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Surya Ganguli
@SuryaGanguli
Associate Prof of Applied Physics @Stanford, and departments of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Neurobiology. Venture Partner @GeneralCatalyst
Stanford, CA
Joined December 2013
Posts
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    *Every single* cure for a disease ultimately flowed from basic exploratory research. Stopping basic research is like stopping the mountain rains and expecting rivers of cures to still flow. Examples: 1) studying saliva of Gila monster -> GLP1's 2) studying funghi -> first
    As a taxpayer (irrespective of whether you’re a scientist) would you would be in favor of more of the @NIH budget going to fund efforts to solve specific diseases at the expense of basic exploratory research? Which diseases?
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    Teaching a new course @Stanford this quarter on explainable AI, motivated by neuroscience. I have curated a paper list 4 pages long (link in comment). What are your favorite papers on explainable AI/mechanistic interpretability that I am missing? Please comment or DM. thanks!
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    Private capital always seeks returns on short horizons and therefore will not fund basic research which yields outsized returns but on very long horizons. Name one country that has improved living standards without public investment in science. You cannot.
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    Using AI to help you on your homework is like using a robot to help you lift weights at the gym.
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    My new post for the @Stanford Human Centered AI Initiative: a personal vision of how #neuroscience #psychology #ai #physics #mathematics and other fields can work together to both understand biological intelligence and create artificial intelligence! hai.stanford.edu/news/the_inter…
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    Science twitter please don’t leave. We have great community here. I know no other place to keep up and interact with ideas from neuroscience, psychology, physics, mathematics, machine learning, philosophy, economics & linguistics. No reason to stop; just block others if needed
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    Replying to @FulfillHeaven
    All suggested changes will absolutely cripple research both basic and applied. See below. Also, that NIH policy changed immediately, including for grants already awarded, without giving time to adjust, does not suggest they want science to get better. Rather they want to hurt it.
    Replying to @Shit_Steve_Sez_
    Reducing indirects without increasing directs equally will lead to less research as the indirects pay for essential research activity. They are also considering reducing NSF overall budget by 66%. These policies would destroy American science and be a win for our competitors
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    1/Our paper @NeuroCellPress "Interpreting the retinal code for natural scenes" develops explainable AI (#XAI) to derive a SOTA deep network model of the retina and *understand* how this net captures natural scenes plus 8 seminal experiments over >2 decades sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
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    Officially got tenure in Applied Physics @Stanford! This feat is really due to a brilliant, creative, and fun group of students and postdocs I have had the great fortune of working with over the years. And thanks to amazing colleagues and mentors at Stanford and beyond!
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    1/Is scale all you need for AGI?(unlikely).But our new paper "Beyond neural scaling laws:beating power law scaling via data pruning" shows how to achieve much superior exponential decay of error with dataset size rather than slow power law neural scaling arxiv.org/abs/2206.14486
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    Replying to @sumitagg1
    Which VC would fund exploring saliva of Gila monsters? Curvature of space time? Intricacies of how bacteria work? All without any clear business plan? All of these works lead to returns in *multiple* decades that changed the world. VCs enter *much* later but depend on all this.
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    #KatieBouman speaking @Stanford on black holes! Amazing: in 100 years humanity derived black holes from pure mathematics, then turned the whole earth into a telescope to see one 53 million light years away, and figured out it weighs 6.5 billion suns! brings a tear to my eye...
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    Love this quote from Sir Michael Atiyah: "Algebra is the offer made by the devil to a mathematician. The devil says, 'I will give you this powerful machine...all you need to do is give up your soul: give up geometry...' The danger to our soul is there... when you pass into
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    This might be the closest thing to an adversarial example for the human visual system that I have ever seen.
    This deceiving grid tricks you into thinking there's a curved line somewhere, but you can't find it. The purposefully placed gray lines of squares in a curved formation will induce your peripheral vision to interpolate curved lines [read more: buff.ly/3oKqWXa]