Fascinating director's commentary by Ridley Scott. Video cued to start at a point where Scott talks about the conceptual background for the film. The subsequent ~15m are really great, including dreams of unicorns, memories of green, origami, Deckard as replicant.
... a special feature on the Prometheus Blu-ray release makes the film even more interesting by tying it into the Blade Runner universe. Included as an entry in the journal of Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), who in the film was obsessed with creating artificial life, is the following gem:
A mentor and long-departed competitor once told me that it was time to put away childish things and abandon my “toys.” He encouraged me to come work for him and together we would take over the world and become the new Gods. That’s how he ran his corporation, like a God on top of a pyramid overlooking a city of angels. Of course, he chose to replicate the power of creation in an unoriginal way, by simply copying God. And look how that turned out for the poor bastard. Literally blew up in the old man’s face. I always suggested he stick with simple robotics instead of those genetic abominations he enslaved and sold off-world, although his idea to implant them with false memories was, well… “amusing,” is how I would put it politely.
Bonus: at 1h18m in the video, Tyrell cryogenically preserved at the heart of his great pyramid!
Center for Gravitation and Cosmology, Yangzhou University (May 16 2022)
There were several good questions at the end, and a discussion of the following rather fundamental topic.
In the conventional description of quantum measurement a pure state evolves into a mixed state, with probabilities of distinct outcomes (non-unitary von Neumann projection).
What Hawking suggested is that a black hole (i.e., gravity) causes pure states to evolve into mixed states.
But if pure states already evolve into mixed states in ordinary quantum mechanics, why is it problematic for black hole physics (gravity) to have this effect?
Title: Quantum Hair and Black Hole Information
Abstract: I discuss recent results concerning the quantum state of the gravitational field of a compact matter source such as a black hole. These results demonstrate the existence of quantum hair, violating the classical No Hair Theorems. I then discuss how this quantum hair affects Hawking radiation, allowing unitary evaporation of black holes. Small corrections to leading order Hawking radiation amplitudes, with weak dependence on the external graviton state, are sufficient to produce a pure final radiation state. The radiation state violates the factorization assumption made in standard formulations of the information paradox. These conclusions are consequences of long wavelength properties of quantum gravity: no special assumptions are made concerning short distance (Planckian) physics.
The talk is pitched at a slightly more expert audience than previous versions I have given.
There are interesting comments by and discussions with G. Veneziano, V. Rubakov, Suvrat Raju and others during the seminar.
The Zoom client on ChromeOS does not allow me to see others in the meeting when I share my slides fullscreen. So at times I was not sure whose questions I was responding to!
Abstract: I discuss recent results concerning the quantum state of the gravitational field of a compact matter source such as a black hole. These results demonstrate the existence of quantum hair, violating the classical No Hair Theorems. I then discuss how this quantum hair affects Hawking radiation, allowing unitary evaporation of black holes. Small corrections to leading order Hawking radiation amplitudes, with weak dependence on the external graviton state, are sufficient to produce a pure final radiation state. The radiation state violates the factorization assumption made in standard formulations of the information paradox. These conclusions are consequences of long wavelength properties of quantum gravity: no special assumptions are made concerning short distance (Planckian) physics.
Theory seminar at Michigan State University April 22 2022.
Title: Has Hawking's Black Hole Information Paradox Been Resolved?
Abstract: In 1976 Stephen Hawking argued that black holes cause pure states to evolve into mixed states. Put another way, quantum information that falls into a black hole does not escape in the form of radiation. Rather, it vanishes completely from our universe, thereby violating a fundamental property of quantum mechanics called unitarity. I give a pedagogical introduction to this paradox, suitable for non-experts. Then I discuss recent results concerning the quantum state of the gravitational field of a compact matter source. These results demonstrate the existence of quantum hair, violating the classical No Hair Theorems. I then discuss how this quantum hair affects Hawking radiation, allowing unitary evaporation of black holes.
Physicist, startup founder, and polymath Steve Hsu discusses the end of the unipolar moment, the return of geopolitics, and the U.S.-China New Cold War. He believes China is not as fragile as some say. We talk Taiwan, how Beijing has caught up in military tech, and how the nature of naval warfare in the next war will be very different. On the technology and AI front, he feels the U.S. and China are at parity, but that the long-term trend is in China's favor. He feels the social credit system is advancing just as fast in the West as in China and that the digital yuan is rapidly gaining in stature. He gives his view on the Ukraine crisis and how it has been a huge strategic error by the U.S. because it has cemented the Eurasian alliance. He's concerned about a systemic financial meltdown, discusses being a victim of woke cancel culture, and knowing Richard Feynman.
