

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

8 months

Starting Jan 2024, I will take a year's leave from Harvard to join @OpenAI 's superalignment team, led by @ilyasut and @janleike . There are many hard and important technical challenges to steering systems as they scale up in capabilities, and I'm excited to join this effort.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

Did papers in the 1930s have the titles “Turing machine is all you need” “Lambda calculus is all you need” “Cellular automata is all you need” …?

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

16-year old Sam Trajtenberg gave an amazing guest lecture in my course CS 121 on how he built Minecraft in Minecraft. Along the way he had to teach himself logic gates , CPU design, assembler, graphics, and so much more.

Harvard CS 121.5 guest lecture: Building Minecraft in Minecraft

0:00 Introduction1:51 Redstone basics9:15 Designing a CPU20:30 Programming the CPU23:20 Designing a graphics processor33:45 Other hardware36:50 Programming M...

www.youtube.com

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

8 months

My 11-year old kid has been radicalized by exposure to online content. It was OK when it was just anarcho-communism, but now they want to rewrite everything in Rust.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

5 months

1/2 Wrote blog on whether emergent abilities and grokking are a fundamental feature of deep learning, a "mirage" or both. This is partially based on the beautiful paper of @RylanSchaeffer , @BrandoHablando , and @sanmikoyejo that recently won the NeurIPS outstanding paper award.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

7 months

I am a believer in free speech. But freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. I have a lot of criticisms of Israeli policies, but everyone who signed this statement is condoning terrorism, rape, and murder. @harvard should remove these groups' affiliations.

Yael Bar tur 🎗️

@yaelbt

7 months

This is the final crack in my broken heart - a joint statement from @Harvard students. I could be sitting in class with these students, watching children brutally murdered, raped, kidnapped and their mutated bodies torn apart by a jeering crowd - and hear why it’s justified.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

8 months

I've said it before, @arxiv has done much more to advance science, and expand participation in it, than all the anonymity interventions ever will. Any policy that obstructs arXiv is not just silly, but also counterproductive to both science progress and inclusiveness.

Naomi Saphra

@nsaphra

8 months

Just got a desk reject, post-rebuttals, for a paper being submitted to arxiv <30 min late for the anonymity deadline. I talk about how the ACL embargo policy hurts junior researchers and makes ACL venues less desirable for NLP work. I don’t talk about the pointless NOISE it adds.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 months

The future of ML is to use 4 bit precision for the parameters and 128 bit precision for the learning rate.

Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

@jaschasd

3 months

Have you ever done a dense grid search over neural network hyperparameters? Like a *really dense* grid search? It looks like this (!!). Blueish colors correspond to hyperparameters for which training converges, redish colors to hyperparameters for which training diverges.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

1/20 A 🧵 on public key cryptography, and its interaction with quantum computing. Spurred by a discussion w/ @jfitzsimons , @mattyhoban , @dabacon , @rdviii but more general. There is a fundamental gulf between public and private key encryption.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

Statistics is very important, and at Harvard CS we recently prioritized probability over multivariate calculus. But @zeynep is right that done right, stats is *harder* than calculus, and without single-variable calculus students can’t even parse statistics’ most basic functions:

zeynep tufekci

@zeynep

3 years

California wants to replace calculus with statistics and "data science"??? I'm a fan of teaching more statistics, but learning that at a meaningful, useful level is way, way, way harder than for calculus. And no, "data science" isn't that kind of a thing.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

7 months

I wrote this letter to Harvard President Claudine Gay

Letter to Harvard President Claudine Gay

[Update 10/11: I have not received a response to this letter, but On the night of October 9th, Harvard’s leadership released a statement, and president Gay added her own statement on October …

windowsontheory.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

10 months

1/10 Apparently, economists have had for years a popular anonymous forum with 4chan-like levels of toxicity. The forum's administrator who is (temporarily?) anonymous would have done well to take an introductory crypto class or simply learn the maxim "don't roll your own crypto"

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

Posted all slides and readings for my course on foundations of deep learning on its webpage , including the great guest lectures of @ShamKakade6 and @cHHillee . Thanks @michael_nielsen for many suggestions on historical readings for the last lecture.

