Liberty آزادی

Jan 17, 2023

شعار زن، زندگی، آزادی شعار زیبا ولی دردناکی است. در زمان نگارش این متن این شعار در ایران رایج شده است. اگر بخواهم به زبان انگلیسی ترجمعه‌اش کنم فقط یک کلمه برایش کافیست:

Bidad بیداد

Oct 21, 2020

“Bidaad” is one of the best performances of Shajarian. He passed away two weeks ago.

Exponential vs. Logistic Graphs

Mar 30, 2020

Because of the virus pandemic, suddenly, we all found ourselves with similar issues in WFH (working from home). Then, we all started looking at how an exponential process looks like and what possible ways are a head of us or how else we can grasp the situation. To the extent that this funny plot about exponential processes seems so real:

Why U200F?

Oct 20, 2019

U+200F is a zero width Unicode character to mark right-to-left blocks of characters. In my opinion, it is an entirely useless character. First of all, there is no button in any standard keyboard layout that I know dedicated to this character. More importantly, if you add it to the text, it makes processing it unnecessarily harder. In the end, it usually doesn’t do what you need for marking direction. Render engines can handle bidirectional texts, such as writing this test “این متن آزمایشی” here. In fact, it is much more likely to misuse it.

Office Prank

Sep 30, 2019

Maybe this one doesn’t need explanation. I really enjoyed this prank: I received a lot of sticky notes with nice words on it.

Remote ESSLLI Presentation

Aug 13, 2019

I am going to present some exercises at APL course at ESSLLI. But I couldn’t travel there, so this is going to be a remote presentaiton.

What was going on in ACL 2018?

Aug 3, 2018

For the first time, I attended ACL. On behalf of CLASP and with the the chance to present my work and meet with people in NLP group at the University of Melbourne. During the conference I used the mobile App to plan my schedule. From the beginning I took notes and sometimes asked questions. Generally, it was an interesting but exhausting experience. On the way back from Australia, when I was killing my time on airplane, I went through my notes trying to draw conclusion out of my notes: “trends”, “talking points”, etc. But I realized whatever I heard and saw were my research interest not a fair report about ACL! So, I decided to use the mobile App once again in order to understand what was going on generally in this conference. Let me explain how was ACL and what I found! Keep in mind that my goal is to find “trends” and “hot topics”.

واژگان، جنسیت سیاست‌مردان و سیاست‌زنان

Jan 21, 2018

یکی از موضوعات داغ مورد جدال و بحث در زبان انگلیسی امروز جنسیت ضمیر سوم شخص مفرد است که از نظر بعضی باید با ارائه گزینه‌های جدید به جامعه اصلاح شود و از نظر بعضی چنین مسیری اصولاً اشتباه است و باید منتظر بود
تا تحول و تکامل زبان خود به خود روی دهد. درباره این بحث فضای سیاست‌زده‌ی زیادی وجود دارد. مجله‌ی اکونومیست یک مقاله‌ی کوتاه در این زمینه منتشر کرده که به بحث‌های زبان شناسی اشاره کرده که آیا می‌شود از داشته‌های زبان کنونی زبان استفاده کرد و آیا نسل جدید آمادگی تغییر زبان را دارد یا خیر.

Mobile services and more

Aug 28, 2017

I am writing from Iran! I came here for my sister’s wedding. I would like to share my recent experience in using mobile apps and Internet in Iran. A few days before the wedding, I went to a barbershop with my brother-in-law. Using public transportation in Tehran for the most part of the city costs hours, that’s why uber-like services are blooming. We got there using one of the major apps. The barber saw my android device and said something like: “Good choice! you won’t have the 1009 error, like us iPhone users”. I asked what is he talking about, and it turns out that Apple, following the recent US sanctions against Iran, decided to put sanctions on all kinds of purchases from Iran, including any free apps on App Store. The general solution is to basically sign out of apple services including App Store. Then, the apps you had purchased before traveling to Iran will work without the error message. A day after the wedding something else happened! Apple completely removed apps which had backing companies in Iran from App Store1, including the one I used. Well, it wasn’t because these companies were in Iran, It was because they couldn’t adapt the Apple’s payment platform in Iran’s banking system, instead their product was relying on available mobile payments in Iran.

Diversity

Aug 9, 2017

Recently an internal message between googlers raised a lot of media attention and discussions about diversity as an issue in IT and computer science departments. We all kind of know that these discussions will not go away soon because lack of diversity in certain fields (racial and gender) is an issue. I didn’t even read the message because the quoted sections in news was enough to make my mind: the author of this memo needs learn more about complicated aspects of the issue. The false argument directly linking biological differences with social status is not just wrong, it can hurt people. Then after Google fired the guy. I read this article in the Atlantic, which convinced me to take a look at the full-text memo (the Gizmodo link above).

Spatial terms are strange

Jul 11, 2017

I would like to put these strange sentences here for fun! Maybe I expand it as a blog post. These are sentences that I either heard from people or I made it up myself.

Padding in RNN chain

Nov 20, 2016

I confess that I didn’t share all of my codes on last post. Well, I was still playing with my new toy. It turns out that my implementation has some flaws. I made some changes but I would like to address a few tricks that I learned in this process.

Colors with tensors

Nov 14, 2016

Finally, my implementation of color descriptor in TensorFlow!

Meaning of colors

Nov 1, 2016

We recently had Matthew Stone as invited speaker in our group. They have very interesting work with Brian McMahan on modeling grounded color semantics.

The myth of unlimited intelligence growth

Oct 23, 2016

I would like to address a misconception about artificial intelligence. I think it is becoming a common believe between academics and intellectuals that we can constantly improve artificial intelligence. It is hard for me to make any claim in favor or against it. In fact, I believe there is a misconception about growth of machine’s intelligence, similar to our many other misconceptions. Well, we are bad at generalization on things that we don’t receive in their correct channels until we look into right numbers, in their right scale. Let me explain why I think this is a problem, and focus on a subject.

Hands-on TensorFlow and compositionality toy project

Oct 16, 2016

Last week, I promised to have a blog post about my experiments on TensorFlow. I don’t want to repeat whatever is out there about it like another tutorial but I don’t want to make it unreadable for general audience who just want to know basics. Here it is what I will do: First a very brief review of TensorFlow (what and why, how), then I will give you a simplified version of my experiments as an example.

Working on weekends

Oct 9, 2016

I was playing with TensorFlow this weekend. But I didn’t have my work laptop with me. Instead of setting up everything on my home computer I had SSH access to run iPython notebook remotely and continue the job on browser. I will share the setup here, maybe you find it useful :)

Oct 2, 2016

This Sunday I went to highest pick in Barcelona! I could see this pick point in mountain (hill?) from where ever I went during my trip. I wasn’t sure what that is. Sometimes it was a church sometimes it was an amusement park. Today I checked it out on google and just went there as my final walking+public-transportation tour. It was both of them! A roman catholic church and an amusement park!

A meaningful language

Sep 26, 2016

“the meaning of a word is its use in the language” – Ludwig Wittgenstein 1

  1. #43 Philosophical Investigation, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953). ↩

Back to blogs!

Sep 19, 2016

I am back! Let’s hope that it will stays this way. The plan is to work on blog posts on Sundays and publish them on Monday mornings. This blog posts will be about my thoughts, feelings, codes, and things that I will call tutorials! There will be posts in Persian as well, like before I will try to have translations for those posts.

What happened to my old blog

Nov 22, 2014

I removed my wordpress blog. It’s somewhere in a database in an old laptop. Maybe I bring it back one day.