This Week I Learned - Week #1 2024

This Week I Learned - 

* A permalink or permanent link is the address (URL) of a web page that is not expected to change throughout the lifetime of a page.  Permalinks are often rendered simply, that is, as clean URLs, to be easier to type and remember. Sometimes URL shortening is used to create them.

* According to Jason Mayes' newsletter, there has been an exponential growth in the Web AI community (I feel like a proud father seeing his child grow up) due to a significantly huge push from folk even beyond Google's core Web ML teams (TensorFlow.js, Chrome, MediaPipe Web) who are really embracing Web AI thanks to commitment from companies like Hugging Face (Transformers.js and HuggingFace.js) and Microsoft (Onnx runtime web) investing in the web space giving Pytorch users a way forward to embrace client side web deployments in the browser too. He predicts that in 2024 AI in JavaScript, client side in the browser, using technologies like WebGPU, WebAssembly, WebGL et al, will continue to rise exponentially.

Photo of Web AI family at Google shared by Jason Mayes

* WebLLM is a modular, customizable javascript package that directly brings language model chats directly onto web browsers with hardware acceleration. Everything runs inside the browser with no server support and is accelerated with WebGPU.

* WebSHAP is the first JavaScript library that brings Kernel SHAP to the Web environment—enabling developers and end-users to explain any ML models anywhere. Kernel SHAP is the state-of-the-art model-agnostic explainability technique to help ML practitioners and end-users understand how ML models make predictions. For any given ML model, Kernel SHAP computes the contribution score of each input feature. Developed with modern web technologies, such as WebGL and Web Workers, WebSHAP empowers users to run Kernel SHAP directly in their browsers, providing a ubiquitous, private, and interactive explanation experience.

* Amazon Q, a new generative artificial intelligence- (AI)-powered assistant for business use comes with 2 Plans - Business & Builder. You can choose among 40+ built-in connectors for popular data sources and enterprise systems, including Amazon S3, Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Slack.

* Tools to build custom Al assistants - Microsoft Copilot Studio, Google Generative Al Studio, Amazon Bedrock

* A response (by Tom Mosher) to a question on Predicting stock or foreign exchange prices with ML models on the DeepLearning.ai AI Projects forum:

A few observations:

• 60% accuracy is barely better than flipping a coin. So your models are not doing very much.
• If this was a easy problem to solve, everyone would be getting rich from stock market investments.
• You seem to be trying to solve a very difficult problem by simply trying a zillion different models. Maybe the issue is with the data set.
• Perhaps the data you have on historical performance does not help with predicting future performance.

* Information on the degree of food processing [PDF] characterizing an item in a store is not straightforward to obtain, limiting the ability of individuals to make informed choices. The website TrueFood.Tech & its associated database with over 50,000 food items sold by Walmart, Target, and Wholefoods, GroceryDB, show how big data can be harnessed to empower consumers.

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* In Asia and individual countries, tracheal, bronchus, and lung (TBL), breast, colon and rectum cancer (CRC), stomach and non-melanoma skin cancer were among the top five most frequent cancers in 2019. Smoking, alcohol consumption and ambient particulate matter (PM) pollution remained dominant among the 34 risk factors for cancer. 

* Summary of the book On the Shortness of Life by Seneca:

We all fear death, but life is long if you know how to use it. Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future: live immediately. In any situation in life you will find delights and relaxations and pleasures if you are prepared to make light of your troubles and not let them distress you.

* Effective communication is really the avoidance of miscommunication.

* A space blanket (also known as a Mylar blanket, emergency blanket, first aid blanket, safety blanket, thermal blanket, weather blanket, heat sheet, foil blanket, or shock blanket) is an especially low-weight, low-bulk blanket made of heat-reflective, thin, plastic sheeting. They are used on the exterior surfaces of spacecraft for thermal control, as well as by people. In first aid, the blankets are used to prevent or counter hypothermia. A threefold action facilitates this:

• The airtight foil reduces convection
• Heat loss caused by evaporation of perspiration is reduced
• The reflective surface inhibits losses caused by thermal radiation

Their low weight and compact size before unfurling make them ideal when space or weight are at a premium. They may be included in first aid kits and with camping equipment. Lost campers and hikers have an additional possible benefit: the shiny surface flashes in the sun, allowing its use as an improvised distress beacon for searchers and as a method of signaling over long distances to other people. Space blankets were also used by the Taliban to hide their heat signature from NATO forces. In the American television series Better call Saul, the character Chuck McGill uses a space blanket as a shield from electromagnetic radiation.

* Telangana experienced at least five unusual climatic events within a span of a year, in 2023 — extreme in July and December, extreme rainfall deficit in October and multiple hailstorms in April. Owing to global warming, even a small weather phenomenon like cyclonic circulation and low pressure are capable of giving way to very heavy rains, which are usually associated with a depression or a cyclone. - ToI

* Ageusia is the total loss of taste. It can be a symptom of many different medical conditions. 

* It is common in Arab culture for mothers to address their children as "mama" and fathers address their children as "baba".

* One spy in the right place is worth 20,000 men in the field - Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) 

* If you have something that you don't want anyone to know maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place - Eric Schmidt (CEO, Google 2009)