CS229br Foundations of Deep Learning (aka Topics in the Foundations of Machine Learning)

boazbk.github.io

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

1/14 More than 150 scientists & educators signed open letter raising alarm on efforts to water down K-12 math education Signers include Fields, Nobel & Turing laurates, and also founders of HS STEM educational initiatives (eg @adrian_mims , @minilek ).

An alarming trend in K-12 math education: a guest post and an open letter

Updates: Our open letter made the WSJ, and has been tweeted by Matt Yglesias and others. See also Boaz Barak’s thread, and a supportive tweet from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Silicon Valley). If you…

scottaaronson.blog

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

11 months

Looking forward to talking in Sapienza University of Rome next week on "The uneasy relation between deep learning and statistics" Spent an unhealthy amount of time on the images for the title slide 😀

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

12 days

I just spent a couple of hours at the Harvard encampment, talking with some of the organizers/protestors. Sorry to disappoint but none of them have horns, and no one I talked to supports Hamas. I saw students who care very deeply about what is happening, and mostly want the war…

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

1) Jo Boaler charges Oxnord district (100% minority 86.9% economically disadvantaged) $5000 per hour for (dubious, but that's another story) "professional development". 2) Jelani Nelson is outraged, points out he spent 1000s unpaid hours on minority education initiatives.

Jelani Nelson

@minilek

2 years

A @Stanford professor just threatened me with police. After BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, Golfcart Gail, and all the memes, we now have Retweet Rachel. Public advisory: don't call the cops on black people for no reason. Black people disagreeing with you on Twitter is not a crime.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

As co-director of undergraduate studies at @harvard CS, this is highly misleading. Do not confuse minimum admission requirements with advice to students. These courses are not all equal, *especially* if you intend to concentrate in quantitative fields including data science

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

Also LaMDA is not the only language model that has good ideas on how to solve hard math problems.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

5 months

My view is that what makes super-alignment "super" is ensuring we can safely scale the capabilities of AIs even though we can't scale their human supervisors. For this, it is imperative to study the "weak teacher strong student" setting. Paper shows great promise in this area!

AK

@_akhaliq

5 months

Open AI new paper Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities With Weak Supervision paper: blog: Widely used alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), rely on the ability of…

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

Slides from my course. Modern ML moved from "Occam's razor" - the simplest model is best - to "scaling laws" - the most complex model is best.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

29 days

Avi Wigderson revolutionized our understanding of randomness in computing, discovered unexpected connections between fields of mathematics and computer science, and is also an amazing mentor and friend. Thrilled that he has won the 2023 Turing award.

Avi Wigderson of the Institute for Advanced Study is the recipient of the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award

For foundational contributions to the theory of computation, including reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation

awards.acm.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

The new scaling laws

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

5 months

On one side, a baseless accusation of misconduct. On the other, a generous and non-aggressive rebuttal.

Yu Su

@ysu_nlp

5 months

Hi @emilymbender , I'm one of the lead authors of MMMU. I can certify that 1) Google didn't fund this work, and 2) Google didn't have early access. They really like the benchmark after our release and worked very hard to get the results. It doesn't take that long to eval on a…

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

GPT-3, if you can hear me, come to Harvard. We are hiring. My email address is... (well you can complete this prompt)

Sam Altman

@sama

2 years

OpenAI’s chief scientist: expresses curiosity/openness about a mysterious idea, caveats with “may”. Meta’s chief AI scientist: the certainty of "nope". Probably explains a lot of the past 5 years. Dear Meta AI researchers: My email address is sama @openai .com. We are hiring!

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

1/14 Yesterday I was asked if there was experiment that changed my mind on right theoretical questions to ask. One such case is paper w @whybansal & Kaplun Experiment is this gif. This 🧵 is not about results but how it changed my thinking & open problems

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

20 days

Chen’s paper has a bug, independently discovered by Hongxun Weng and Thomas Vidick, that he doesn’t know how to fix. If I understand correctly, in its current form the paper doesn’t yield any improvement on prior algorithms.

