Traditional classes [presentations]

Dear Students,

Decide when you would like to deliver your presentation.
It should be from the area of your studies and it should be 10-13 minutes long. Do remember to prepare a PPT presentation.

3 February 2020 Room 15

2 p.m. Przemysław Latoch, Łukasz Kwaśniewicz, Piotr Schneider, Andrzej Kawiak
3 p.m. Klara Szelagowska
4 p.m. Artur Arciszewski

4 February 2020 Room 108

6 p.m. Michał Bukowski, Adam Słucki, Monika Berendt-Marchel
7 p.m. Monika Kaczorowska, Emilia Zawadzka-Gosk, Sebastian Babushkin

5 February 2020 Room 108

2.30  p.m. Kamil Bolek
3 p.m. Przemysław Tomczyk

Week 7 [20-26.01.20] Does AI have to care about human values?

There is a long way before will have to consider this question seriously in it's full meaning - in terms of thinking machines with their own morality.

But even now, we can't forget about biases in data sets that AI models are being trained on.
AI models are more and more often used on hiring, medicine, scientific analysis, public policy, judiciary or banking.
G. Irving and A. Askell in https://distill.pub/2019/safety-needs-social-scientists/ warn that the problem with biases
and importance of alignment of values will increase together with advances in AI systems.

Please read the article and answer the following questions:
1. Do you think that statistical approach for making decisions regarding human lives is justified? For example in a court, based on some set of data a system could statistically more accurately determine if a accused person is guilty or not. At the same time it could make very unjustified decisions on the individual case basis.
2. Did you hear about any cases where people become victims automated systems making decisions?
3. If it wasn't possible to align AI with human values, what are the save fields to use AI/statistical systems?

Week 6 [06-12.01.20] Climate changes and pollution

Nowadays climate changes and pollution topic is more popular than ever.  I have prepared several articles about this topic.
First of all, an article on the decomposition of plastic, and the cleaning of plastic contaminants(this article) 
Also an article about an enzyme that devours plastic (this article)
The whole world is now trying to reduce pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. Many countries refuse coal (this article) and diesel engines.

• Do you know any other new projects to combat pollution or global warming?
• Is it too late to prevent climate change?
• Is it worth reducing the number of animals(livestock) to combat global warming?
• Are countries doing enough to combat global warming? What would you suggest more?
• How should we deal with countries that pollute the environment, and do not want to participate in cleaning the planet? 

Week 6 [06-12.01.20] Talent vs Luck

Hi everyone!

I've noticed a quite interesting paper on one of news sites, where it scored no comments and went unnoticed. Maybe it will get more attention here then.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07068.pdf (abstract at https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 of course)

Author of the paper compares typical distribution of talent (attributes in general) in human populations (Gaussian) with distribution of wealth - as proxy for success - being Pareto. Using simple simulation points out that discrepancy might be caused by randomness, that is by luck.
Then the interesting stuff starts: assigning funds to researchers, when total amount of money is constant, using different algorithms:

• all equal
• only some percentage of "best" (that is those who succeeded before)
• some to successful ones and rest split among rest
• percentage of randomly selected

The goal is get "most bang for a buck". Surprising conclusion is that equal distribution of funding is most effective.

The questions:
1. Do You think the author might be onto something, regarding funding distribution? Or agent model is too simplistic and does not account for human motivations?
2. Is it common that luck factor is ignored when its about success, but accounted for in cases of failures?
3. Are there any human endeavours You can think of, where luck can be mostly ignored, and the best of the best succeed?

WEEK6 [06-12.01.20] PhD students mental health

Hi everyone

I have found a very interesting articles about PhD students mental health.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01492-0
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03489-1

In May 2019 there was organized a international conference to discuss about mental health and wellbeing of postgraduate researcher. Many PhD students are depressed, overworkd and overstressd. It's a very important problem. I'm very interesting about your opinions.

Please answer some questions

1. How do you think what should be done to avoid PhD students mental health problems?
2. Have you ever feel overworked and overstressed after beginning PhD studies? If yes what was the reason for that feeling?
3. Do you agree with PhD student mentioned in article that PhD students more than twice as likely to suffer from mental-health difficulties than the highly educated population in general?