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Reddit and PLOS Science invited me to an
Ask Me Anything session that was in the top 10 all time Reddit/PLOS Science AMAs in 2018 |
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Quanta produced a podcast to explain our research (published by the Royal Society) on the emergence of units like genes through algorithmic evolution
(under the most self-evident assumption that evolution is not a random ergodic process but is constrained to regions removed from randomness in a rule-driven space). |
I was invited to write an essay to imagine how
Computing will look like in the year 2065--published by Springer and edited by Prof. A. Adamatzky--of which a draft can be read online: Reprogramming Matter, Life, and Purpose. |
At Christ Church College, Oxford
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I consider myself a kind of 'computational natural scientist'. Gregory Chaitin, one of the founders of Algorithmic Information Theory, described me as a "new kind of practical theoretician". With the help of a great team, I introduced the field of Algorithmic Information Dynamics (AID), a type of discrete calculus to deal with complexity, causal discovery and causal analysis based on perturbation analysis of computable (mechanistic generative) models. I also work on the foundations of symbolic computation in machine intelligence using the principles of AID to equip machine learning with model-driven capabilities.
After a BSc degree in mathematics (UNAM), a Masters in Logic (Paris/ENS), a PhD in Computer Science (Lille) and a PhD in Epistemology (Paris/CNRS), I was a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Behavioural and Evolutionary Theory Lab at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield in the UK before joining the structural biology group at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford as a Senior Researcher (faculty member), and later as the Director of Oxford Immune Algorithmics, a biotech spinout devoted to transform medicine from statistical symptom pattern-matching to causal diagnostics. Before, I was a member of the NASA Payload team for the Mars Biosatellite project at the MIT in the U.S. to study the effects of microgravity on living organisms for interplanetary space traveling; and a member of the (then very small) coding team of Wolfram|Alpha, the A.I. engine behind Apple Siri and Alexa that enables them to answer some factual questions, working with the CEO of Wolfram Research in Boston, MA and for a while at the company headquarters in Urbana-Champaign, IL (combined, for almost a decade). I lead the Algorithmic Dynamics Lab at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden (the institution that awards the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology) where I team up with experimental scientists such as molecular biologists, immunologists, oncologists, toxicologists, and other mathematicians to understand and study first principles of living systems. I also lead the Algorithmic Nature Group, the lab that started the Online Algorithmic Complexity Calculator and the Human Randomness Perception and Generation Project (prompting wide media coverage), a kind of inverse Turing test involving almost 3,400 humans. I am the founder of the Automacoin Foundation in the UK, the ultimate project for an intelligent civilisation before the heat death of the universe. Automacoin is a token and cryptocurrency based on the economics of finding all the answers to all computable questions (including perhaps how to delay the heat death of the universe itself), hence its fundamental nature. I am also the managing Editor of Complex Systems, the first journal in the field of complexity science founded by Stephen Wolfram in 1987. Editor for several journals including Entropy, Information, Frontiers in AI, and Complexity; and for academic book series such as Springer on Complexity. I have also been invited as a visiting scholar and a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA; the National University of Singapore; the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia; and at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK. I was awarded level SNI II by CONACYT in Mexico (2018) and I have served as an evaluator for the NSF and the Simons Foundation in the U.S. for BIRS in Canada, and for the European Commission (FP7 and H2020), among other national science councils around the world. |
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One year before passing away, Marvin Minsky, widely considered the founding father of Artificial Intelligence, made the following astonishing claim describing what turns out to be exactly my own research in a closing statement at a prime venue (video on the right and excerpt below). I wish I could tell him that I have gone farther than anyone else at what he thought everybody should be doing!
"It seems to me that the most important discovery since Gödel was the discovery by Chaitin, Solomonoff and Kolmogorov of the concept called Algorithmic Probability which is a fundamental new theory of how to make predictions given a collection of experiences and this is a beautiful theory, everybody should learn it, but it’s got one problem, that is, that you cannot actually calculate what this theory predicts because it is too hard, it requires an infinite amount of work. However, it should be possible to make practical approximations to the Chaitin, Kolmogorov, Solomonoff theory that would make better predictions than anything we have today. Everybody should learn all about that and spend the rest of their lives working on it."