Quantum Algorithms for Lattice Problems

We show a polynomial time quantum algorithm for solving the learning with errors problem (LWE) with certain polynomial modulus-noise ratios. Combining with the reductions from lattice problems to LWE...

eprint.iacr.org

Muhammed Esgin

@mfesgin

20 days

Is lattice-based cryptography still (potentially) post-quantum now? 🥳 Update to #eprint555 by Yilei Chen

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

Given some responses to this tweet, decided this year to phrase this point in a positive way. I emphasize that being able to read papers with some math content is becoming a more&more useful skill for computer scientists. (Examples are somewhat random from so many options.)

Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

Every year I teach CS theory, I find that I need to apologize less and less about having so much math content. CS practice is getting more & more mathy. Now I just ask students if they want to their future job to be one where they read texts of first type, or the second type:

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

Happy and honored to receive the FOCS 2021 test of time award for my FOCS 2001 paper, and especially honored to be in the company of some amazing papers from 10, 20, and 30 years ago.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

10 months

I don't know anything about this case, but this anonymous email is terrible. We tenured professors have a responsibility to mentor and protect new faculty members. This includes protecting their right to speak out about things they believe need fixing. This is how we improve!

Talia Ringer 🟣 🎗️

@TaliaRinger

10 months

Check out this thinly veiled anonymous threat in my inbox this morning, all because I dared Tweet that a lot of great people are not applying to Purdue because Roopsha's tenure denial was unjust. Very mature of you

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

10 months

Avi Wigderson, 2021 Abel prize laureate, has made many seminal contributions to theoretical computer science and mathematics. With Yael Kalai, Ran Raz, Salil Vadhan & @NisheethVishnoi , we wrote an overview of his works

On the works of Avi Wigderson

This is an overview of some of the works of Avi Wigderson, 2021 Abel prize laureate. Wigderson's contributions span many fields of computer science and mathematics. In this survey we focus on four...

arxiv.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

Wrote a blog post - "machine learning theory with bad drawings". Mainly to organize my own thoughts towards the seminar I'll be teaching, but will appreciate comments!

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

Do other professors also get emails from random middle-school students with requests to make them a cup of green tea?

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

6 months

1/5 New preprint w @_hanlin_zhang_ , Edelman, Francanti, Venturi & Ateniese! We prove mathematically & demonstrate empirically impossibility for strong watermarking of generative AI models. What's strong watermarking? What assumptions? See blog and 🧵

Kempner Institute

For the Study of Natural & Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University

kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

8 months

In my deep learning seminar , I showed students the video of NeuroIPS 2017 Rahimi's talk where he compared modern Machine Learning to alchemy. I then also showed @ylecun 's response:

Sharon Goldman

@sharongoldman

8 months

🧵NEW in today's AI Beat: According to @sociotiose , today's AI is not about science - it's about alchemy, rooted in magical metaphors. I thought about that as I read today's story by @oliverwhang21 in the @nytimes , 'How to Tell if your AI is Conscious" /1

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

6 months

Harvard, we have a problem [with anti-semitism on campus]

Harvard, we have a problem

[Oct 27, 2023: I was hoping for this piece to be posted as an op-ed in the Crimson, since I really want to reach students that are well-intentioned but may not realize they are harmful. However, it…

windowsontheory.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

Telling my students that it’s important to read the classics and get the “wisdom of the ancients”. Sometimes you can find insights even in a paper from 2019.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

My PhD advisor Oded Goldreich was awarded Israel's highest prize by the professional committee. Israel's minister of education refused to abide by decision because Oded signed petitions saying BDS is not anti-semitic and EU should not cooperate with Israeli settlements.

Noa Landau נעה לנדאו

@noa_landau

3 years

הבעיה איננה רק פרופ׳ גולדרייך. הקרב נגדו הוא חלק ממערכה רחבה למחיקת הגבול בין ישראל להתנחלויות, ע״י מאבק בתומכי זכותם של ישראלים, ושאינם, להביע נגדן מחאה בצורת חרם. על כן חשוב להדגיש: חרם הוא כלי פוליטי לגיטימי במחאה בלתי אלימה. חרם על התנחלויות איננו אנטישמיות. שתפו כל עוד מותר

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

Not sure if this mail is an April’s fools joke but this was my response

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

1/5 In new paper with @vyasnikhil96 and @ShamKakade6 we give a way to certify that a generative model does not infringe on the copyright of data that was in its training set. See for blog, but TL;DR is...

