Related papers: Remembering Leo
Invited lecture at Int. School on Particles and Cosmology, Baksan Valley, 1993
The banquet for the July 2017 conference in Cambridge, UK celebrating Stephen Hawking's 75th birthday was held in Trinity College on July 3rd. The organizers asked the author, among others, to give a 10 minute after dinner talk on what it…
In 1956 Reines & Cowan discovered the neutrino using a liquid scintillator detector. The neutrinos interacted with the scintillator, producing light that propagated across transparent volumes to surrounding photo-sensors. This approach has…
A room, a teacher and many friends.
Most AI agents remain confined to an instrumental "command-execution" model, resulting in unequal, one-sided interactions. While recent works attempt to build relationships through hidden memory backends, these invisible processes often…
In the fall of 1924, Enrico Fermi visited Paul Ehrenfest at Leyden on a 3-month fellowship from the International Education Board (IEB). Fermi was 23 years old. In his trip report to the IEB, Fermi says he learned a lot about cryogenics and…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding text and generating high-quality responses. However, a critical distinction from human cognition is their typical lack of a distinct internal `reading'…
From industry to government to academia, attracting and retaining science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors is recognized as a key element of the 21$^{\text{st}}$ century knowledge economy. The ability to retain students…
From theoretical linguistic and cognitive perspectives, situated dialog systems are interesting as they provide ideal test-beds for investigating the interaction between language and perception. At the same time there are a growing number…
I state some open problems coming from joint work with Paul Erd\H{o}s
Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to use information across long inputs effectively. Prior work has identified positional biases, such as the Lost in the Middle (LiM) effect, where models perform better when information appears at…
Einstein at the Z\"urich Polytechnic: he skipped classes, did not attend all the lectures of his Professors, and before going to the examinations he studied instead from the notebooks of his good friend from class, Marcel Grossmann.…
A talk presented at the April 2016 APS meeting in Salt Lake City: The speaker had the great good fortune to take an undergraduate course in group theory from Sidney Coleman, and (after graduate school away) was hired by Coleman to a…
This article presents early findings from designing, deploying and evaluating an AI-based educational agent deployed as the primary instructor in a graduate-level Cloud Computing course at IISc. We detail the design of a Large Language…
In June 1965, Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, BVM, received the first US PhD in Computer Science, and this paper outlines her life and accomplishments. As a scholar, she has the distinction of being an early advocate of learning-by-example in…
These lecture notes were written for the course 18.657, High Dimensional Statistics at MIT. They build on a set of notes that was prepared at Princeton University in 2013-14 that was modified (and hopefully improved) over the years.
These notes are very informal notes on the Langlands program. I had some pleasure in daring to ask colleagues to explain to me the importance of some of the recent results on Langlands program, so I thought I will record (to the best of my…
The Landau-Nordita conference that was held in Moscow in 1981 was the first place where I met Lars. This "marvellous meeting", as Lars quoted in one of his reminiscence article, was organised by Alan Luther. It was an event that generated a…
Research on large language models (LLMs) has shown remarkable performance in domains such as mathematics, programming, and literary creation. However, most studies have focused on semantic memory-based question answering, neglecting LLMs'…
The transition between receiving a PhD and securing a tenure track faculty position is challenging for nearly every astronomer interested in working in academia. Here we use a publicly available database of recently hired faculty (the…