Marvin Minsky Panel discussion on The Limits of Understanding World Science Festival, NYC, Dec 14, 2014 |
On the other hand, these excerpts from a review article by Sydney Brenner — the 2002 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate awarded by the Karolinska Institute -- completes the picture of what I and my lab team at the Karolinska Institute strive:
"[on biological research] in Alan Turing’s work there is much to guide us
. . . Although many believe that ‘more is better’, history tells us that ‘least is best’. We need theory and a firm grasp on the nature of the objects we study to predict the rest . . . The concept of the gene as a symbolic representation of the organism — a code script — is a fundamental feature of the living world and must form the kernel of biological theory." (my brackets) Sydney Brenner
'Turing centenary: Life's code script' Nature 482(7386):461, 2012 |
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"AI is currently split. First, there are those who are intoxicated by the success of machine learning and deep learning and neural nets. They don’t understand what I’m talking about. They want to continue to fit curves. But when you talk to people who have done any work in AI outside statistical learning, they get it immediately. I have read several papers written in the past two months about the limitations of machine learning."
Interviewer: The way you talk about curve fitting, it sounds like you’re not very impressed with machine learning. "No, I’m very impressed, because we did not expect that so many problems could be solved by pure curve fitting. It turns out they can. But I’m asking about the future — what next? Can you have a robot scientist that would plan an experiment and find new answers to pending scientific questions? That’s the next step. We also want to conduct some communication with a machine that is meaningful ... |
One of my research aims is to reintroduce symbolic computation into statistical machine learning to alleviate current limitations in techniques such as deep learning along the lines of the criticisms put forward by people such as Sydney Brenner, Marvin Minsky and Judea Pearl and believed to be fundamental to make further progress in AI research. Here a video produced by the journal Nature to explain my research:
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I got interested in neural networks from the standpoint of computability and complexity theory in my early 20s when writing my final year memoir for my BSc in math degree at UNAM. Today I am trying to help revolutionise the area by reintroducing the theories of computability and algorithmic randomness back into the field of neural networks, in particular, to machine and deep learning.
On the right is an image showing how a deep neural network trained with a large set of fine art paintings 'sees' me. My current research consists in helping machine and deep learning see beyond statistical patterns in more clever ways than simple pattern matching. By introducing algorithmic probability to artificial intelligence we aim at helping traditional deep learning to incorporate more abstract thinking of the type needed to understand the basic concept of cause and effect. Known to underperform in tasks requiring abstraction and logical inference, current approaches to deep neural networks are very limited. An example of our research in this direction is our paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence that can be read here for free (no paywall). |
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As reported in our paper published in the journal of Cellular Automata (also available in the arXiv), by exhaustive exploration of rule composition, two 4-colour cellular automata that we've proved to be Turing universal.
This means that these CAs can, in principle, run MS Windows and any other software. These new CAs helped us show how the Boolean composition of two and three ECA rules can emulate rule 110. This also means that these new CAs can be decomposed into simpler rules and thus illustrates the process of causal composition and decomposition. It also constitutes a form of sophisticated causal coarse-graining that I have explored in other papers such as this one. In the same paper we also introduced a minimal set of ECA rules that can generate all others by Boolean composition. |
These CAs that we have proven to be Turing-universal using novel methods, and thus are able to run any computable function are the result of combining the power of extremely simple computer programs (ECAs):
Composition of ECA rules 50 ◦ 37 with colour remapping leading to a 4-colour Turing universal CA emulating rule 110.
Composition of ECA rules 170 ◦ 15 ◦ 118 with colour re-mapping mapping leading to a 4-colour Turing universal CA emulating rule 110.
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Latest news
AUTOMATA 2020
I am the organiser and chair of the prestigious AUTOMATA 2020 that has been running for about 2 decades now and will be held in Stockholm (now mostly virtual). The website is now available but it is being updated constantly. More details are announced on the website.