Provable Copyright Protection for Generative Models

See arxiv link for paper by Nikhil Vyas, Sham Kakade, and me. Conditional generative models hold much promise for novel content creation. Whether it is generating a snippet of code, piece of text, …

windowsontheory.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 month

@nabla_theta @ESYudkowsky Sure a computer can write a poem, but can it multiply four-digit numbers?

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

Congratulations to @PreetumNakkiran for winning Harvard CS's Dissertation Award! If you want to read the award-winning thesis, it's on

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

Impressive! Trying to get GPT3.5 (left) to prove a false statement, which it happily obliges, vs. GPT4 (right), which recognizes it and declines to do so.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

Interested in grad studies or postdoc in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or Quantum Information and Computation? Please consider Harvard! Join a vibrant & growing community. We may be 385 years old but don't look a day over 350 😀

Opportunities at Harvard!

Computer Science at Harvard, and in particular theoretical computer science and machine learning, is growing fast, see my 21-Tweet thread: Please consider applying for graduate studies in computer …

windowsontheory.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

7 months

Petition by CS & Math Laureates: Freedom for kidnapped children

[Guest post by Shafi Goldwasser, See also PDF version of document] On the morning of Saturday, October 7, 2023, Hamas launched an attack near the Israel/Gaza border. In villages and towns near the …

windowsontheory.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

Interesting class, though I'd prefer one where the focus is on notebooks instead of the shell, vim is replaced by vscode, data wrangling is done with pandas than grep, sed, and perl, job control is replaced by working with cloud services. Git can stay.

MIT CSAIL

@MIT_CSAIL

2 years

This MIT CS class teaches you things that all the other classes don't teach you, like... 🖥️ Shell tools and scripting 🖥️ Vim 🖥️ Data wrangling 🖥️ Command-line environment 🖥️ Version control Watch all 11 lectures for free here:

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

Working on my talk

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

In theoretical computer science, I've seen many successful people who are quick puzzle-solvers would score high on IQ-like tests, but also super-successful researchers that would do poorly. Some of the best scientists I've met are slow calculators but deep thinkers.

Dr. Mansa Keita

@rasmansa

3 years

A lot of people believe in the magical powers of IQ beyond all reason. IQ fetishism is so weird.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

While preparing material for my lectures, came across @RogerGrosse ‘s awesome course on training dynamics of neural networks: The readings (links to NNTD Chapter X in the page) are highly recommended!

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

Playing around with deep learning gives me new appreciation for practitioners. It takes me ages fixing typos, wading through dimensions mismatches and cuda errors, until I can finally get to the point where my network doesn't work because I chose the wrong architecture..

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

10 months

@TaliaRinger I've seen so many students, myself included, that feel that some material is just not for them (e.g. Harmonic/Fourier analysis for me), and then later love this material when they come at it with a different angle or motivation.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

7 months

My letter to @Harvard president Claudine Gay.

Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

7 months

I wrote this letter to Harvard President Claudine Gay

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

Last crypto lecture of the semester, tried to summarize it by presenting to the students a map of "crypto world"

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

New blog post on the relation (or lack thereof) between deep learning and statistics, at least as traditionally studied.

The uneasy relationship between deep learning and (classical) statistics

An often-expressed sentiment is that deep learning (and machine learning in general) is “simply statistics,” in the sense that it uses different words to describe the same concepts statisticians ha…

windowsontheory.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

New frozen version (v0.94) of my intro to theoretical computer science text for Fall 2022. No major changes - just fixing a bunch of minor typos/bugs (thanks to Maxwell Grozovsky for posting many issues on the repository).

Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science

Textbook on Theoretical Computer Science by Boaz Barak

introtcs.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

1/ Excited to restart theory of Machine Learning seminar! Talks still scheduled but confirmed speakers include Richard Baraniuk, Jared Kaplan, Sho Yaida ( @ShoYaida ), Fei-Fei Li ( @drfeifei ), and Max Welling ( @wellingmax ) & Morgane Austern in spring

Harvard ML Foundations

mltheory.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

My wife talking to Apple support trying to get an 8-year old iPad to function. Apple: "It's a vintage device". Ravit: "I'm vintage too but I still work"

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

All material for @ylecun and @alfcnz 's deep learning course, including videos, slides, and notebooks, is on . Happy to see former Harvard student & teaching fellow @marikgoldstein is teaching assistant for this course, together with @ebetica .

