Lee Spector

Our new season of short podcasts on What AI Means is off to a great start, with Brendan O'Connor on "What AI Means for Social Science," Amber Sweat on "What AI Means for Language, Media & Culture," and David Zureick-Brown on "What AI Means for Mathematics." open.spotify.com/show/04JNAYx...

Excited to see what this special issue on Lexicase Selection surfaces! Are you working on selection in evolutionary computing, biology, machine learning, AI? Have some ideas about connections to lexicase selection (lexicase.ai)? Submission deadline is Dec 1, 2026. link.springer.com/collections/...

"[Hampshire College] was intellectually engaging and exciting, and at the same time an economically efficient and effective educational institution." www.amherstindy.org/2026/06/05/h...

I really enjoyed this brief conversation with Genesis Baez on what AI means for photography podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w... open.spotify.com/episode/3Nmr...

Hampshire College Faculty, Staff, and Students Deserve a Just Closure @hampshirecollege.bsky.social #westernmass #highered #academicsky actionnetwork.org/petitions/ha...

This was a fun conversation, that some of you might find interesting. The page I'm linking embeds the YouTube video, but you should also be able to find it on your favorite podcast app. danfaggella.com/spector1/ #ArtificialIntelligence #EvolutionaryComputation #CognitiveScience

What AI Means for Earth Science with Nicholas Holschuh podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

New podcast! I ask scholars and creators about the significance of artificial intelligence for the world as they see it, through the lenses of their disciplines and expertise. What AI Means AI in the Liberal Arts at Amherst College Listen wherever you get podcasts, or at: lnkd.in/emd7NHus

New, brief overview of lexicase selection: lexicase.ai It considers individual training cases in different random orders, and therefore with different priorities, for each selection event. #AI #MachineLearning #ALife

@ladyslipperhere.bsky.social If your ever in Western MA area this is worth checking out I particularly enjoy the rainforest in the center in the middle of a New England winter garden.smith.edu/visit

The imaginatively named streets in Hadley, Massachusetts that cross the bike path on the way from Northampton to Amherst: Cross Path Rd, West St, Middle St, East St, South Maple St #westernmass

Much like "crab", industrial music is constantly re-evolving from first principles basically anywhere where there's a bunch of metal and plastic laying about

Super niche AI/GP technical content: I made this short video 6 years ago and was just delighted to discover that I still think it's okay! LMK if you have related ideas you'd like to discuss. www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGJW...

New book review, freely available in GPEM: “Reversible world of cellular automata” by Kenichi Morita, reviewed by Tomas Rokicki link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Indeed - we showed an AutoML could easily compete with a deep learning LSTM & significantly outperform it in efficiency academic.oup.com/bioinformati... #automl #deeplearning #machinelearning

We're excited to share "The Cost of Getting Around: The Transportation Burdens of Lower-income residents in Western Massachusetts", a collaboration between MPG and @wayfinders.bsky.social for @massdot.bsky.social. Here's Quick thread of some of the key findings. www.mass.gov/doc/the-peop...

In my first interaction with ChatGPT 5 it provided four "key references," every one of which was hallucinated or broken in one or more ways. This was about a machine learning techique for which there is a lot of information online, and it totally butchered it.

the brain that can see a face in a wall outlet was always doomed to hear the voice of God in a markov chain

Our tree-based pipeline optimization tool (TPOT) automated machine learning (AutoML) review paper is featured in this special issue of Cell's Patterns on open-source software www.cell.com/patterns/iss... #tpot #automl #mlsky #machinelearning

In my latest (and last!) column for Science’s Expert Voices series, I write about the reasons behind AI chatbots’ “deceptive” behaviors (and why Claude threatened a fictional CEO with blackmail). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Brutal to learn that Margaret Boden has passed. An absolute powerhouse in the areas of AI and creativity. leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2025/07...

GPEM Journal has a new CFP for a special issue in Generative AI and Evolutionary Computation for Software Engineering! This will be edited by Dominik Sobania See Leo's blogpost: gpemjournal.blogspot.com/2025/06/call... And special issue page: link.springer.com/collections/...

news.elenarossini.com/fediverse-vi...

Excited to be at: Genetic Programming Theory & Practice (GPTP) is a small, invitation-only workshop. This year’s GPTP will be hosted by Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI on June 05-07, 2025 gptp-workshop.com/index.html #artificialintelligence #geneticprogramming

This was a great conversation and I'm looking forward to the Q&A session! www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Five alarm fire: The State Department has effectively ended free speech for student visa holders.

Congratulations to Rich Sutton and Andrew Barto on receiving the Turing Award in recognition of their significant contributions to ML. I also stand with them: Releasing models to the public without the right technical and societal safeguards is irresponsible. www.ft.com/content/d8f8...

It's not exactly what he just won the Turing award for, but some of the best conversations I've ever had about the nature of minds, brains and machines have been with Andy Barto. Congratulations Andy!! mastodon.acm.org/@ACM/1141102...

Via a friend, from MIT’s alumni magazine. On the confluence of Lisp-based Object Oriented Programming systems and gourmet ice cream in Cambridge, MA in the 1970s. I joined Symbolics in 1982 working with Dan Weinreb and Howard Cannon, writing a lot of Lisp code with Flavors. #lisp #oops #symbolics

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated shortly after midnight. Read our letter to the American people: 18f.org

The Silencing Science Tracker is a joint initiative of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law & the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. It tracks government attempts to restrict or prohibit research, education or discussion climate.law.columbia.edu/Silencing-Sc... #science #research

Is the evolution metaphor still necessary or even useful for genetic programming? link.springer.com/article/10.1... #geneticprogramming #machinelearning #artificialintelligence #datascience

pixelfed.social/p/lspector/7...

Output: Once was a time when life simple life simple was. Was beautiful. Unpredictable. Unforgettable. Beautiful. Unpredictable. Dream.

HELENA: Doctor, has Radius a soul? DR. GALL: He's got something nasty. - R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), by Karel Čapek

Here's one of our recent projects on the power of subsampling in learning... which I think has a lot of potential, explored more in other work of ours and others... arxiv.org/abs/2408.12604

Congratulations to DR. LI DING!! www.linkedin.com/comm/feed/up... @umassbluesky.bsky.social #AI

The Firebird installation at MASS MoCA was pretty great. I hope to be able to experience other Touki Delphine work in the future. massmoca.org/event/firebi...