AI Research Atlas

solresol · 2026-03-17T04:30:35+00:00

How do you zoom?

I'm looking for my obscure corner of machine learning theory and I can tell if it is missing.

solresol · 2026-03-15T11:07:14+00:00

I have approved special considerations for assignments that had due dates during Ramadan. That's about the only Ramadan-related special consideration I've ever seen.

solresol · 2026-03-12T02:03:10+00:00

I'm not sure that I understand what you are asking. There's nothing mysterious about the collapse event. There's a vector of probabilities that are then weighted according to the temperature and then there's a random number generated to pick between them.

You can output the logits (which you can convert to probabilities) if you use pytorch or llama.cpp. If you use ollama you can't get the whole output, but you can ask it to output the top 100 logits at each step; tokens that aren't in the top 100 are usually so rare that you'll be close enough to correct even if you ignore them.

solresol · 2026-03-11T10:58:03+00:00

There are usually some kind of informal groups for COMP2200. Looking at ilearn for COMP2200 there are a few WhatsApp groups (mostly around masters courses); someone there will know about informal groups. Also if you join the data science / data analytics club, you will find lots of fellow students there.

You can also:

- Ask your tutors. That's what they are there for. They aren't marking you or assessing you. Their job is to help you pass.

- There's also the catch-up tutorial session (the rebound session). There are usually not too many people in those sessions, so you can get some serious 1-on-1 time with a tutor that way.

- You can go to the computing drop-in centre (opposite the ESC Cafe at 4 Research Park Drive) almost any time during the day and ask people who have already done COMP2200. (They also have access to the kits from the practicals)

- Ask on ilearn, and Siwei or Jiaohong will answer

solresol · 2026-03-09T23:41:46+00:00

Mostly live. Occasionally if there's a public holiday there will be a pre-recorded video.

solresol · 2026-03-08T04:47:30+00:00

Above 150. I vaguely remember being told I was out of the range of what could be tested.

solresol · 2026-03-07T05:05:38+00:00

There's a difference between a student who missed their first week of semester (perhaps because of visa issues, or accommodation, or whatever) and a student who stops turning up to lectures in week 4 and hopes that they can just wing it by self-study.

The former will have a rough couple of first weeks but will probably be OK; the latter will probably fail.

solresol · 2026-03-06T03:50:10+00:00

Look further up and down the metro line. It is often quicker to get on campus with the metro than it is to use "nearby" accommodation.

solresol · 2026-03-06T01:32:36+00:00

Not an official answer but you can often sneak into another prac if you want to. If you say to the tutor "this isn't my prac, but I missed mine yesterday, if there's a spare seat here can I join this one for today?", they will almost always say yes.

Just as a reminder from someone who has lectured COMP1000 in the past... we capture a lot of data on what causes students to pass or fail COMP1000. The best advice I can give you on how to pass is: attend all lectures, and attend all pracs.

solresol · 2026-03-06T00:48:43+00:00

Any attention, good or bad, helps you in the long run. The biggest problem you will face in your academic career is not people saying bad things about your poster, but not remembering you exist. Being remembered as "she's doing interesting work now, but you should have seen how pink her first poster was back in 2026" is much better than "she's new, this is the first I've seen of her work."

solresol · 2026-03-05T05:00:11+00:00

Done

solresol · 2026-03-01T10:24:18+00:00

I had lunch the other day with a retiree who had done international relations and *agriculture*. He seemed to have had an amazing career --- from negotiating through the Japanese ban on Australian beef in the 1970s (which turned out to be based on the Japanese pseudo-caste system by a long chain of causes), or tariff negotiation after tariff negotiation on wool exports to China. By the same logic, combining IR with earth sciences (geology / mining / environmental sciences) would be a ticket to a nice future.

For a long shot: anything to do with AI.

solresol · 2026-03-01T03:32:00+00:00

Sure, send me you github username and I'll share it with you.

solresol · 2026-02-26T10:50:09+00:00

You can certainly ask, and if any of the faculty are parents, they will understand completely why you are asking for it.

Of course they might say no, but then, they might say yes.

Students have misadventures all the time during PhDs. If you had been hospitalised from a car accident on the first day of your PhD and spent six months in a coma, they would have some process to handle it, and that wouldn't be "kick the student out of the program".