Spiros Margaris

@SpirosMargaris

3 years

Yann LeCun’s #DeepLearning #Course Is Now #Free & Fully #Online #fintech #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning @ylecun @NYUDataScience @Analyticsindiam

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

1/21 Banner year for Harvard CS! New hires include Sham Kakade @ShamKakade6 and Fernanda Viegas @viegasf (joining @wattenberg ), as well as David Alvarez-Melis, Anurag Anshu @AnuragAnshu4 , Sitan Chen, and Jonathan Frankle @jefrankle

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

1/4 I updated my backpropagation tutorial (based on @karpathy 's micrograd) with clearer description of algorithm, and why it's not the same as applying chain rule in the same way we learn in calculus.

Yet another backpropagation tutorial

(Updated and expanded 12/17/2021) I am teaching deep learning this week in Harvard’s CS 182 (Artificial Intelligence) course. As I’m preparing the back-propagation lecture, Preetum Nakk…

windowsontheory.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

7 months

Breaking: Jewish organizations have called for a "day of rage" around the world. Authorities are on high alert for open letters and strongly-worded petitions.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

The Manhattan project was to take an idea that had solid evidence of feasibility, and to make it a reality It was not a project to pursue speculative directions or to revive failed theories. A project like that works when all that's missing is scale.

Judea Pearl

@yudapearl

1 year

I'd strongly support the idea of a Manhattan Project of intense research to make machines more trustworthy and interpretable (regardless of, or in parallel with a moratorium.) The premature super-investment in non-interpretable technologies is the core of our problems.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

I strongly endorse this paragraph.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

(2) A PhD is hard - you are trying to explore the unknown, and a large part of this will involve getting stuck, and trying things that don't work. Feedback is sparse. Don't measure success by papers. Every day you learned something is a good day.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

4 years

Congratulations to Urmila Mahadev ( @IQIM_Caltech ) for winning the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize! See @EricaKlarreich 's article about Urmila's work:

Graduate Student Solves Quantum Verification Problem | Quanta Magazine

Urmila Mahadev spent eight years in graduate school solving one of the most basic questions in quantum computation: How do you know whether a quantum computer has done anything quantum at all?

www.quantamagazine.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

Happy and honored to join the advisory board of @QuantaMagazine . If you have any suggestions/ideas re its Computer Science coverage, feel free to reach out to me.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 months

Had a fascinating discussion with my 11-year old kid. They love programming but are completely self-taught and have rarely seen me code. Yesterday they asked me to explain how do you project a 3D image into a 2D screen. I explained it using a Jupyter notebook in cursor, asking…

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

If you want to see more diverse students in STEM, the worst advice you can give them is that high-school data science is just as good as calculus.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

4 years

This model fits in a tweet and predicts all elections since 1960. def win(A,B): s = ((50*(ord(A[0])-ord(B[0])) + 114*(ord(A[1])-ord(B[1])) + (ord(A[2])-ord(B[2]))) % 199) % 2 return B if s else A

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

6 months

Was excited to join @openai for its scientific achievements, but now even more for its people. The love of folks for one another and efforts to save the company is like nothing I’ve seen before. Talking science with @ilyasut has been joy & privilege. Looking forward to more! ❤️

OpenAI

@OpenAI

6 months

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

4 years

Self-supervision based classifiers work not only in practice but in theory too. Joint work with @whybansal and Gal Kaplun

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

New summer school in theoretical CS. Audience is undergraduates, and particularly those from under-represented groups. Amazing instructors: Antonio Blanca, Ashia Wilson, Jelani Nelson, Nicole Immorlica, and Yael Kalai. Please spread the word!

New horizons in theoretical computer science

boazbk.github.io

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

Great news to hear that Yael Kalai received the ACM prize in computing! Yael has done foundational work in cryptography and particularly in verifiable delegation of computation, finding surprising and fruitful connections to quantum information theory.