I've had numerous requests to comment on the conflict in Ukraine, but have been too busy to write anything.
For background on the situation, I highly recommend the discussion in the video below, released March 3 2022.
To save time, just listen to the presentations by Mearsheimer and McGovern, and their final comments at the end of the video. Both present historical details from the last decade or so that will shock people who only pay attention to mainstream Western media. (Also in the discussion: Jack Matlock, former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Ted Postol, MIT professor and missile expert.)
Ray McGovern is a retired CIA analyst who served as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. I featured another interview with him in an earlier post on the US catastrophe in Afghanistan: Tragedy of Empire / Mostly Sociopaths at the Top.
Corey Washington and I interviewed John Mearsheimer for the original Manifold, but the episode was not released. It's possible that I might release it some time in the future.
While military and diplomatic aspects of the conflict in Ukraine are worthy of attention, far more important are the long term consequences of Western hysteria and economic war on Russia. Tacit support for Russia from China, India, Brazil, Turkey, OPEC states, indeed perhaps the majority of the world population, may presage a new era of multipolarity and hard power confrontation between great powers.
Why do educated citizens of the countries listed above understand the situation better than the typical American or European? Because they are familiar with Western media propaganda and the history of US imperialism. They are much more likely to understand the facts described by Mearsheimer and McGovern about the recent history of NATO, Ukraine, and Russia leading up to this conflict.
PS I'm surprised there isn't more discussion of systemic risks from defaults of highly networked financial entities that are affected by sanctions on Russia.
This looks dangerous -- like the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008. Or am I missing some structural reforms that prevent that from happening again? (Maybe the earlier round of sanctions have already decoupled Russia enough...) Or will the central banks that effectively run our economies now simply issue a blanket put, allowing all of our clever money men to go back to sleep? People used to complain about "zombie companies" in some countries with excessive state intervention in their economies. It looks to me like we've had zombie financial markets for some time now...
Of course I think individuals in TW and UKR have every right to vote / fight for the government they want.
But they are not likely to get their way as the issue is much more important to their giant neighbor (RUS, PRC) than to the USA or soft Europeans in Brussels.
They are probably better off negotiating a peaceful coexistence with the nearby great power. Finland "Finlandized" itself and that was probably the best it could do...
What you are seeing right now in UKR is what great power realists like Mearsheimer *predicted* would happen IF the West gave too much hope to UKR without being willing to actually back it up.
Now, you may say that Joe Smith in Iowa *should* want to back up UKR or TW, send his son to fight on the front lines there. But it is not the case and we know that. We also knew it 10-15y ago when NATO expansion mischief got started and Mearsheimer made his early cautionary statements on this, as did Kennan, Nitze, Perry, Sam Nunn -- all the old cold warriors who ACTUALLY DEFEATED USSR and understood things better than today's leaders.
US won't even sanction RUS energy imports to this country... How much pain are we willing to endure for UKR?
We're going to fight this war to the last Ukrainian... If there isn't a negotiated settlement soon UKR will end up like Iraq and Afghanistan -- abandoned by the US and destroyed.
I can predict something very similar for TW, even though I have extended family living there right now. Does that count towards emotional commitment / empathy? I'm descended from KMT military officers on both sides of my family tree!
TW should negotiate for the best deal it can get from PRC and not count on the US to protect it.
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US war hawks want to see PRC blow itself up fighting for TW. The conflict will destroy Asian economies and leave USA largely unscathed (just as WWII did). They don't care about the well-being of ~2-3 billion Asians.
Some of them just can't help themselves and want to see RUS blow itself up fighting in a UKR trap. But this group is very stupid as they are driving RUS into the arms of PRC and that is going to be very bad for USA.
Some US war hawks are smarter than others...
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US to Ukraine, pointing at Russia: "Let's you and him fight."
