Notices by Chloé Azencott (cazencott@lipn.info)

In a partnership with Mistral AI, CNRS is deploying a locally-hosted LLM chatbot for its employees.

They provide some examples of tasks you can ask the chatbot: summarizing a long text; translating; and writing an outline for an article.

Tasks you'd want to delegate to an assistant because they're beyond you.

And then they decided it would be a great idea to "honor" Emmy Noether, one of the most influential women mathematicians ever, by naming this chatbot Emmy after her.

I cannot fully express how angry that makes me.

Can't be arsed to read something yourself? Ask good old Emmy to summarize it for you, that's right up her alley, she'll do it between proving two major results in algebra or mathematical physics, too bad she's only a website and can't make you a cup of coffee while she's at it.

https://alan-poc.dsi.cnrs.fr/accueil/index.html (in French)

@elilla biorxiv (preprint server for biology) tried that two years ago.

Authors disagreed, as the abstracts were very low-quality, misrepresenting the science and usually failing at the task of offering a summary understandable for a general audience. They added a notice indicating that they were written by an AI tool and not approved by the authors.

Haven't seen any of them recently (good news!).
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03545-x (behind paywall, can share pdf if you want it)

For the first talk of this 54th #ParisWiMLDS meetup, Irina Nikulina, a senior computer vision engineer, is introducing OpenCV, a major open source library for computer vision that interfaces C, C++, Python and Java.

Irina walks us through some basic functions and transformations that just take a few lines in OpenCV. #ParisWiMLDS

The initiative calling for the ban of "conversion therapy" in the European Union has collected enough signatures (around 1 180 000 as I type) 🎉

But you still have till the end of today, May 17, to add your signature and support putting an end to hateful practices that have been described as torture by the United Nations.

Wouldn't that be a suitable thing to do on the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia?

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/

#IDAHOT2025 🌈

@ushcala oooh, that's interesting, I didn't realize that was a thing.

I'm so fed up* with articles about the widespread use of LLM chatbots by university students that only interview students who use them intensively and teachers who have no idea how to encourage students to think by themselves.

Aren't there any stories out there of students who refuse to use them because they realize how detrimental to learning this can be (I'm less interested in those who refuse out of ethical/environmental/geopolitical concerns, not that those aren't valid) or of educators who have found how to effectively encourage students to do their own work, because the point is not the final product but the process?

(Yeah, my Introduction to Data Science course is starting in a few weeks and I'm not looking forward to the time we're going to waste on grading projects written by an algorithm.)

* by which I mean, excessively upset and having difficulty sleeping at night. The despair they induce has even been seeping into some of my dreams.

To keep their federal funding, Columbia University agreed to ban masks, empower 36 campus police officers with new powers to arrest students, and appoint a senior vice provost with broad authority to oversee the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies as well as the Center for Palestine Studies.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/columbia-university-trump-demands-federal-funding-e94d41ca

I don't have the words.

I have a lecture during the Parisian #standUpForScience rally. So I made a slide.

Student reactions to my speech on budget cuts included "oh putain", my job's done here.

So my university is moving to Office 365, and we got an email from the communication department promising (among other things) good security and accessibility, but now we've just received another email from support telling us to pretty please keep using our self-hosted cloud for sensitive data and for the love of all that's holy do not put it on Office 365.

I'd laugh if it wasn't so tragic...

Academia has a travel problem.

Attending faraway conferences is ecologically unsustainable, and creates a huge barrier to entry for people who are disabled, have care duties, or lack resources, among others.

One piece of the solution is to create local satellites of major conferences. This idea has been successfully implemented in Paris for #NeurIPS for a few years, and I'm happy to have joined the advising committee of NeurIPS@Paris (Dec 4&5 this year)

Check it out: https://neuripsinparis.github.io/neurips2024paris/

So France now has a Minister of AI and Digital Affairs, but not even a Secretary of State for Handicap.

As a handicapped researcher working in a field that falls under the umbrella of "AI", I don't think that's a good thing.

@thomasfuchs both the colleague and I are in the EU and yes, very much so.

@thomasfuchs a colleague was telling me the other day about medical doctors copy-pasting patient files in ChatGPT to get summaries, so I'm not worried about this at all

Quick summary of the political situation over here:

French people went and voted, massively compared to previous legislative elections in the last 40 years, and one out of three voted for the main extreme-right party – by far the one that gathered the most votes, much more (slightly higher percentage, many more voters) than for the European elections that triggered these snap elections.

1/

Votes for the largest cities are still being counted, as their polling stations only closed at 8pm, but this should not make a major difference to the overall trend.

This is not over, we're voting again next Sunday between candidates who have obtained more than 12.5% of the votes – and who have not withdrawn; a number of left-wing candidates are expected to do so to favor a non-fascist candidate, but who knows what candidates from Macron's party will do.

These are very scary times.

2/2

Hi ML people, do you remember the RocketAI hoax at NeurIPS 2016 in Barcelona?

@emilymbender is trying to track down details, please add to her thread 👇 https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/112095582161648879

@timnitGebru Thank you so much for the work you're doing.