Author: David Fox
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The Knowledge Trap
“A little learning is a dangerous thing” – Alexander Pope The Temptation You have a large body of unstructured text, and a problem to solve. Perhaps you need to summarize the text or identify topics. Perhaps you need to extract the essential information from the text or find authoritative answers to questions. The traditional approach…
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On Genies
What ChatGPT Started On November 30, 2022, OpenAI announced a research preview of its new conversational model, ChatGPT. Over the next 3.5 years, AI became a major topic of public interest, as illustrated by the chart below showing the relative frequency of queries for the term “AI” as reported by Google Trends. What the graph…
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When Automation Fails
The Story The case for automation was good – thousands of claims needing audits, overwhelming a team of claims experts, but where over 90% of audits found nothing wrong. The machine learning task was a straightforward supervised learning exercise: we had the results of 100,000 audits as labeled data; given those results and the underlying…
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Neutrino Hunting, part 2
In my previous post, I talked about neutrino detection, and about the Kaggle competition IceCube – Neutrinos in Deep Ice, which challenged participants to reconstruct the direction of neutrinos from data on Cherenkov radiation given off by charged particles created by neutrino interactions in the ice at the South Pole. As I mentioned, the contest…
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Neutrino Hunting, Part 1
IceCube Competition on Kaggle In early 2023, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory sponsored a competition on Kaggle called IceCube – Neutrinos in Deep Ice. As a former physics and astronomy student, and an on-and-off Kaggle participant, I was intrigued. Neutrino Physics and Astronomy Neutrinos are electrically neutral particles given off by beta decay, as well as…
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Still Hallucinating?
Can we avoid language model hallucinations with Retrieval-Augmented Generation? The News In a recent blog post, Teresa Kubacka describes some problematic responses to queries she made to a system designed to answer questions based on a large index of abstracts of research papers. Kubecka’s questions were about electromagnons, a phenomenon in condensed matter physics which…