How Well Designed Is the Human Lung?

The well-designed child

This article is inspired by recent psychological studies confirming that a child is not born a blank slate but has important innate capabilities. An important part of the “learning” required to deal with the three dimensional world of objects, processes, and other beings was done by evolution. Each child need not do this learning itself. By the 1950s there were already proposals to advance arti...

How Well Can a CNN Marginalize Simple Nuisances It is Designed for?

We conduct an empirical study to test the ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to reduce the effects of nuisance transformations of the input data, such as location, scale and aspect ratio. We isolate factors by adopting a common convolutional architecture either deployed globally on the image to compute class posterior distributions, or restricted locally to compute class conditiona...

The well-designed young mathematician

This paper complements McCarthy’s “The well designed child”, in part by putting it in a broader context, the space of possible well designed progeny, and in part by relating design features to development of mathematical competence. I first moved into AI in an attempt to understand myself, especially hoping to understand how I could do mathematics. Over the ensuing four decades, my interactions...

How is the Mother Tongue Acquired

Ebola: How well is the UK prepared?

The government expects a handful of cases of Ebola virus disease in the UK over the next three months and it hopes, through screening at airports and other points of entry, to identify passengers coming from the affected region (there are no direct flights and fewer than 1000 arrived via flights from other European capitals in September) who could develop the disease once in the UK, even if the...