Part of every faculty's role at the College is to advise students academically and professionally. Even though I'm in Chile, I kept my student advisees instead of handing them off, temporarily, to another faculty member. Typically, if an advisee wants to meet with me while I'm away, they shoot me an email and we set up a time to zoom.
Yesterday, I met with one. Today, I met with a couple more. It's good to touch base with them and hear how they're doing in the new semester and new school year.
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Today, when not meeting with students, I spent the day testing a new algorithm for clustering words and phrases by their meaning using a "transformer". This is the 'T' in chatGPT. A transformer converts words and short phrases to numbers and lets you compute how similar they are semantically (in their meaning). It's a difficult task that has improved by leaps and bounds in the last 5 years. Aside from its use in AI, transformers have important applications in computational linguistics, which is where I'm applying it.
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Our freezer is pretty well stocked with meals that Laura has made over the past several days. I should be in good shape for home cooked meals while she is in the US for the next few days. She got a Ninja blender a couple of days ago and has put it to good use almost every day since. This evening, we went to a little shwarma place we like a couple blocks from our building. Thus, conserving one of the meals in the freezer.
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Obligatory sunset photo.
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