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ICTP Interviews: Professor Vafa youtu.be/QM_31Eglyaw via YouTube

My public website cumrunvafa.org includes a selection of my lecture videos, as well as interviews and publications.

Tune in this Friday, August 21 at 11am EDT for Brian Greene’s live conversation with Breakthrough winner @cumrunv. They will discuss the past, present and future of string theory and how puzzles ignited his interest in physics. Join us here: bit.ly/30ugQNR #WorldSciU

New paper: arxiv.org/abs/2109.06387 Consider a sequence generated by a language model. Which words were most important for generating each word? We propose greedy rationalization: greedily finding the smallest subset of words that would make the same prediction as the full text.

Excited to speak this Saturday at the #NeurIPS2022 Workshop on Distribution Shifts about CAREER, a transformer-based method for modeling career trajectories from labor sequence data. arxiv.org/abs/2202.08370 w/ Susan Athey, Blei Lab, Emil Palikot, Tianyu Du, Ayush Kanodia

1/ I had the opportunity to join the Data Skeptic podcast to discuss CAREER, a method that uses transfer learning to model career trajectories. This is a project I've been working on with Blei Lab and Susan Athey's group. Thank you for having me on! open.spotify.com/episode/7tZ032…

Belated updates: 1- I defended my PhD in May! Big thank you to my committee and especially to my advisor, Blei Lab. 2- I'm excited to start a postdoc at Harvard! Very grateful to Harvard Data Science Initiative for the opportunity.

New paper: How can you tell if a transformer has the right world model? We trained a transformer to predict directions for NYC taxi rides. The model was good. It could find shortest paths between new points But had it built a map of NYC? We reconstructed its map and found this:

Interesting paper about AI and physics from an author I know very well!

Pursuing science is the most fun game and at the same time the most meaningful activity a mind can be engaged in. I feel very lucky!

In a sense all scientists are religious. Otherwise, why would they be searching without believing there's something out there worth finding?

Reality is too strange to pass as a believable science fiction plot. No science fiction plot can do justice to the unreal nature of reality.

As an Iranian-American I'm inspired by the legacy of ancient Persian scientists. Science is a timeless borderless adventure.

Optimism is a key to successful research. The belief that somehow things will work out at the end, usually leads exactly to that result!

If you thought Trump's address was a little bizarre, check out these inauguration word clouds keyonvafa.com/inauguration-w…

To see the view, climb the mountain. Without confusion, clarity is hard to appreciate. These times will also pass and clarity will set in.

Is it just me or does this extra from the Big Bang Theory look like me?

Will you be watching curling at the #Olympics? Last year the Crimson curling program finished 4th in the country at the USA College Championships hrvd.me/brooma1b0