I had a very different article queued to be published today. However my server was taken offline for 10 days partly due to the Covid pandemic.
The unexpected becomes more likely in times of crisis. I am currently reading Nassim Taleb’s Technical Incerto, I highly recommend it for anybody working on medical AI. My blog is hosted on a university server with multiple redundancies – I am relatively secure in my understanding of the associated techinical limitations on uptime – but now the university has been shutdown! Buildings are being sealed, until September, and the electricity is being shutoff. There is a delicious irony in reading about grey-swan events – essentially events which are underrepresented in the data due to their relative infrequency – while being subject to one of the many avalanche consequences of a global pandemic.
The current setup of my server is not a stable solution. I have a copy of the source and will stand-up a backup if it falls again. My blog is not important in the greater scheme of things, but it forms a part of my CV and I am currently applying for positions.
The article which appeared today, was programmed to be published one week ago. I will push back today’s article by at least one week. Then hopefully normal service will be resumed.
Since I am talking about Covid, I might as well mention that I had it a few weeks ago and am happily recovered.
Current topics on my quarantine work list:
- Decide what I am going to do for the next 3 months now that all of my keynote and conference talks have been cancelled.
- Continue mentoring a number of AI-driven biomedical startups in Berlin.
- Create a predictive model for clinical adverse effects from scratch. [already done, it was even easier than I expected]
- Continue working on theoretical aspects of Causality Theory.
- Expand my work on long-tails applied to the safety of medical AI.