Monday, January 26, 2015

At Carnegie Mellon University

There are not many graduate student lounges in the world where you see, upon entering it for the first time, a whiteboard full of complicated calculations: two grad students figuring out the log-likelihood gradient of the entropy of an unrestricted Boltzmann machine. (If you have never heard of a single non-connective word in this expression, no, you are not necessarily a moron. I had to make several inquiries and even afterwards, I was not sure I fully understood what it was about.)

I guess philosophy lounges, including the one in Tilburg, are even less likely to host such cutting-edge intellectual activities. At Pittsburgh, however, you find them. And lots of cool people who inhabit them.

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