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William Burns is Biden's CIA Director, and was Ambassador to the Russian Federation. What did he write about Ukraine and NATO expansion? From Peter Beinart's substack:
Two years ago, Burns wrote a memoir entitled, The Back Channel. It directly contradicts the argument being proffered by the administration he now serves. In his book, Burns says over and over that Russians of all ideological stripes—not just Putin—loathed and feared NATO expansion. He quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995. ‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
While the Biden administration claims that Putin bears all the blame for the current Ukraine crisis, Burns makes clear that the US helped lay its foundations. By taking advantage of Russian weakness, he argues, Washington fueled the nationalist resentment that Putin exploits today. Burns calls the Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” And he describes the appetite for revenge it fostered among many in Moscow during Boris Yeltsin’s final years as Russia’s president. “As Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage,” Burns writes, “a gathering storm of ‘stab in the back’ theories slowly swirled, leaving a mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would linger for decades.”
As the Bush administration moved toward opening NATO’s doors to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about a Russian backlash grew even starker. He told Rice it was “hard to overstate the strategic consequences” of offering NATO membership to Ukraine and predicted that “it will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” Although Burns couldn’t have predicted the specific kind of meddling Putin would employ—either in 2014 when he seized Crimea and fomented a rebellion in Ukraine’s east or today—he warned that the US was helping set in motion the kind of crisis that America faces today. Promise Ukraine membership in NATO, he wrote, and “There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard.”
Were a reporter to read Burns’ quotes to White House press secretary Jen Psaki today, she’d likely accuse them of “parroting Russian talking points.” But Burns is hardly alone. From inside the US government, many officials warned that US policy toward Russia might bring disaster. William Perry, Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary from 1994 to 1997, almost resigned because of his opposition to NATO expansion. He has since declared that because of its policies in the 1990s, “the United States deserves much of the blame” for the deterioration in relations with Moscow. Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 served as US ambassador to Ukraine, has called Bush’s 2008 decision to declare that Ukraine would eventually join NATO “a real mistake.” Fiona Hill, who gained fame during the Trump impeachment saga, says that as national intelligence officers for Russia and Eurasia she and her colleagues “warned” Bush that “Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action.”
Oh, there's some historical background to all this? Some context? Wait I'm told every day this crisis just happened because Putin went crazy and wants to rebuild the USSR / Russian Empire.
Who is full of crap? Western governments and media today, or our CIA Director and former Ambassadors and Secretaries of Defense? The whole world ex-USA/EU can see this. It's only Westerners who are brainwashed.
Added March 7 2022: This is a long Chinese analysis of the military aspects of the war so far. They also cite Oryx estimates. Note comparisons near the end of Russian and PLA capabilities.
I certainly sympathize with "Putin bad", "Russia bad place for me to live", "democracy good" sentiments.
But suppose the realistic possible outcomes are:
1. Ukr is dominated by Russia but not destroyed in a war
2. Ukr is dominated by Russia after a brutal war, with its economy destroyed
3. (Low probability) Ukr escapes Russian domination thanks to strong US support (avoiding WWIII).
4. (Low probability) US strongly supports Ukr, leading to MAD, WWIII
To be very definite, suppose that
I. Given actual past US policies of ~2010-2022 probabilities are P(#1) = P(#2) = 45% and P(#3) = 9% and P(#4) = 1%
II. Following advice of Mearsheimer, frmr SecDefs Perry and McNamara, CIA director Burns, etc. etc. we have
P(#1) = 95% P(#2) = 4%, others much less than 1%. [ i.e., this is a counterfactual scenario that, in my opinion, turns out better! ]
I think this is a REALISTIC characterization. You may disagree. Under my assumptions II is better than I.
But this is not primarily a normative or moral discussion... we don't disgree there.
Note, in a standard utilitarian framework P(#4) dominates everything else!
This is video of a seminar I gave at the University of Sussex. Slides.
Has Hawking's Black Hole Information Paradox Been Resolved? Quantum Hair and Black Hole Information
Abstract: In 1976 Stephen Hawking argued that black holes cause pure states to evolve into mixed states. Put another way, quantum information that falls into a black hole does not escape in the form of radiation. Rather, it vanishes completely from our universe, thereby violating a fundamental property of quantum mechanics called unitarity. I give a pedagogical introduction to this paradox, suitable for non-experts. Then I discuss recent results concerning the quantum state of the gravitational field of a compact matter source. These results demonstrate the existence of quantum hair, violating the classical No Hair Theorems. I then discuss how this quantum hair affects Hawking radiation, allowing unitary evaporation of black holes.
I'm working on the return of Manifold. I just did the first interview yesterday, with James Lee. I'm not sure when it will be released, but soon I hope.
Thanks to everyone who enjoyed the original show. I received a lot of requests to bring it back over the last 18 months since we went on hiatus. Please make suggestions for guests and show topics!
