No (Economic) Clarity until 2022
(B) I watched Blackstone Q4 quarterly webcast, titled “no clarity until 2022”, on the financial markets. That webcast was prepared by Blackstone’s Byron Wien and Joe Zidle. I enjoy listening […]
Author Archives
Serge-Paul Carrasco
Covid-19 – Day 369: The Second Wave is Here!
(E) The second wave is here. Infections have been rising to the roof: Europe, the U.S., South America, and Russia. The U.S have now over 150,000 new daily cases, and […]
Covid-19 – Day 361: BioNTech and Pfizer Vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2
(E) Today is a good day! Pharmaceutical giant partner Pfizer announced today that the vaccine developed with its partner BioNTech, a bio-tech company located in Mainz in Germany, against the […]
Un Ballo in Maschera
(E) One of my favorite fun activities, every Fall, is to attend a performance of the San Francisco Opera. And to select which opera performance I will attend, I usually […]
Covid-19 – Day 359: Slovakia Attempting to Test Entire Adult Population for Covid
(E) Taiwan and New Zealand have a huge advantage over other countries fighting the propagation of SARS-CoV-2: they are islands. Closing and reopening offices, schools, restaurants, gyms do not work. […]
2020 An Halloween without any Kids
(E) 2020 will be a different year in many ways. The streets empty of kids during Halloween. Note: The picture above is the house from one of my neighbors, an […]
A New Algorithm for the TSP (Traveling Saleperson)
(E) Quanta Magazine has a new interesting article “Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record“. The new record was broken by PhD student Nathan Klein and his advisers from the University […]
Fertilizing the Desert
(E) Gora Ndiaye is making the impossible possible in Senegal. Fertilizing the desert. Mr. Ndiaye is a magician of the permaculture, growing many types of trees and plants in a […]
Learning from Sequoia Capital
(B) After the successful IPOs of SnowFlake, Unity, and Sumo Logic, CNBC has published an article about Sequoia Capital “Silicon Valley’s most prominent VC firm had a banner week: $9 […]
Google Quantum Computing Symposium
(T) Google had an online Quantum Computing Symposium this Summer. I missed it! But all the videos are on YouTube, and I watched a few of them. Following is the […]
SnowFlake Upcoming IPO
(B) The recent surreal time, due to Covid 19, has been a challenge for many start-ups in Silicon Valley since the capital markets have been dried for new IPOs. Without […]
A Kafkaesque Sky In a Kafkaesque Year
(E) I woke up today wondering if it was still the night or a new day. The sky was red! And, my car front window was covered with ashes. According […]
Developing Autonomous Decision Making Systems with Deep RL
(T) I really enjoyed watching this fun video from Professor Sergey Levine on autonomous decision making systems using deep reinforcement learning. Most of the content is somewhat “high level” but require some […]
Angélique Kidjo Singing Lonlon with Ravel’s Bolero!
(E) I had such a blast listening to Angélique Kidjo singing her song, Lonlon, with Vincent Niclo. The music is Ravel’s Bolero. Stop everything, and just listen to it… Additionally, […]
Machine Learning Models for Autonomous Vehicles
(T) Waymo’s principal scientist Drago Anguelov recently highlighted the latest innovations of Waymo’s machine learning models for its autonomous vehicles at CVPR 2020. In a previous blog article, Waymo (ChauffeurNet) […]
Exploring Causal Inference for Business Decisions
(B) I had the great privilege, while being a student at UCLA, to have Professor Judea Pearl as a professor. A few years after I graduated from UCLA, Professor Pearl […]
The Dark Universe and the Dark Energy Survey
(E) Stanford University’s KIPA (The Kalvi Institute for Particles Astrophysics and Cosmology) offered many online lectures this summer. See below some of my favorite recent lectures. This Tuesday, August 11th […]
“King Lear” Online Today and Tomorrow
(E) Like many other summer festivals, you will be able to watch this year “King Lear” production of the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival online. Usually, the performances are held in […]
OpenAI’s GPT-3 Insane Number of Parameters!
(T) I finally had a chance to start studying OpenAI’s GPT-3. GPT-3, like GPT-2 provides many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, and in particular reading comprehension, summarization, translation and question […]
KPIs and Metrics for Consumer and Infrastructure Products
(B) I have been recently thinking how to propose KPIs for an infrastructure-oriented product versus KPIs for a consumer-oriented product, and how they might differ. A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) […]
Intermezzo – Music@Menlo Online Chamber Music Festival
(E) How do you experience art online without the intimacy, the conviviality, and the emotional connection that live performances do? My favorite summer chamber music festival, Music@Menlo, will be online […]
When what Looks like a Bad Idea is a Good Idea?
(B) I really enjoyed this video from Chris Dixon venture partner at Andreessen Horowitz at Y Combinator‘s Start-up School. Mr. Dixon rightly articulates the goal of a venture investor which is […]
