Peyman Milanfar

I was invited to give this plenary talk at the Electronic Imaging Symposium this past February. The recording is now available on YouTube

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s59U...

Silicon Valley crosswalk buttons have been hacked to hilarious effect

ruined by tariffs

What I’ve learned here is that some will not get it, even if explained in the simplest terms.

it's called "volatility drag" - look it up. and it doesn't need fixed percent. I used a fixed number so it would be easier for people to understand. apparently it wasn't easy enough

Most people don't understand that volatility alone can kill your investments

start with capital P
lose 5% one week: (1-0.05)*P
gain 5% the next week: (1+0.05)*(1-0.05)*P.

repeat the pattern for 1yr (52 weeks):
(1+0.05)^26 *(1-0.05)^26 *P = 0.88P

You lost 12% of your money.

bias-variance tradeoff

It's a cruel irony that those who orchestrated this stock market crash are already insulated from its effects. They will be fine.

The real tragedy is that it's the ordinary person – the retiree, the small investor, the hardworking individual – who will suffer the most.

Opinion | The Rise and Fall of Elon Musk (Gift Article) His belief that liberal democracy has failed and that technologists should lead can be traced to the unusual life of his grandfather.

"That Mr. Musk has come to hold so many of the same beliefs about social engineering and economic planning as his grandfather is a testament to his profound lack of political imagination, to the tenacity of technocracy and to the hubris of Silicon Valley."

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/o...

Warning signs you're dealing with a cynic:

* says “that’ll never work...” before any evidence
* often assumes the worst of people
* every interaction is a 0-sum game
* uses criticism to signal competence

2/2

Every profession has its personality types. In my experience the most difficult people to work with are cynics - no matter how talented they may be.

Healthy skepticism is positive and curious. Cynicism is not - it's judgmental. The difference is under-appreciated.

1/2

A wonderful scholar and person, he is. Taught me so much.

Meta has one VP for every 300 employees. They’re a dime a dozen.

This tour de force overview by the incomparable Alan Willsky (my former advisor) is well worth reading, and a great reference for anyone studying AR models for generation.
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?rep...

Autoregressive models have become more popular recently. Speaking to people, I get the sense most folks are unaware of the history of the topic in signal processing. In particular, AR across scale got a lot of attention in the 90s. There are a lot of great papers on the subject but one stand out…..

I think the "zero" connotation came before "digit" though. So perhaps arabic inherit that more directly from sanskrit

monsieur le zero

A cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption - the foundation of all of cryptography research and practice.

Not widely appreciated is that the word cipher has its direct origin in the arabic word صفر (sifr) meaning zero.

Andصفر itself roots to sanskrit शून्य (śūnya)

give this kid a PhD

A man walks into a library and asks whether they have a book on Pavlov’s dog and Schrodinger’s cat. The librarian thinks for a moment and says “it rings a bell, but I’m not sure if it’s in or not”

I posted this thread four months ago. To my knowledge not a single one of these 10 basic features has been implemented on this website. It can’t be that hard.

Model Distillation

Bonus: this form is flexible enough to adapt both the length and to different audiences.

n/n

And finally, use the last 5-10 minutes to summarize and talk about what you think are important new directions to pursue in research and how these could have impact for the team and the products of the company, or the department and their areas of interest and growth.

3/n

Second, you can spend the next 20-25 minutes doing a deep dive on just one of them - say, the one you're most proud of, or the one that matches the hiring team/departments interests and needs best.

2/n

First, a short snippet of your overall set of technical accomplishments. For instance, you might spend the first 15 minutes giving short overviews of a few of your works/papers - it's also very good to draw a theme across them if there is one.

1/n

In some ways it's harder than ever to land a research job these days - both in academia and in industry.

As you prepare for a job talk, consider giving it the following structure - it's hard to give a bad talk that's built like this.:

0/n

The Power of Context: How Multimodality Improves Image Super-Resolution

Kangfu Mei, Hossein Talebi, Mojtaba Ardakani, Vishal M. Patel @docmilanfar.bsky.social Mauricio Delbracio

tl;dr: condition SR model on RGB+depth+segmentation (which you can predict from RGB)-> PROFIT
arxiv.org/abs/2503.14503

I had these slides in a deck for a couple of years. For tired of seeing people use SURE to derive Tweedie. Though I’m sure it will keep happening. 😀