I'll try to get Dominic Cummings for a long interview. For now, see this great piece in the Guardian about his substack:
Michigan State University owns the copyright to the old stuff, so we may have to create a new channel and web site. This new project will be entirely mine and I will probably allow comments on the YouTube channel -- we turned those off because the university was/is risk averse about free expression ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I hope to have Corey as a frequent guest on the show, but I will be restarting in solo mode.
Here's the first episode where Corey and I introduced ourselves. Very rough around the edges, but still fun for me to listen to again.
I first watched The Night Porter while in graduate school, and came across it again last weekend as a byproduct of ordering HBOMax to see the new Dune movie. There are quite a few film classics buried below the top level HBOMax recommendation engine -- you just have to search a bit. See also here on Kanopy.
Opinions of the film vary widely. In my view it's a masterpiece: the performances by Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde are incredible, although I must say that I find the film very difficult to watch.
Rampling portrays the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in the new Dune -- see director Denis Villeneuve's analysis of her Gom Jabbar scene.
I've always wondered about the origins of The Night Porter and how it got made. The material is sensationalistic, even borders on exploitation, but the treatment has psychological and cinematic depth.
This video contains remarkable interviews with the director Liliana Cavani, writer Italo Moscati, and Rampling. Short clips are interspersed with the interviews so you can get a sense of the film if you've never seen it. Unfortunately, these clips caused the video to be age restricted on YouTube so you have to click through and log in to your Google user account to view it.
Bogarde is not interviewed in the video, but his Wikipedia bio notes that
Bogarde was one of the first Allied officers in April 1945 to reach the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, an experience that had the most profound effect on him and about which he found it difficult to speak for many years afterward.[6] [ Video of the interview below.]
"I think it was on the 13th of April—I'm not quite sure what the date was" ... "when we opened up Belsen Camp, which was the first concentration camp any of us had seen, we didn't even know what they were, we'd heard vague rumours that they were. I mean nothing could be worse than that. The gates were opened and then I realised that I was looking at Dante's Inferno, I mean ... I ... I still haven't seen anything as dreadful. And never will. And a girl came up who spoke English, because she recognised one of the badges, and she ... her breasts were like, sort of, empty purses, she had no top on, and a pair of man's pyjamas, you know, the prison pyjamas, and no hair. But I knew she was a girl because of her breasts, which were empty. She was I suppose, oh I don't know, twenty four, twenty five, and we talked, and she was, you know, so excited and thrilled, and all around us there were mountains of dead people, I mean mountains of them, and they were slushy, and they were slimy, so when you walked through them ... or walked—you tried not to, but it was like .... well you just walked through them.
... there was a very nice British MP [Royal Military Police], and he said 'Don't have any more, come away, come away sir, if you don't mind, because they've all got typhoid and you'll get it, you shouldn't be here swanning-around' and she saw in the back of the jeep, the unexpired portion of the daily ration, wrapped in a piece of the Daily Mirror, and she said could she have it, and he" [the Military Police] "said 'Don't give her food, because they eat it immediately and they die, within ten minutes', but she didn't want the food, she wanted the piece of Daily Mirror—she hadn't seen newsprint for about eight years or five years, whatever it was she had been in the camp for. ... she was Estonian. ... that's all she wanted. She gave me a big kiss, which was very moving. The corporal" [Military Police] "was out of his mind and I was just dragged off. I never saw her again, of course she died. I mean, I gather they all did. But, I can't really describe it very well, I don't really want to. I went through some of the huts and there were tiers and tiers of rotting people, but some of them who were alive underneath the rot, and were lifting their heads and trying .... trying to do the victory thing. That was the worst."[4]
In her interview Rampling notes that it was Bogarde who insisted that she be given the role of Lucia.
arXiv:2011.11661, to appear in Foundations of Physics
For any choice of initial state and weak assumptions about the Hamiltonian, large isolated quantum systems undergoing Schrodinger evolution spend most of their time in macroscopic superposition states. The result follows from von Neumann's 1929 Quantum Ergodic Theorem. As a specific example, we consider a box containing a solid ball and some gas molecules. Regardless of the initial state, the system will evolve into a quantum superposition of states with the ball in macroscopically different positions. Thus, despite their seeming fragility, macroscopic superposition states are ubiquitous consequences of quantum evolution. We discuss the connection to many worlds quantum mechanics.
