Month: February 2021

Repugnant Intuitions

Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion has long been a focus area in the field of population ethics, as it seems to imply counterintuitive (or repugnant) tradeoffs when taking a utilitarian view. As Parfit states it, the Repugnant Conclusion suggests that: “For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality …

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The Power of Sparsity

The field of machine vision has progressed rapidly over the last decade, with many systems now achieving “better than human” results on standardized image recognition tests. Deep convolutional neural networks have been a main driver of these improvements, and have been enabled by increasing data availability and computing power. ImageNet Competition Best Error Rate Performance, …

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