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finin

870 karma · joined February 13, 2009

http://umbc.edu/~finin
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finin··on Enigma: GPT-2 trained on 10K Nature Papers: Can you spot the difference?
We've done recent work on using a transformer to generate fake cyber threat intelligence (CTI) and found that a set of cybersecurity experts could not reliably distinguish the fake CTI examples from real ones.

Priyanka Ranade, Aritran Piplai, Sudip Mittal, Anupam Joshi, and Tim Finin, Generating Fake Cyber Threat Intelligence Using Transformer-Based Models, Int. Joint Conf. on Neural Networks, IEEE, 2021. https://ebiq.org/p/969

finin··on What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?
cf. Byron the Bulb in Thomas Pynchon's book Gravity's Rainbow http://lukedanger.blogspot.com/2009/02/story-of-byron-bulb.h...
finin··on Why the world has so many Guineas
Like the one that Beatrix Potter imagined?https://imgur.com/a/tjktk
finin··on Smaller Code, Better Code
I've found the when teaching, I sometimes work on an example program too much, producing what I think is elegant and compact code, but that the students find hard to understand. I suspect that the same may be true when I am collaborating with others on a program. There can be value in writing code in a straightforward, easy to comprehend style.
finin··on Artificial Intelligence Lecture Videos
I took his AI class, 6.258, 45 years ago, in the Spring of 1971. It was probably the first or second time he taught it. He's a great teacher and inspired me to focus on AI. One aspect I remember was that our exams were all take home exams that we had several days to work on. They were great learning experiences.
finin··on AP Style alert: Don’t capitalize internet and web any more
wait, what?!?
finin··on Marvin Minsky dies at 88
Trenchard More of Dartmouth was also a participant and is, as far as I know, still alive
finin··on Symbolic expressions can be automatically differentiated too
THE LISP DIFFERENTIATION DEMONSTRATION PROGRAM, K. Kaling, Artificial Intelligence Project, RLE and MIT Computation Center, AI Memo 10, 1959.

https://archive.org/stream/bitsavers_mitaiaimAI_878286/AIM-0...

ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-010.pdf

finin··on Google Knowledge Graph Search API
The current service returns a ranked (with scores) list of up to 200 entities. You can specify a type in your query or filter the results to select types of interest (e.g., Person, Place or Organization). The top result for 'apple' is the Corporation 'Apple, Inc.' and #2 is Thing 'apple' (a fruit). The score is probably based on a graph popularity metric (e.g., number of inlinks) possibly augmented by pagerank. Interestingly, the knowledge graph ID is the same as the Freebase MID and the results for the KG search for 'apple' appear to be a subset of a similar Freebase search and also in the same order.
finin··on Images to Text – Toronto Deep Learning Demos
http://www.skunkieacres.com/images/rabbit_box.jpg

A picture of a rabbit in a wooden box => "a cat looking into a bin full of apples"

Mistaking a rabbit for a cat is not too bad. A bin is like a box, I suppose. I'm not sure where the apples came from.

finin··on Programming Language Network: A Graph of Programming Languages
There are many nodes and edges missing. It would be great if the underlying graph was on a wiki. Maybe this content could be added to Wikidata (http://www.wikidata.org/).
finin··on IBM Watson API
Factoid is a word coined by Norman Mailer for "an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid
finin··on 3-character filename extensions
I recall DEC's TOPS10 operating system for the PDP-10 using three character extensions. It was introduced in 1970. I think the older PDP6 and ITS systems at MIT-AI had a different scheme for extensions. On ITS I recall that a file had a name and a version number and you could get the most recent version of the file named FOO by referring to it as "FOO >". Every time you edited FOO, you created a new version whose extension was incremented by one. Periodically you issued a command that deleted all of the old versions.

IIRC I first saw the three-letter extension scheme when I started using TOPS10 in 1974.

finin··on Wikipedia: We’ve won. Now what?
Wikidata, a free knowledge base that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike: http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
finin··on First Recorded Usage of "Hacker" (2008)
You can see a scanned version of The Tech from November 20, 1963 in the paper's archives at http://tech.mit.edu/V83/PDF/V83-N24.pdf.
finin··on A Lisp interpeter in a thousand lines of Bash
interpeter => interpreter
finin··on George Orwell: Politics and the English Language (1946)
This post on Language Log identifies ways in which Orwell violated his own rules in the essay.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992

finin··on Free Unix (1983)
Yes, the lisp machnes used CRTs, but they did not look like the classic terminals from that era. IIRC they had much higher resolution and were black and white.
finin··on Free Unix (1983)
I'd guess that he composed that message on a Lisp Machine and not a CRT, e.g., something like this: http://s7.computerhistory.org/is/image/CHM/500004885-03-01?
finin··on The Sad Death Of An Adjunct Professor Sparks A Labor Debate
It's ironic that the full name of the university is "Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit".
finin··on Ask HN: What literature do you read?
Wool by Hugh Howey
finin··on Computing: Secure the Internet
I believe that this short piece appears in the 'Comments' section in the print edition of Nature.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7424/pdf/491325a....

finin··on Ways to Learn to Program Online
This makes me think of Peter Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years". http://norvig.com/21-days.html
finin··on BlaBlaMeter detects how much bullshit is in your text
I tried this on Paul Ryan's RNC address from last night, Barack Obama's innaugarel address, and a recent IEEE TKDE journal article. It gave bullshit measures of 0.15, 0.13 and 0.25, respectively. :-(
finin··on What Really Makes Us Fat?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070707/quotes?qt=qt0231370 When Sleeper was released 39 years ago, I thought this was a cheap joke. But every few years I think about it when there is yet another reversal in what we think we know about nutrition.
finin··on WakeMate Update
I never got my promised replacement power adapter either. I thought it was just me. :-(
finin··on Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?
prolog ∈ Other
finin··on Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?
Prolog ∈ Other
finin··on Are Apple 'stealing' Open Street Map data?
"Corporations are people, my friend."
finin··on Difference Between URL and URI
For completeness, IRIs should be mentioned as well.
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