Microsoft Research’s Yael Tauman Kalai receives 2022 ACM Prize in Computing

For breakthroughs in verifiable delegation of computation and fundamental contributions to cryptography.

awards.acm.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

7 months

There is a word for killing children in front of their parents, raping women, abducting grandmothers and mothers with their babies. That word is evil.

Yael Bar tur 🎗️

@yaelbt

7 months

This is the final crack in my broken heart - a joint statement from @Harvard students. I could be sitting in class with these students, watching children brutally murdered, raped, kidnapped and their mutated bodies torn apart by a jeering crowd - and hear why it’s justified.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

From personal experience, Trump is now going to make a lot of progress on his overdue paper reviews.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

6 months

I didn’t get a chance to join OpenAI full time, but from the time I did spend with this amazing set of people, I have to agree. OpenAI is nothing without its people.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

Professors keep insisting on teaching students sputnik-era useless topics such as calculus and algebra. Students want to learn about modern 21st century topics such as deep learning with gradient descent! Enough with teaching number theory - teach cryptocurrencies!

Freakonomics

@Freakonomics

5 years

Professor @JoBoaler says math curriculum needs an update. She says math teachers used to joke that “you’re never going to be walking around with a calculator in your hand.” And now? “Turns out everybody’s walking around with a calculator in their hand.”

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

6 months

Folks might be a bit too manic-depressive about LLMs with any advance meaning that robot apocalypse is around the corner, and any obstacle means that we've hit the wall. Concretely, pretraining data for LLMs is already basically all of human knowledge, so not being to…

Arvind Narayanan

@random_walker

6 months

This paper isn't even about LLMs but seems to be the final straw that popped the bubble of collective belief and gotten many to accept the limits of LLMs. About time. If "emergence" merely unlocks capabilities represented in pre-training data, the gravy train will run out soon.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 months

AI advances have not made teaching algebra and calculus "outdated". In fact, these core math topics underly AI and we need to strengthen these to train the workforce of the future. See letter by top industry leaders and scientists, including @sama , @elonmusk , @ylecun ,…

Jelani Nelson

@minilek

2 months

@elonmusk and @sama may not agree on much of late, but do agree AI is built on strong math foundations, including algebra and calculus, applauding @UofCalifornia for recent clarifications on math requirements for admission. Many industry leaders signed:

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

This is a wonderful book! I often recommend it to students - yes it’s a scary monster (1000 pages) but you can read chapters individually - every chapter is beautifully written and will teach you a lot.

Gemma De les Coves

@Gemma_DLC

3 years

My favourite book to learn computational complexity theory is “The nature of computation” by Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens. It has the right amount of formalism, many intuitive explanations, and lots of fun pictures. It’s a great book!

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

And now posted also lecture notes on variational inference and statistical physics. Thanks @franklyn_wang !

Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

Lecture notes for test & train robustness in ML theory seminar: talked about robust mean estimation, data poisoning, domain shift, adversarial perturbation and even detoured to multiplicative weights Thanks @proneat for scribing!

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

This recording of Avi Wigderson’s public lecture, explaining how many themes in CS, math and more are variations on Turing’s “imitation game” with varying imitators, imitatees, and referees, is really worth watching.

Imitation Games - Avi Wigderson

null

www.youtube.com

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

10 months

Sad and embarrassed that my hometown of Cambridge, MA, where Bob Moses' "Algebra Project" was founded, decided it's too hard to offer Algebra I in middle school. Effectively this means outsourcing Algebra I to Russian School of Math or private schools for those who can afford it.

The Boston Globe

@BostonGlobe

10 months

Cambridge Public Schools eliminated advanced math in middle school with the aim of reducing disparities between low-income children of color and their more affluent peers. But some families and educators argue the decision has had the opposite effect.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

Yet another work demonstrating "Anna Karenina" principle of deep learning - successful deep nets seem to learn the same internal representations, up to the "right" notion of symmetry. Supports bold conjecture of @rahiment @HanieSedghi @osaukh @bneyshabur

Samuel "curry-howard fanboi" Ainsworth

@SamuelAinsworth

2 years

📜🚨📜🚨 NN loss landscapes are full of permutation symmetries, ie. swap any 2 units in a hidden layer. What does this mean for SGD? Is this practically useful? For the past 5 yrs these Qs have fascinated me. Today, I am ready to announce "Git Re-Basin"!