It may come as a surprise to many physicists that Schrodinger evolution in large isolated quantum systems leads generically to macroscopic superposition states. For example, in the familiar Brownian motion setup of a ball interacting with a gas of particles, after sufficient time the system evolves into a superposition state with the ball in macroscopically different locations. We use von Neumann's 1929 Quantum Ergodic Theorem as a tool to deduce this dynamical result.
The natural state of a complex quantum system is a superposition ("Schrodinger cat state"!), absent mysterious wavefunction collapse, which has yet to be fully defined either in logical terms or explicit dynamics. Indeed wavefunction collapse may not be necessary to explain the phenomenology of quantum mechanics. This is the underappreciated meaning of work on decoherence dating back to Zeh and Everett. See talk slides linked here, or the introduction of this paper.
We also derive some new (sharper) concentration of measure bounds that can be applied to small systems (e.g., fewer than 10 qubits).
The first three videos below are episodes of Japanese director Takeuchi Ryo's ongoing series on Huawei.
Ryo lives in Nanjing and speaks fluent Mandarin. He became famous for his coverage of the lockdown and pandemic in Wuhan. The fourth video below tells the stories of 10 families: how they survived, and how their lives have changed.
The general consensus seems to be that Huawei is 2+ years ahead of other competitors in 5G technology, and has a very deep IP position (patent portfolio) as well. In AI applications my impression is that they are also strong, but not world leaders at the research frontier like Google Brain or DeepMind. Like most Chinese companies their strength is in practical deployment of systems at scale, not in publishing papers. In smartphones and laptops they compete head to head with Samsung, Apple, etc. in all areas, including chip design. Their HiSilicon subsidiary has designed Kirin CPUs that are on par with the best Qualcomm and Apple competitors used in flagship handsets. However, all three rely on TSMC to fabricate these designs.
In episode 14 of the Psychology Is podcast, we have the special opportunity to talk to Dr. Steve Hsu, a physicist, professor at MSU, and founder of Genomic Prediction. We discuss the newest innovations related to genetic testing and editing, including Genomic Prediction and CRISPR. We also discuss what these innovations may make possible (for better or worse), and how we can proceed carefully as we learn to harness this new power.
Afu Thomas is a German internet personality, known for his fluent Chinese, who lives in Shanghai. His videos are extremely popular in China and people often recognize him in public.
These are a series of street interviews shot at 3 AM, in which he elicits sometimes moving and philosophical responses from ordinary people about hopes, dreams, family, money, happiness. These individuals, ranging from teen boys and girls to middle aged men, answer the questions simply but with insight and sincerity.
I recently came across this channel on YouTube, produced by CMSA at Harvard.
The new Center for Mathematical Sciences and Applications in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will serve as a fusion point for mathematics, statistics, physics, and related sciences. Evergrande will support new professorships, research, and core programming.
Shing-Tung Yau, Harvard’s William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics, will serve as the center’s first director.
“The Center for Mathematical Sciences and Applications will establish applied mathematics at Harvard as a first-class, interdisciplinary field of study, relating mathematics with many other important fields,” Yau said. “The center will not only carry out the most innovative research but also train young researchers from all over the world, especially those from China. The center marks a new chapter in the development of mathematical science.”
If I'm not mistaken Evergrande is a big real estate developer in China. It's nice to see them supporting mathematics and science in the US :-)
In 2010 I accompanied S.T. Yau and a number of other US academics and technologists to visit Alibaba, which wanted to establish a center for data science in China. Unfortunately this never really got off the ground, but CMSA looks like it is off to a good start.
Here are some talks I found interesting. There are quite a few more.
The talk on Atiyah, Geometry, and Physics led me to this poem which I like very much. Sadly, Atiyah passed in 2019. I believe we met once at a dinner at the Society of Fellows, but I hardly knew him.
In the broad light of day mathematicians check their equations and their proofs,
leaving no stone unturned in their search for rigour.
But, at night, under the full moon,
they dream, they float among the stars and wonder at the mystery of the heavens: they are inspired.
Without dreams there is no art, no mathematics, no life.
After PPP correction the PRC economy is significantly larger than the US economy, so it's important to understand what nominal GDP and its adjusted counterpart represent.
This 2019 video follows a 26 year old woman during a typical weekend day. She lives in a $330 per month apartment in central Shanghai, a short walk to her office where she works as an advertising copywriter. You get a look at the apps she uses to order food and household supplies, keep up with fashion and culinary trends, pay at restaurants, etc.
