JJ Clark

A small statue of a praying baby Buddha sitting on a stone ledge outside of the main Buddhist temple in Seoul Korea

Peace

Fractal Patterns of ice crystals on my office window on a very cold day in Montreal

The geometry of winter

Drs. Mackworth and Poole recognized for making AI education accessible to students worldwide

UBC Computer Science Professors Emeriti Alan Mackworth and David Poole were awarded the AAAI/EAAI Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award for developing free online resources to learn foundations of AI. Congratulations! Read more: www.cs.ubc.ca/news/2026/02...

When I was in grade 8 (in Richmond B.C.) our teacher put a small B&W TV on his desk and we all watched the final of the Canada-USSR hockey Summit series.

Photo of a large van with pictures of random people on it including pope John-Paul, taken in front of the Pantheon in Paris circa mid 2000’s. Image is rather faded with a sepia tone. A man next to the van walks towards the camera contorted with a subtle strangeness

A rather strange photo my camera captured in the mid 2000’s in front of the Pantheon in Paris. I don’t know why the image came out with such a strange faded appearance

this is who runs this account

She

I like how they played “All by myself “ right afterwards

Congratulations Alan and David! Well deserved!

Photo of Granville street in downtown Vancouver in late December 2018. Shows a grizzled man walking towards the camera with a young woman walking further behind him. The entrances to shops are cluttered with trash. The iconic Orpheum theater sign dominates the skyline in the distance.

Vancouver (2018)

(Vancouver 2018)

The Ashen Crow remake of a track from my myspace days back in the early 2000's

A spooky track for #Halloween! 🎃For my friends in Vancouver, which has many many crows (who are not your friends).
soundcloud.com/jjclark-cylo...

Harvard has slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Sarnath

After destroying the people of Ib, the high-priest of Sarnath was found dead, and the word "DOOM" scrawled on the altar. For years after, the city of Sarnath flourished, but one day, at the height of its power, the town vanished.

Made a track inspired by this:
soundcloud.com/jjclark-cylo...

Portland 2025 by artist Nikkolas Smith, showing a person in a frog costume facing down a row of masked and arm ICE officers clad in black uniforms.

The cover of a collection of H.P. Lovecraft's short stories, entitled The Doom That Came to Sarnath

H.P. Lovecraft is widely acknowledged to be a racist, but his 1920 short story, "The Doom That Came to Sarnath", can be interpreted as a cautionary tale about the dangers of demonizing the "Other". The leaders of Sarnath killed off the people of Ib, who had a green hue, flabby skin and bulging eyes.

IMHO this is the right way to go. General purpose "know-it-all" systems are too big, too expensive, and ineffective compared with small, cheaper to run, domain-expert systems. A collection of these experts interfaced to an agentic front-end would be much more cost-effective and higher performance.

I did a postdoc at Harvard in 1985, and was on an H-1b visa. There is no way in hell I would have gotten the position if the university had to pay another $100k.

Some peaceful calming waves

Transcription of a voicemail message "See he does massage with the clocks the pickles so speak on them just stand along. I think give it just talk. Are they supposed to have that supposed to my messy bun?"

The attached image shows the transcription of a voicemail message left on my cellphone provided by Bell Mobility. The voicemail was a message in French to set up an appt for our condo's smoke alarm inspection. Apparently Bell assumes messages are in English, which is strange for a Quebec service.

This post from Terence Tao, on the threats to research and science, should be broadly shared wherever you can. It is measured and clear: newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-an-awar...

Color. Is color in the world or is it in the mind? There is a lot of philosophical discussion of this question.

Very cool. When I was in grad school I took a course on observational astronomy. One of my assignments was to plot the density of galaxies in the Virgo cluster by manually counting galaxies in a grid overlaid on a large print from the Palomar Sky Survey.

Vinod's person detection algorithm was subsequently used by PhD students Carmen Au (now at Meta) and Sandra Skaff (now with Nvidia) as the frontend for an anomaly detection algorithm (works by using file sizes of bzip compressed images to compute mutual information (published in ICPR 06, 49 cites)).

While at UofT Vinod worked on many things, including the CIFAR 10-100 datasets. His most cited paper from that time is "Rectified linear units improve restricted Boltzmann machines" which is commonly cited by people using the ReLU activation in deep neural networks. He now works at Google Brain.

Vinod learned a couple of things from the project. First - that he was not a fan of labelling (at least not of doing the labelling himself), and second, the attractions of machine learning. He applied to do a PhD at UofToronto and was accepted by Geoff Hinton.

Vinod started labelling, but quickly learned that image labelling is tedious and boring. So, he changed the method to a self-supervised learning technique (the subject of the CVPR04 paper, which has 191 citations) where he was able to avoid all the labelling drudge work.

I like to think this camera had a tiny bit to do with Geoff Hinton winning the Nobel Prize. The first project it was used for was developing a person detector, done by then-Masters student Vinod Nair in 2003-4 (published in CVPR 2004). The method required labelling lots of training images.

a stark white hallway in the McGill University McConnell building showing a glowing exit sign and a small surveillance camera on the ceiling looking down the hallway.

The end of an era. In 2002 I installed an Axis ethernet camera in the hallway outside of my office. Yesterday we had to take it down because McGill security said that we weren't allowed to have any unofficial cameras in public areas.

This camera hasn't been used for 15 years but did have its day.

This is a good example. The name of the 267th pope is information by definition as knowing it reduces uncertainty (whats the name of the 267th pope?). This info was created in the brain of Robert Prevost. In fact any utterance is information in that it reduces the uncertainty of what will be said.

I get in my seat and notice that across the aisle is Mayor Menino and his wife, sitting in coach with all the regular people. He gives me a wink. My favorite Boston mayor.