I am the organiser and chair of the prestigious AUTOMATA 2020 that has been running for about 2 decades now and will be held in Stockholm (now mostly virtual). The website is now available but it is being updated constantly. More details are announced on the website.
A new kind of research-based cryptocurrency:
My students and I are developing a new more responsible and eco-friendly cryptocurrency to help science reveal models of the world. We are creating and developing the first coin whose purpose is to perform the most meaningful computation (all possible useful computations). It provides a sense and meaning to crypto-mining and, in a sense, is thus the most eco-friendly coin possible as every computation involved contributes to a specific scientific calculation. It aims at using crypto-mining as a force for research rather than wasting precious resources, it will implement incremental lossless compression too. It is also the first coin purely based on the most basic computational principles that are behind all other cryptocurrencies but in a purely transparent fashion. Click on the banner to see the new website of the project. AUTOMATA 2020 is the first conference that will accept Automacoins as partial payment for conference fees.
My students and I are developing a new more responsible and eco-friendly cryptocurrency to help science reveal models of the world. We are creating and developing the first coin whose purpose is to perform the most meaningful computation (all possible useful computations). It provides a sense and meaning to crypto-mining and, in a sense, is thus the most eco-friendly coin possible as every computation involved contributes to a specific scientific calculation. It aims at using crypto-mining as a force for research rather than wasting precious resources, it will implement incremental lossless compression too. It is also the first coin purely based on the most basic computational principles that are behind all other cryptocurrencies but in a purely transparent fashion. Click on the banner to see the new website of the project. AUTOMATA 2020 is the first conference that will accept Automacoins as partial payment for conference fees.
Journal Anniversary:
- The journal Complex Systems for which I was recently made its editor-in-chief. Founded 30 years ago it was the first journal in the field founded by Stephen Wolfram. To celebrate we commissioned a very nice poster that you can download and print in high resolution by clicking on it:
Online course:
- We have closed the first course on Algorithmic Information Dynamics---A Computational Approach to Causality and Molecular Biology: From Complex Networks to Reprogramming Cells. More than 1200 students were enrolled and 10% of them are currently pursuing projects or became AID ambassadors and collaborators. The course will be open next year and you can register here.
Course poster, trailer and content module dependencies:
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Module dependencies of the course and of the new field of Algorithmic Information Dynamics. Orange link means conceptual/motivational dependency. Pink link means weak dependency. Blue link means strong dependency.
You can start watching and following the course (for free) online here !
Special issue on Philosophy and Epistemology of Deep Learning:
- I am guest-editing a special issue of the journal Philosophies, together with friend and colleague Prof. Selmer Bringsjord, on Philosophy and Epistemology of Deep Learning.
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Book season time, four books coming out in the next months:
- Our book Algorithmic Information Dynamics: A Computational Approach to Causality and Molecular Biology. From Networks to Cells has been approved for publication by Cambridge University Press and will be available later this year (with N.A. Kiani and J. Tegnér)
- Our book Methods and Applications of Algorithmic Complexity: From Sequences to Graphs is also coming out soon published by Springer Verlag later this year (with F. Soler-Toscano and N. Gauvrit).
- Two more books will see the light next year: Algorithmic Cognition (with N. Gauvrit and J. Tegnér) and Graph Complexity (with N.A. Kiani and J. Tegnér), both to be published by Springer Verlag. Here the line-up:
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Other authored and edited books:
'Lo que cabe en el espacio' a short book I prepared right after my BSc degree, is available for Kindle and for free in mobi and pdf.
As contributor:
I contributed to the final materialization of the Leibniz-Chaitin medallion after Leibniz' original design 300 years ago to celebrate his discovery of binary arithmetic
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The Leibniz-Chaitin medallion story in celebration of the works of Greg Chaitin and the discovery of binary arithmetic from which, according to Leibniz, everything can be created
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I have been to more than 300 cities in about 50 countries giving talks related to my
work in about half of them, and as an invited speaker in 15:
work in about half of them, and as an invited speaker in 15:
Histograms of number of cities visited coloured by countries (with at least 4 cities) and continents:
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