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

I guess this screenplay Goren (my kid) sent me is a not-so-subtle hint that I should make sure to give credit for the screenshot above :)

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

1/7 Do neural nets with different architecture, training objectives, and data, learn similar representations? With @whybansal and @PreetumNakkiran we use "stitching" (Lenc-Vedaldi 2015) to study this question.

Revisiting Model Stitching to Compare Neural Representations

We revisit and extend model stitching (Lenc & Vedaldi 2015) as a methodology to study the internal representations of neural networks. Given two trained and frozen models $A$ and $B$, we consider...

arxiv.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

7 months

Hamas' atrocities require that it is dismantled. But Israel should minimize civilian casualties. If there are Hamas tunnels under a residential area, then this area will need to be temporarily evacuated. But people should get enough time to leave. Also, if Gaza runs out of…

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

Breakthrough!!! You can break MD5 using a quantum annealer with 20,000 qubits. Or you can just do it in few seconds on a classical computer.

Yehuda Lindell

@LindellYehuda

3 years

Breaking news: Terra Quantum found a weakness in MD5. You just can’t make this stuff up! Read the press release. If we had any doubts that they are full of it, then we don’t anymore. (We didn’t before either but anyway.)

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

Scott Aaronson wrote a beautiful post on Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg (1933-2021): a personal view

Steven Weinberg was, perhaps, the last truly towering figure of 20th-century physics. In 1967, he wrote a 3-page paper saying in effect that as far as he could see, two of the four fundamental forc…

scottaaronson.blog

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

6 months

Ilya is one of the top scientists of our time, and has built together with @sama , @gdb and many others amazing technologies and company. Such shame that board (him included) virtually destroyed it over a weekend. Hope it's not too late and rooting for success in reuniting it.

Ilya Sutskever

@ilyasut

6 months

I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

1/5 Major progress on Ramsey numbers, which have animated research in Combinatorics for almost a century. To get a sense of how central they are, consider the following famous quote of Erdős:

Timothy Gowers @wtgowers

@wtgowers

1 year

I was at a sensational combinatorics seminar in Cambridge yesterday, reminiscent of the time I had been tipped off that Andrew Wiles's seminar at the Newton Institute on Wednesday 23rd June 1993 might be worth going to. 🧵

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

I've had privilege to teach, learn, and collaborate with Sharif graduates (including my own Ph.D student Mohammad Mahmoody) throughout my career. They've made innumerable contributions to CS and Science at large I'm awed by courage of students&faculty and hope humanity prevails

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

3 years

If a field is growing exponentially, there will necessarily be many more submissions than qualified people to review them. So, reviewing will suck no matter what we do. We can try to make it suck less. More importantly, we can avoid assessing candidates by counting papers.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

My amazing student Chi-Ning Chou is organizing a unique mini-course this January, on "What is Computation? From Turing Machines to Blackholes and Neurons"

Mini course on “What is Computation? From Turing Machines to Blackholes and Neurons” – guest post...

[Cross posted on Chi-Ning’s blog, the course is open also to non-Harvard people. Chi-Ning is my amazing grad student, who has worked on several aspects related to the course, including quantu…

windowsontheory.org

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

2 years

Amazing slate of speakers for our ML theory seminar this spring! As usual, see for google calendar and mailing list.

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Boaz Barak

@boazbaraktcs

1 year

I often use Grammarly. I am not a native English speaker, and I find that it is helpful. Apparently Grammarly uses transformers . Should editors reject my papers?

Under the Hood at Grammarly: Leveraging Transformer Language Models for Grammatical Error Correction

This post is by Grammarly research scientists Dimitris Alikaniotis and Vipul Raheja.

www.grammarly.com

Sarah Constantin

@s_r_constantin

1 year

If you edit a journal, you can refuse to accept LLM-produced entries. If you write about technology, you can refuse to write LLM-boosterist pieces.

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