If one term has captured the popular imagination of late, it’s artificial intelligence (AI). Depending on whom you ask, it’s either the panacea for humanity’s woes, or a harbinger of the end times. And yet, how many of us can truly say that we understand AI? Can either the optimists or the pessimists actually justify their positions? What does the AI future actually look like?

• ai
• future

At its core, decision-making is about answering questions. Should we launch this product? Should I order take-out for dinner? Should I go on this date? These are conditional questions that reflect some number of possible futures. The decision occurs when you select one of the futures and take the action that it prescribes.

• decision making
• questions

Search relevance is a difficult problem in information retrieval. How do you ensure that you get the best results back from searching a collection of documents? Let's explore a few basic strategies, including simple searching, term-frequency searching, and TF-IDF searching.

• information retrieval
• nlp
• search

Writing is humanity’s superpower — when done well, it informs, provokes, and entertains. Perhaps that is why blogging is so popular among programmers. We’re a naturally curious community and sharing knowledge is an integral part of our ethos.

• essay
• writing

Natural language processing is a complex and evolving field. Part computer science, part linguistics, part statistics--it can be a challenge deciding where to begin. One starting place is to look at the most influential papers in academic literature--if you can master these papers, then you'll be well on the path to becoming an NLP expert.

• academia
• ai
• books
• nlp

One of the great things about using Python for natural language processing (NLP) is the large ecosystem of tools and libraries. From tokenization, to machine learning, to data visualization--Python has something for every NLP task in your workflow. Of course, choosing the right tool isn't always so easy.

• deep learning
• machine learning
• nlp
• python
• tools

In mid-August 2020, the Stanford NLP Group released version 1.1.1 of the Stanza Python library. Let's explore what Stanza can do, and while we're at it, see if we can learn something about the characters in a classic novel.

• literature
• nlp
• python
• stanza
• text analysis

In 2016, Cal Newport introduced a new term into the business lexicon: deep work. It’s an idea that has since taken hold of disaffected knowledge workers everywhere, due in no small part to the promise that they could finally start doing what they were hired to do--create value. More importantly, intertwined with this promise is something more nebulous--something fragile and fleeting. Dare we call it self-actualization?

• books
• essay
• work

Much has been made of the question about what it is to be an informed citizen. We’re instructed to “read widely,” “engage in debate”, “seek out new viewpoints,” etc. The message is clear: the more information you consume, the better informed you will be. On its face, this is reasonable and well-intentioned advice. The problem is that it’s also completely wrong.

• essay
• news

In the modern sense, we think of a meme as a funny photo, or catchphrase, or joke that comes into our lives for a fleeting moment, typically via the Internet, and then goes on its merry way. But there is something arguably more sinister to the process. To us, the exchange of a meme is a bit of levity, but to the meme, the exchange is a question of survival. To propagate, to live, the meme must spread.

• article
• information
• memes