I'm Alex Kearney, a PhD student studying Computer Science at the University of Alberta. I focus on Artificial Intelligence and Epistemology.
When I'm not playing with robots, I hang out with the indieweb community, drink tea, and scubadive.
I talk a lot about yeg, dev, travel, indieweb, grad-school, music, folk, tech, smithsonian, and canmore
The struggle of @black_in_ai organizers trying to bring a diverse audience to #neurips reminds me of a point @erica_joy made in an interview:
“We aren’t thinking about the lost time spent having to fight those issues.”
These researchers are providing a service to the community which comes at a cost. We need to be better at acknowledging this and providing support.
Clearly @element_ai is all ready for #neurips . They've got a cute little walkway with some neat #mtl facts and deep learning memes.
My labmate and I are heading to @CIFAR_News winter school on the neuroscience of consciousness and found a pepper robot in the wild (only one finger missing).
(I've never actually seen one practically put to use)
I was on a flight and the guy across the aisle from me clearly took a picture of the woman sitting next to him.
After the flight, I mentioned to him (in private) that I noticed he took a photo of her without her permission.
His response? "It's not even your problem".
Just looking at some plants.
I talk about what-you-see-is-what-you-get posting system for my #indieweb site and how it improved my post quality.
I'm sitting here hoping that confusion over pronunication of #NeurIPS turns into a wholesome meme where people pronounce it differently everytime they say it.
new-rups
nyr-ups
nurr-ips
The neighborhood toy store where I grew up is now a vape store.
I guess communities do age with their residents.
I recently made a hat for Matt. I used some super-soft alpaca yarn that I picked up from an industrial-revolution era wool spinner located in Alberta. I managed to find a colour which was close to the alpaca logo he uses on his site to keep it on-brand.
The pattern I ended up using was a free japanese pattern. I wasn't quite sure how to read the ribbing section, so I used a slip-stick to give it a slightly elongated stitch to match the faux cabling.