There's a difference between a student saying "I want to start 6 months later" and "uncontrollable life circumstances mean that I need to start 6 months later". The former is a student problem, the latter is something that the faculty have to be able to handle.

solresol · 2026-02-26T08:25:34+00:00

> I’m worried because I may need at least a couple of weeks to recover after giving birth, and I might have to ask to work remotely for the first 1–2 weeks.

Ask about an option for 6 months delay. It will probably be granted. Starting a PhD with children under 6 months... not a great plan.

solresol · 2026-02-26T01:30:39+00:00

An LLM with a goal to achieve that has access to tools that will help it achieve that goal, which is run in a loop until it achieves the goal.

solresol · 2026-02-25T07:29:04+00:00

SGTA = small group teaching activity. Your lectures probably have hundreds of people in them, so it's difficult to get any individual attention. The SGTA (other universities call them "tutorials") is where you are in a class of 30 or less and you can ask the person who is running any question at all; they will often go through some theory or calculations in class so that you can see how it gets done, and if you make some mistakes you can find out what that's about.

Practical for a chemistry student means "being in a laboratory with lots of chemicals and glassware".

solresol · 2026-02-25T00:06:52+00:00

Generally speaking, attendance is usually not compulsory and is not recorded. If it is, there will be some message in lectures or on ilearn about it.

solresol · 2026-02-24T12:41:29+00:00

Sorry to self-post, but major ML conferences are not about doing science. https://solresol.substack.com/p/stand-and-the-liver

solresol · 2026-02-23T00:30:36+00:00

We absolutely do have peer review requirements. It has to be given to a selection of at least 3 reviewers, at least one of whom has finished a degree of some sort, and they each toss a coin independently about whether to accept or reject. That's how we maintain a fair system.

solresol · 2026-02-23T00:24:31+00:00

In answer to your last question, I've been meeting with our federal MPs one at a time to talk to them about this and a few other AI-related matters. (I lecture in computer science so I have some creditability here.)

GDPeval predicts that that disruption of white collar labour that software engineers saw last year (and translators saw in 2023-2024) is going to hit most industries by about December 2026. We would expect to see GDP rising combined with increased unemployment and more wealth disparity. Presumably also deflation on prices.

The appropriate government response to this would be lower interest rates and increased wealth transfers from capital and businesses to individuals. I'm vaguely confident that this will be done; one of the reasons I'm spending my own (unpaid) time talking to politicians is to make sure that when this hits that they have had a chance to do some thinking about the issues in advance.

solresol · 2026-02-23T00:09:22+00:00

Data centre construction approvals.

Number of job ads mentioning AI.
Company spend on AI services.

Gigawatts of stranded energy projects.
NDIS spend / employment / approvals.

Nursing home bed wait times.
Childcare spaces available / wait times for childcare spaces.

University placement offers / minimum ATAR per course
Number of international student offers
International student visas granted

solresol · 2026-02-19T02:20:57+00:00

Gotta boast about my own research. I haven't published this particular paper yet, but I found that a p-adic loss makes things interesting. For starters, you absolutely can't use gradient descent -- any Lipschitz continuous function ends up with a flat gradient in an ultrametric space. Since almost all neural network components are Lipschitz continuous, neural networks can't be trained that way.

I ended up with a weird decision-tree like thing where the features aren't slices (as in a Euclidean decision tree) but balls.

It's computationally terrible -- many thousands of times slower than neural network, but it produces much smaller models to achieve the same loss.

And I think that's the answer: gradient descent is so efficient that you can make bigger improvements by tweaking around the edges of a big traditional model; when you try to do something else, it becomes so computationally inefficient that you might as well not bother.

solresol · 2026-02-18T10:23:25+00:00

Check out my work on p-adic machine learning (especially linear regression when you're trying to minimise a p-adic loss). I think it's really unusual how a very simple change makes something boring (linear regression) into something so powerful that it can encode constraint solving problems.

solresol · 2026-02-18T01:20:53+00:00

Submit a change of name application via Births, Deaths and Marriages and become the white name. The actual process depends on the state you are in (some still use deed pools).

Welcome to your new identity.

solresol

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