Her monthly budget is about $2300 USD per month, and as far as I can tell her lifestyle would cost more than twice as much in NYC (e.g., Brooklyn), San Francisco, Chicago, or even a somewhat smaller US city. So the nominal to PPP correction of 2x may actually be conservative! Some have suggested that the PRC government deliberately understates its GDP in order to continue to claim "developing nation" status, and to not alarm US hawks (as if that were possible).
In late 2010 I was in Shanghai for a physics meeting, and blogged about dollar-yuan purchasing power parity (PPP).
1 USD = 6.64 RMB. Average salary in Shanghai is reportedly 65k RMB or about USD $10k per annum. ... The IMF estimates that the PPP (purchasing power parity) vs nominal exchange rate adjustment for China is about a factor of 2 (i.e., PPP GDP is about twice nominal GDP). That doesn't sound entirely crazy to me but it's very dependent on choice of goods for the PPP basket. ...
This lifestyle channel delivers daily vignettes from China (~5 minutes each), with an occasional episode from Taiwan. They have English subtitles, so offer a unique window into modern Chinese life.
When I blogged from Beijing in the summer of 2019, some readers were surprised that I found parts of the city as aesthetically interesting as places in Tokyo or other iconic cities.
Everything is advancing very rapidly in China, as you can tell from the videos. Below are some episodes I recommend. There are many more...
Kindergarten in renovated Beijing courtyard house.
Tibetan lodges.
Boat house in Fujian.
Struggles of an independent film maker.
Photographer documents lives of factory workers in Guangdong.
Amasa Delano was an American ship captain and distant relative of FDR who circumnavigated the globe several times as a fur trader. Most of the fur went to China in the 18th and early 19th century: Delano brought back porcelain to America. Even then there was a manufacturing trade deficit! He appears in Herman Melville's novella Benito Cereno.
Delano's book A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817) describes his impressions of China in that era:
China is ... the first for greatness, riches, and grandeur, of any country ever known.
Seminar at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI, Berkeley and UCSF) July 17 2019. I gave a similar talk the following day at OpenAI. Jennifer Doudna, one of the co-discoverers of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, is the Executive Director of IGI. You might recognize her voice if you can hear the audience questions.
IGI began in 2014 through the Li Ka Shing Center for Genetic Engineering, which was created thanks to a generous donation from the Li Ka Shing Foundation. The Innovative Genomics Initiative formed as a partnership between the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco. Combining the fundamental research expertise and the biomedical talent at UCB and UCSF, the Innovative Genomics Initiative focused on unraveling the mechanisms underlying CRISPR-based genome editing and applying this technology to improve human health.
Slides -- slightly updated from the ones I used in the talk.
Title: Genomic Prediction of Complex Traits and Disease Risks via AI/ML and Large Genomic Datasets
Abstract: The talk is divided into two parts. The first gives an overview of the rapidly advancing area of genomic prediction of disease risks using polygenic scores. We can now identify risk outliers (e.g., with 5 or 10 times normal risk) for about 20 common disease conditions, ranging from diabetes to heart diseases to breast cancer, using inexpensive SNP genotypes (i.e., as offered by 23andMe). We can also predict some complex quantitative traits (e.g., adult height with accuracy of few cm, using ~20k SNPs). I discuss application of these results in precision medicine as well as embryo selection in IVF, and give some details about genetic architectures. The second part covers the AI/ML used to build these predictors, with an emphasis on "sparse learning" and phase transitions in high dimensional statistics.
In my earlier post on Beijing I emphasized the issue of scale in China -- massive scale that is evident in the video above.
I traveled in SE Asia before the 1997 currency / economic crisis. At that time there was plenty of evidence of a bubble in those countries -- unused infrastructure and real estate built on spec, few signs of real technological or productive capability, etc. China had aspects of that 10 years ago, but now it's apparent that earlier infrastructure investment is being put to good use.
As I walked around Beijing I strained to find things around me -- buildings, solar panels, batteries, cars, high speed trains, electronics, software infrastructure, even airplanes -- that couldn't be sourced in China. Other than a few specific tech stacks that will get serious attention in coming years (e.g., CPUs) I was not able to think of many areas in which China has not caught up technologically. See Can the US derail China 2025?
PS I'm back in the US now. Will be giving a talk today at IGI in Berkeley and at OpenAI on Thursday.
