lidsblog

Engagement

The opening ceremonies were "frickin' amazing."  Lopez Lomong bore the flag for the USA.  It is quite a story of how he ended up less than a marathon's distance from my birthplace.  (The excellent film God Grew Tired of Us which I saw at Kendall Cinema recounts similar stories.)  His participation was symbolic of the engagement with China that President Bush talked about in this interview. 

Costas: The Opening Ceremonies were glorious. There's much to admire about China's people, China's culture, and its present accomplishments. But this remains an authoritarian state --

Bush: That's true.

Costas: -- with an abysmal human rights record. In the long run, is China's rise irreconcilable with America's interests?

Bush: No. In the long run, America better remain engaged with China, and understand that we can have a cooperative and constructive, yet candid relationship. It's really important for future Presidents to understand the relationship between China and the region, and it's important to make sure that America is engaged with China -- even though we may have some disagreements.

Bush echoes the sentiments expressed by President Lehman in an excellent speech I had the pleasure of hearing at Schoellkopf Field in 2004.  (A quotation from the speech forms the tagline of Krish's blog.)

Lehman: But Ice-9 contamination arguments of this form revolve around other, more limited forms of contact, forms that do not endorse or enable the underlying activity. They take the simple form, “Don’t have anything to do with X because X is bad and if you engage X you will elevate X and debase yourself, X’s name will be legitimated, and yours will be sullied.”

Lehman: My primary message this morning is that you should be very wary of Ice-9 contamination arguments and the sense of despair that is implicitly associated with them. Let me stipulate that there is a special satisfaction one can derive from using them as a reason to withdraw from contact with the world. It is the satisfaction that follows from feeling a certain kind of moral superiority. But I would argue that this satisfaction carries a very heavy price. Yielding to Ice-9 contamination arguments will often, perhaps usually, lead us to miss opportunities to accomplish genuine good in the world through serious engagement.

What does all of this have to do with LIDS?  Working on mathematics and theory, the hazard is to view application and the details of applications as something to be avoided.  From Servo Loops to Fiber Nets written on the fiftieth anniversary of the laboratory by Bob and Sanjoy discusses how LIDS has engaged with various applications through its history.

Gallager and Mitter: Its mathematical foundations lie in complex function theory and harmonic analysis.  Its creativity lies in the discovery of the hidden conceptual structures behind engineering problems and in crystallizing them through the introduction of appropriate mathematical structures.  But the interaction between theoretical and conceptual ideas, engineering synthesis and technological development in the field of systems, communication and control is more complex.  It is in fact a highly complicated feedback process.  Conceptual developments in engineering are incomplete until they lead to a new algorithm, new apparatus or machine.  These in turn require new conceptual ideas for their full utilization. 

Pictures

Just a fleeting glimpse of a picture of Mr. Strong on the shirt of a character in the Mary Poppins—Sound of Music—Mighty Ducks-esque film Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic has the power to take you back to when you were little and Papa was reading to you.  Through books and especially picture books, you can go anywhere. 

Alan's wife Susanna Natti, when she is not illustrating esoteric talks such as this, illustrates children’s books.  I don't know if it is because of this, or just because of the power of picture books, Alan always refers to the story The Sky is Falling when describing loopy belief propagation.  "Chicken Little told Henny Penny, who told Ducky Lucky, who told Goosey Lucy, who told Chicken Little, who said 'I knew I was right.'"  One advantage of graphical models is the ability to visualize complicated probability distributions as well as algorithms on those distributions.

Another favorite of Alan's is to refer to the Hawaiian islands and 'almost' islands when describing level set methods and curve evolution.  The picture gives your mind much more than equations do.  Lav has argued that in scientific works such as those of information theory, the text and the pictures/diagrams cannot be taken apart (see his class project for details). 

I opened my SSG talk last year with a slide featuring Elmer, Granny, Sylvester, Penelope, and Pepe to go over the fact that objects can be clustered based on a variety of features, e.g. human/animal, color/black-and-white, and coappearance in stories.   For the purposes of the work I was presenting, however, the features that mattered were the prior probabilities of hypotheses for a detection task — perhaps the prior probability of an 'aerosol release.'  The previous year, my early slides included an anatomical diagram by Leonardo and a cartoon, both related to the topic I was presenting.   

In Jason's opinion, technical talks, especially when given at MIT, should be as rich in technical content as a technical report.  They shouldn't be Powerpoint engineered and they should, quoting Dmitry, deliver the "full fury of science."  I agree with those sentiments, but also feel that different media have different requirements.  I don't think that including cartoonish pictures in talks necessarily diminishes their technical depth if the necessary equations, derivations, etc. are also included. 

I'm not sure if I'll put any cartoon-type graphic elements into the slides for my SSG talk this year, but I still have a couple of months to think about it.