A Book That Everyone Should Read: Angie Thomas

EliskaLeave a comment

It’s about Seven. Sekani. Kenya. DeVante. It’s also about Oscar. Aiyana. Trayvon. Rekia. Michael. Eric. Tamir. John. Ezell. Sandra. Freddie. Alton. Philando. It’s also about that little boy in 1955 who nobody recognized at first – Emmett.

The messed-up part? There are so many more.

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For a long time I couldn’t bring myself to start reading Angie Thomas’ timely masterpiece The Hate U Give. Having read quite a bit about police violence in US and seen the tape of the horrifying shooting of Philando Castile, I knew I was going to cry throughout the book. Even though the book is conceptually very different it reminded me of Malala Yousafzai autobiography in the tone of horrible things seen and described through the eyes of a young girl. This incredibly powerful story of Starr whose friend gets shot by police officer is both eye-opening and heart wrenching and is most definitely far from one-sided. It is an acute portrait of ugliness of racism and violence that at the same time manages to be thoughtful and implicit letting the reader understand the bigger picture through Starr’s experiences. Angie Thomas is Harper Lee of our time and this book is an absolute must read for everybody.

Machine learning blog at ETH

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The interest in possible applications of machine learning in physics has been growing exponentially for a while now and there seems to be a sea of literature. Couple of months ago we decided to review the literature and have weekly seminar about the papers we found interesting. There is a dedicated blog post for each of these on our group website.

Recently I have contributed with the discussion of the paper by E. M. Stoudenmire and D. J. Schwab: Supervised Learning with Quantum-Inspired Tensor Networks (arXiv:1605.05775 (2017)). In this paper the authors propose to train a tensor network with DMRG-like sweeps. You can read my full post here.